Don’t be Stupid, YPB and the Internet of Shit — WILTW: Dec. 11 — 17, 2016
The Platform’s Young Professionals Bootcamp held last week was amazing. I tried as much as to write about everything, but gave up after Day 3. However, nwawe ifeoma tried as much as possible to cover grounds, but that was all it is — try. Read her (and well, my, without the triple exclamations after each sentence) summarized experience at Mowe.
“2017 is a year that will start off tough for the Nigerian state and we have not seen signs that the current government understands this, or has taken cognisance of this in their planning. It appears to us that the government has pinned all of its hopes on oil prices rising.”
“Sad story that’ll do a disproportionate amount of damage. The line about her making up a lie because of her curfew isn’t shocking. If her parents are as strict as reports insinuate, she’s probably accustomed to using lies to navigate two opposing worlds. Lying is a way of being able to fit into mainstream "western" culture and keep the members of your immigrant subculture happy. The lies tend to be benign as it were, but this one got out of hand. I’m sure the shame of bringing disgrace to her family, will hurt her far more than all the negative press.” Christiana1987 on twitter
So apt!!
and there’s this as well
When you build a competitor (attention is a zero-sum game, so every platform on the internet is a competitor of the other), and promote it with phrases like "tell my story the way it should be told - the African way", you are positioning "Africa" at odds with the wider community. You are attempting to "define" how African publishes, and in that case, the onus is on you to knock it out of the park on the objective, non-geographic metrics…”
The recent obsession with data in the digital world prompted this comparison between data and digital natives.
In a constantly connected, data-rich world, all of our expectations are evolving quickly. Autocomplete and autocorrect are everywhere — and we make fun of them when they don’t work. We’re frustrated when our GPS doesn’t autocomplete, or when it shows us a restaurant 1,000 miles away — so we’ve replaced it with Google Maps or Waze. Now, we wonder why it hasn’t already learned our preferred route.
Responding to deliberate pettiness, or negative behavior from people you actually care about with benevolent silence solves nothing. It doesn’t make you a better person, it merely gilds your high horse, so you can look down, all glittering with benevolence, because you were the ‘bigger’ person. It denies the person the chance for growth/redemption (in the off-chance they were being ignorant) and you the chance to forge a better friendship with them. That’s stupid.
How to Grow from “Thought Leader” to Actually Leading
I’m ending this with some of the pictures of the beautiful people I spent 5 days with at YPB.
Till next week.
✌
Nsuaha.
