Don’t look back in anger

The world has changed significantly in the last 12 months.  2011 was the year the media really woke up to the power of social and mobile networks.

The ‘Arab Spring’, the global ‘Occupy’ movement, and the UK riots all demonstrated how technology could be used to connect and coordinate disparate groups of people in ways that made it almost impossible for security forces and governments to keep up.

This phenomenon was by no means new, but it was unexpected. As more and more people became digitally connected, and mobile technology became almost ubiquitous, Clay Shirky’s adage that communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring, proved to be right on the money.

While MySpace continued its steady decline, other social networks such as Tumblr, Instagram, and Google+ grew rapidly, each vying for our attention. But as RIM (makers of BlackBerry) discovered this year, attention isn’t always such a good thing.

The hackers behind Anonymous and LulzSec figured this out too.  Niche social networks such as Path have emerged to enable sharing of information among small groups of people. Other platforms like Silk Road are designed to be invisible to those not in the know.

Unsurprisingly, the techies involved in the Occupy movement are trying to build these types of private networks. This trend has led some to speculate that there will never be another network the size of Facebook. I’m not so sure.

What is beyond question is that mass disruption has been a recurring theme across the globe these past 12 months. We’re also seeing an increase in a consumer trend that has been dubbed “SoMoLo” – Social, Mobile, Local.

Observe the modern shopping experience and you’ll see this being played out. Customers in stores are using their smart phones to check prices, compare products, identify other local shops and consult with friends before purchasing. Soon they’ll be paying for items with their phones too.

This year has also seen the rise of the Urban Mashup.  Oglivy Culture launched in the US and Steve Stoute chronicled ‘The Tanning of America’ – highlighting the growing influence of urban culture on the mainstream.

The Kiss

In June, Canadian photographer Richard Lam took one of the most striking images of the year during riots that erupted in Vancouver.

The image of a couple kissing in the midst of the chaos and riot police became an internet viral sensation. Many saw it as a 21^st Century reimaging of the famous photo of ‘The Kiss’ that took place in Times Square on V-J day in 1945.

For all the momentous changes that took place in 2011, I can’t help but feel that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Here’s to 2012…

Think of me as Evil or Do No Evil?

The one that got away

In the 1997 movie L.A. Confidential there is a scene in which Kevin Spacey’s character, Sergeant Edmund Exley, recounts the tale of ‘Rollo Tomasi’, the name he gave to the unidentified street criminal who killed his father. In the film, Rollo Tomasi becomes synonymous with the idea of the one that got away.

I was reminded of this when reading ‘Think of me as Evil: Opening the Ethical Debates in Advertising’ published last month by the Public Interest Research Centre and WWF-UK.

The report takes as its starting point a typically hyperbolic comment by my friend Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, in which he states that he “would rather be thought of as evil than useless.”

I couldn’t help but think that a more accurate subtitle for the report would have been ‘Reopening the Ethical Debates in Advertising’, because as the authors Jon Alexander, Tom Crompton and Guy Shrubsole acknowledge, these issues have been discussed over the last 50 years ever since Vance Packard published his famous critique of advertising, The Hidden Persuaders.

In this latest contribution to the debate, the authors argue that ‘modern advertising’s impact on British culture is likely to be detrimental to our wellbeing, and may well exacerbate the social and environmental problems that we collectively confront.’

To its credit, the report sets out the evidence in a reasonably balanced way, but what I found striking was the fact that the entire discussion failed to make any reference to the world’s largest advertising company. This is a company that claims to do no evil, but has grown several times larger than WPP by creating what is possibly the most efficient advertising model ever. Of course I’m talking about Google.

You could argue that Google doesn’t deserve this distinction because it is not the creator of the vast amount of advertising it serves to us everyday as we search the web, but that would be to miss the point. Google has revolutionised the advertising industry by democratising it.

In the world before Google, in order to reach customers, a business had little choice but to engage an advertising or marketing agency of some description. This was (and remains) a costly business best suited for those with deep pockets.  Google changed all this by providing businesses with a direct means of targeting potential customers very precisely and quickly, for as little or as much as that business was prepared to pay.

The net result is that Google’s technology has generated far more adverts than any ad agency on the planet, netting billions of dollars in profits for itself in the process.

Yet the word ‘Google’ doesn’t appear on any of the report’s 60 plus pages and there is only a passing reference to the impact of ‘Online search engine technologies and the information stored by social networking sites and webmail services’.  This is a testament to Google’s ability to act as a Hidden Persuader. It presents itself as a technology business with a mission to provide free access to information, but as someone once wisely said, “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

The genius of the Google is not just its ability to serve ads based on search queries. The Pay Per Click (PPC) model effectively sells users to advertisers. Unlike Spotify, there is no ad-free model on Google search.

Google is by no means alone. Its model is now the industry standard for online businesses and is being replicated by Facebook and Twitter among others. But the fact that Google has escaped being tarnished by the same brush as the advertising industry demonstrates that for now at least, it really is Rollo Tomasi – the one that got away.

Footnote:

On 24 November the RSA hosts an Advertising Association Debate - ‘Advertising in society: what’s the deal?’  Unsurprisingly, Google is not represented on the panel.  

Who’s been sleeping in my Tumblr?

The brands that are missing out on the emerging social network

October 21^st 2011 was a big day for Tumblr. It became the first blogging platform to host President Obama’s blog, launching his social media campaign for re-election in 2012.

Obama’s choice (clearly influenced by socially savvy members of his campaign team) brought Tumblr to the attention of the world’s media, including those who had not previously come across the network or had assumed it was only a place to share funny photos of cats. However this attention is long overdue.

In June of this year the network founded in 2007 by David Karp surpassed WordPress in the total number of blogs, breaking through the 20 million mark. It now has over 33 million and rising.

Nielsen’s State of the Media report on Social Media for Q3 2011 highlights Tumblr as the ‘Emerging Social Network’ citing the trebling of its US audience over the last year.

In the UK its growth has been impressive too with 7.5m unique visitors, 5.4m of whom visit in an average month. London in particular seems to be in love with Tumblr.  Its residents make 1.6m visits to sites in the network. Only San Paulo in Brazil has more Tumblr fans.

Given that Tumblr’s UK audience is more female (52%) than male (48%) and many of its users are in the much coveted demographic of 18-24 year olds, it’s not hard to see why some brands, particularly in fashion and publishing, have been quick to jump onto the network.

Vogue, Life and Vice have all developed Tumblr sites as have many fashion brands. DKNY is a notable example having recently ported their ‘Notes on a City’ to Tumblr following on from the success of their ‘DKNY PR Girl’ site.

The Economist, The Washington Post and IBM have set up Tumblr blogs too, presumably hoping to earn kudos from a younger ‘edgier’ audience than they might usually attract. I’ve even set one up (for much the same reasons).

What is more surprising is the number of brands that haven’t caught on to it yet. I was pleased to see that Bing (a client of mine) has a fully functional Tumblr site, but was amazed to find that Google.tumblr.com is a blank holding page that appears to have nothing to do with the company itself.

Google is by no means alone. A search for many of the world’s top brands using their .Tumblr.com addresses brings up some surprising and sometimes shocking results. Nike, Adidas, Microsoft, Samsung, and Apple all appear to have people sleeping on their Tumblr’s. I find it hard to believe that any of the brand custodians or legal departments would be pleased about this. In the case of Coca-Cola, I imagine they would be horrified to see what is being displayed in their name. I can therefore only assume that these brands haven’t woken up to Tumblr yet. Like the proverbial bears in the story of Goldilocks, I don’t think they’ll be too happy when they do.

Although some brands are rushing to snap up their own top level brand domain names despite the costs involved, it seems extraordinary that so many have failed to register their own name on Tumblr, which is free and is fast becoming the social network to watch.

I expect this will change in the coming months, particularly if Tumblr continues its growth trajectory and builds insight tools for brands and marketers. When this happens, I imagine a few heads will tumble.

Notting Hill braces itself for the 2011 Carnival as Google turns to Grime

In a few hours time Europe’s largest Carnival will take to the streets of Notting Hill for the 45^th time. However it’s not just the poor weather forecast that has worried people this year. Coming so soon after the UK riots, some local residents and businesses in Notting Hill are preparing for the worst by boarding up their houses and shop fronts.

They’re not the only ones who don’t want to get caught out. During the widespread looting that followed the riots, there was some criticism of the police for not keeping up with how rioters were using communication technology such as BlackBerry’s BBM network to coordinate attacks. This time around the police refuse to be caught napping and have already made preemptive arrests, based in part on their monitoring of social media.

While the Mayor Boris Johnson’s call for the Carnival to ‘help heal wounds’ caused by the riots was lampooned by some on Twitter, many of the comments last night were from people hoping that the event will pass off peacefully, or those too worried to attend because they feared trouble themselves.

Google turns to Grime

Meanwhile last week Google released an advert for its Chrome browser featuring Jamal Edwards, the just turned 21 year old rising star of the UK Grime scene who launched his own TV channel, SB.TV and has his sights set on becoming a future media mogul.

The ad, made by the London agency BBH, was apparently produced ‘way before the trouble’ started on the streets of Tottenham, but nonetheless it must have made a few Google Executives nervous given its focus on the UK’s black urban culture, which has been blamed for causing the riots, most notoriously by Historian David Starkey. In my view, Google’s potentially controversial choice of subject matter was no accident.

In Search of Street Cred

One of the loudest advocates for Google’s new social networking platform Google+ is the founder and former President of MySpace, Tom Anderson. In a recent article, he argues that Google+ is destined for success, and draws parallels between its launch and that of other social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.

Of Twitter he writes:

“When the 140 character wunderkind launched in 2006, it was only used by tech nerds. Just one community, that knew each other by name, if not in person. Then John Mayer signed up. Now there was two communities. The tech nerds, and the John Mayer fan club. Then there was Diddy. Suddenly Twitter was of interest to people who liked hiphop & rap. One celebrity at a time started to build sub-communities on Twitter. And make no mistake, Twitter went out and recruited them. Like Facebook, they realized that to gain scale in the social networking space and take mind share from others, they needed to target sub-communities.”   

It would seem that Google has learnt that lesson. By making a hero of a young, black, up and coming entrepreneur, they are following in the footsteps of brands like Nike and Adidas who have long understood the benefits to be gained by associating with urban cool.

Google+ “not broadcasted enuff for us cool kids”

I did a bit of digging around to try and try out what types of people have been joining Google+. Perhaps unsurprisingly the early adopters were largely male geeks from the US. There is an Urban Technorati Google+ group and the odd Hip-Hop celebrity (Snoop Dogg and the UK’s Tinie Tempah). But from what I could tell, the cool urban kids aren’t flocking to the service in droves just yet.

Using my own connections, I also did a bit of primary research via BBM to see how many young people on that network had opened a Google+ account. Only one person responded positively, suggesting that Google has some work to do.  Google+ is “not broadcasted enuff for us cool kids lol to no about it” was one response I received. If the latest advert for Chrome is anything to go by, it looks like Google plans to change that.

However, engaging with an urban audience can be tricky. As BlackBerry makers RIM discovered during the riots, being the brand of choice within this demographic could land you in hot water on occasion. But to ignore them is to risk being left out in the cold entirely.

As this year’s Notting Hill Carnival hits the streets, the eyes of the media will be watching closely to see whether urban youth culture is still too hot to handle.

31/08/11 UPDATE: Fortunately, this year’s Carnival came and went without a major outbreak of violence. The Guardian reports that arrests were only slightly up at 245 compared to 243 at last year’s event. Considering that around 1 million people were expected to attend the festival, this figure is remarkably low. For comparison, 138,000 attended this year’s Glastonbury music festival but there were 123 arrests made – a significantly higher ratio.

It seems that the massive police presence played a role in keeping the crime figures down. But the remarkable photograph of a youth fleeing the scene having stabbed someone in front of a line of police officers shows that for some, the threat of arrest is no deterrent.

This kind of behaviour is almost impossible to comprehend without understanding the mentality of some of the youths on the streets today. It is described in gripping detail in the book Hood Rat by Gavin Knight, and may well be the topic of a future post.

However, like many people, I’m relieved that the Carnival on the whole brought out the best of London.

The UK Riots one week on – The search for simple answers to tough questions

A week ago today a riot began in Tottenham that swept across London and other parts of the UK. That much isn’t in dispute. But as the dust settles and the clean up operation continues, the recriminations as to how and why this happened is causing controversy.

On yesterday’s Newsnight, the Historian David Starkey provoked a storm of protest when he laid the blame squarely at the door of black culture and its impact on white youths.

But as the blame game ensues, attention has also focused on the role that social networks played and what can be done to curtail their use if situations like this reoccur in the future.

For the first time, BlackBerry’s (BBM) Messenger network has been included in this discussion. Yesterday the BBC reported that an18-year-old woman from east London had been charged under the Serious Crime Act for using Blackberry messenger to encourage others to take part in the riots.

The use of BBM as the communication channel used by rioters seemed to take everyone by surprise.  I spent much of the week being asked by journalists how I got the drop on the story before anyone else.

I’ve been thinking about that too, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason other people missed the BBM connection was because it was hidden in plain sight.

BlackBerry and Instant Messaging are nothing new. In fact, in today’s world of iPhone Apps, Google+ and Geo-Location services, they are practically old hat, but that’s the point. As Clay Shirky states: “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”

The birth of Hip-Hop illustrates this perfectly. According to last night’s Channel 4 programme, Hip-Hop Changed The World. But think back to how it all started, it was DJ Kool Herc who found a new way to use old technology – in this case, two turntables – to launch a new cultural movement. Every subsequent development from graffiti to rapping, scratching to sampling was more about innovation than invention. The kids on the street weren’t creating the technology and they weren’t even using the newest stuff, it was what they did with what they had that was revolutionary.

No simple solutions

A central part of early Hip-Hop mythology involves Afrika Bambaataa, the former gang leader who turned away from a life of crime and used Hip-Hop to turn violent gang rivalry into street dance battles between B-Boys and B-Girls. It was a classic tale of swords being beaten into turntables, which has now become a Hollywood cliché.

It’s tempting to think that if we could only just recreate that moment in time, we could all get along. But as the subsequent East Coast/West Coast rivalry between the rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur proved, sometimes music can breed violence, not quell it.

On the other side of the argument, I’ve heard journalists referring to BlackBerry’s BBM as ‘the weapon of choice’ for the rioters. This seems to suggest that there was a coordinated master plan to use this ‘covert’ network to organize the attacks. I think this gives too much credit to the rioters. The truth is far more worrying.

BBM and other instant communication channels allow people to organise more like Bees. It doesn’t require a ‘command and control’ structure, or a criminal mastermind stroking his white cat to orchestrate attacks. Instead it relies on short bursts of information that can be read and passed on quickly.

This is what Benjamin Ellis refers to as ‘barely planned behaviour’. Simply put, modern technology makes it easier for people to do more and plan less. As we saw during the riots, this created real challenges for the police as they tried to keep up with the disturbances.

So with no single force for good or evil to turn to or blame for the week’s events, we are left searching for simple answers to tough questions. There is perhaps one undeniable conclusion that has been underlined through all the events of the week. Whether we like it or not, more than ever before, we are all connected.

The London Riots and BlackBerry’s BBM (part 2)

Today has been an extraordinary day. As I write this, more and more areas of London are becoming engulfed in flames, violence and disorder.

It’s been a pretty strange day for me too. The blog post that I published in the early hours of Sunday morning caught the attention of the media resulting in the post being republished, quoted and adapted across online international news outlets throughout the day. I’ve also had various journalists trying to contact me for interviews, most of which I missed (sorry guys, I was at work).

The reason for this interest was because I appear to have been one of the first people to notice that young people were using BlackBerry’s BBM network to communicate with each other prior to, and during the riots that began in Tottenham on Saturday night.

I have to admit that while I thought it was an interesting angle to take, I didn’t expect it to become quite as big a news story as it has. My insight came from the urban young people I’m connected to, for whom BBM is the social network of choice. I outlined the reasons why in my original post, so I won’t rehash them here. What the young people I’ve spoken to today find amazing is that this is a revelation to people.

“BBM is standard issue.” One said to me. “Of course. It’s all about BBM. This is our network!” I was told. The fact that journalists have just woken up to this fact is interesting in itself, but it has led to some sections of the media coming to bizarre conclusions.

To be clear, BlackBerry did not cause the riots and is not responsible for them. BBM is simply the preferred communications network for large numbers of young people, and as I said earlier when young people are angry and organised enough – the results can be explosive.

BBM’s private nature is I’m sure of concern to the police. Earlier BlackBerry issued a statement via Twitter to let people know that they are cooperating with the authorities, presumably in response to media interest in this story.

But calls for the use of BBM to be curbed are, in my opinion misguided. As others have pointed out, social networks don’t cause riots – people do.

 

Photo credits: Ed Yourdon via Flickr and TechCrunch

The unlikely social network fuelling the Tottenham riots

Saturday the 6 August 2011 and the streets of Tottenham are set ablaze by rioting.

As many people will recall, it isn’t the first time this has happened. On 6 October 1985 a notorious riot occurred on the Broadwater Farm Estate that led to the murder of PC Keith Blakelock.

On both occasions the disturbances were triggered by deaths caused by police. In the first instance it was that of Cynthia Jarrett, an African Caribbean woman who died during a police search of her home. This latest incident was sparked by the shooting of Mark Duggan, a 29 year old man killed during an alleged gunfight with police on Thursday.

As I write this in the early hours of Sunday morning, the disturbance is ongoing and it is not yet clear how serious an incident this will become.

In recent public disturbances such as the Student protests, commentary has focused on the role that social networks such as Twitter and Facebook have played in the planning of demonstrations and coordination of protesters. By contrast in this riot it appears the social network of choice is one provided by none other than BlackBerry.

Blackberry’s have been produced by Research In Motion (RIM) since 1999. They were originally associated with busy office executives who needed to access their emails on the move, but in recent years they have become increasingly popular within youth and urban cultures. I have to admit that I found this puzzling. It took my far cooler 17 year old nephew to explain that the main reason for their popularity is due to BBM – BlackBerry Messenger.

BBM as it is known, is an instant messenger system that has become popular for three main reasons: it’s fast (naturally), it’s virtually free, and unlike Twitter or Facebook, it’s private.

Blackberry recognized the appeal of their products to the urban market and has had a long association with Jay-z in the States. In the UK, they recently hosted a ‘secret gig’ in Shoreditch Town Hall featuring Tinie Tempah, Wretch 32 and Devlin.

So what has all this got to do with the riots in Tottenham?

Well, it appears that BBM messages have been circulating since Thursday’s shooting of Duggan by the police. These have fuelled the anger of the youths that have taken to the streets. BBM was also the channel used to spread the word that the riot had started, and from what I can tell on Twitter, it appears to be the means by which communications continue to be shared.

The key point here is that although these messages are spreading virally, by being shared via BBM they have been less visible to the outside world, making them harder to track.

I am not a security intelligence expert so I don’t know the extent to which the police are able to monitor the BBM network, but Canadian police officers have previously complained that criminals prefer using Blackberry Messenger because it is harder to wiretap.

As we have seen throughout the world this year, when angry young people utilize social networks to communicate and coordinate publically or privately, the results can be explosive.

Photo Credits: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images via Flickr

UPDATE: It appears that the Daily Mail has found a way to pin the blame for yesterday’s riot in Tottenham on Twitter. This is because ‘a picture of a burning police car was re-tweeted more than 100 times’. However, as pointed out here, the logic doesn’t quite stack up, as the Mail (and every other news channel) was also responsible for sharing these images with far larger audiences.

Still, it’s prehaps not surprising that journalists defaulted to blaming the usual suspects.

How Pre-Internet Piracy Made Me (Almost) Famous

There has been a great deal of discussion and a very good book written about the rise of Internet piracy and the dilemma that this creates for businesses operating in a digital age.

The photograph above is of my son and I standing in front of a mural that I was commissioned to paint by a community centre in Stockwell. Almost 20 years on it’s probably the piece of artwork that I’m proudest of. Following on from my last wander down memory lane, I thought I’d explore the theme of piracy by sharing the tale of this image.

First, a little scene setting: It was the start of the 1990′s and a new wave of Black Consciousness was sweeping both sides of the Atlantic. Malcolm X was back in vogue thanks to rap groups such as Public Enemy. Spike Lee was challenging audiences to ‘Do The Right Thing’. Meanwhile fashion labels such as FUBU (For Us, By Us) were affirming a new African centred identity.

The intellectual underpinning for this movement was inspired by the writings of Cheikh Anta Diop, Molefi Asante, and Maulana Karenga. Louis Farrakhan, the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, gave these ideas additional religious fervor. As a young man growing up in the midst of all this, the words of Tracy Chapman summed it up. We were ‘Talking Bout A Revolution’.

The mural is a reflection of this moment in time. Based on the map of Africa, it featured black heroes from Queen Nefertiti to Queen Latifah. At the centre, a Benin Mask and the Soul II Soul logo merge together to illustrate the past and present coming together.

The image was supposed to inspire people and based on the feedback, it seemed that it did. The mural became so popular I agreed that a poster could be produced and sold to fund a trip to Egypt for a group of young people. One of the leaders at the centre said she knew someone who could produce the posters cheaply, but that turned out to be a big mistake.

‘Stan’ was the man in question. He was responsible for running the bootleg poster operation that proliferated in London at that time. You couldn’t pass a busy street corner without seeing an array of reproduced Athena posters for sale at bargain prices. When I raised concerns that my picture might be similarly ripped-off, I was assured that this wouldn’t happen because Stan wouldn’t dare cross his own community, as he knew what the consequences would be.

In the event, if Stan did know, he didn’t care, because posters with the Africa image on it soon began appearing all over London. Unsurprisingly this sparked outrage. Feelings were running so high that a few ‘brothers’ were sent to have ‘words’ with Stan. This led to a large quantity of posters being retrieved and promises that no more would be printed. However after a few weeks, more posters began appearing on the streets.

But something else happened. Among a certain set of people I became (almost) famous – or at least my picture did. Stan’s distribution network was far more extensive than I could have imagined. As a result the image cropped up in all sorts of places, from inner-city street corners to suburban offices. A friend spotted it on TV hanging on the wall of an architect’s home in New York. My brother found a reproduction in a street market in Switzerland.

The bootlegged copies didn’t entirely kill the market for the legitimate ones either. As the unauthorized prints were unsigned, the limited edition of 500 was sold to those who were willing to pay extra for a signed copy.

Although this episode took place before the widespread adoption of the Internet, you can see similar effects taking place on a much larger scale today. For example the number 1 book on the Amazon bestseller list ‘Go The F**k To Sleep’ was widely pirated before publication, something that the author attributes in part to its success.

I only ever met Stan once, in a council flat in Greenwich that served as a base for his bootlegging operations. I have no idea what happened to him, or if he got his comeuppance in the end. But if I did meet him again I’m not sure what I’d say. Perhaps it should be ‘Thanks’.

Comments welcome

From Super Heroes to Social Media Super Stars

Scrolls of Imhotep front cover

If a week is a long time in politics, a year in social media must be close to eternity. During this time the world of social media has changed considerably. Questions about whether it can really generate ROI have been replaced by brands scrambling to be part of the Facebook gold rush.

Personally, I’ve gone from being something of a social media outsider to an inside man by joining Jam earlier this year. In some ways this has been a natural progression, but it’s not one I saw coming.

I was reminded of the strange career path I’ve taken when I read this blog post by Dave Coplin.  Dave is now my client at Bing, but it turns out that he’s a fellow comic geek. When I saw the Forbidden Planet image by Brian Bolland, memories came flooding back of weekend trips up to that store and many of the surrounding ones such as Comic Showcase, Gosh, and LTS – the tiny upstairs shop tucked away around the corner of Denmark Street that broke almost every rule of retail by being nearly impossible to find and cramped inside.

Since I read my first Spider Man book the age of 10, comics had dominated my life. They inspired my passion for illustration, graphic design and reading.  Authors such as Alan Moore, Chris Claremont, and Frank Miller informed and challenged me, while artists such as Simon Bisley, Jamie Hewlitt and Frank Miller (again) were my heroes.

The only other cultural force that occupied such as central role in my life was Hip-Hop. But if you’d have asked me what I wanted to be during this period, the answer was simple – a comic artist.

Through my Secondary School years, I spent every spare moment I had drawing, and after Art college I enrolled at the London Cartoon Centre where my tutors included ‘V for Vendetta’ artist David Lloyd and colourist Steve Whitaker among others.

Up until this point my career path into that of a comic artist was on track. Hanging out at ACME Comics in Brixton I met Alan Mitchell, a comic writer who worked on Third World War with Pat Mills, published in Crisis.

This led to our collaborating on a comic called the “Scrolls of Imhotep” that was published in an Africentric magazine called The Alarm. Eventually, I got to meet the editor of 2000AD, who – when he saw my work – promised me a try out in the magazine. I was at the cusp of fulfilling my schoolboy dream, so what happened?

Two things changed my plans: technology and the need to be ‘social’.

Technology began to play an increasing role when I was introduced to Apple Macs and Desk Top Publishing at Art College. This spurred a growing interest in design and communications more generally, influenced in part by the work of Neville Brody and the design aesthetic of groups like Public Enemy.

It wasn’t long after this that I was encouraged to start my own design agency and my career began to head in a different path.

The other more fundamental reason was social – or rather the lack of it. One of the notable features of my life as a comic geek is that it was often an isolated one. Although comics provided stories that fuelled my imagination, in the real world, comic collecting was often an individual and competitive pursuit.

Being a comic artist in many ways was worse. I would sit by my drawing easel into the early hours of the morning, not interacting with anyone outside of my pen and paper. After a while I started to go stir crazy, and it began to dawn on me that the life I had dreamed of may not be the one I wanted to live.

Looking back then, it’s no surprise to find myself immersed in the world of social technology as it connects to my passions and reflects my personality in a way that comics in isolation couldn’t.

Is there still a part of me that wonders what would have happened if I’d stuck to my original vocation? Of course there is. But I believe that The Creator has a Master Plan, and so far it seems to be working out.

The Big Society has Big Shoes to fill

Ever wondered why people throw shoes over telephone lines?

I have to admit, it was not a thought that regularly crossed my mind until the pair in the picture above appeared on a road not far from where I live in South London.

According to Wikipedia, the shoe-tossing phenomenon is called “shoefiti”. Suggested explanations for it range from the shoes being used by drug dealers to mark the presence of a drug den, through to the means by which young Scottish men announce to their mates that they have lost their virginity!

Whatever the reason, the presence of the mysterious shoes got me thinking about the ‘broken windows’ theory, and about the challenge of facing the concept of the Big Society.

The broken windows theory was famously referenced in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller The Tipping Point. In a nutshell, the theory suggests that small acts of vandalism – such as broken windows that are left unrepaired – encourage other larger acts of antisocial behaviour, because they send out the message that no one cares. However, by quickly repairing the damage, vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage.

Although the theory has been challenged – most notably in another bestselling book, Freakanomics – there is common sense logic to it.

For me, the hanging shoes prompt a question: In the Big Society, whose job is it to take them down?

Until recently, the most likely answer would have been the local authority. After all, this was part of the service we expected in return for paying our taxes. But in today’s constrained economic environment, is that a reasonable expectation?

When you think about it, the costs involved in removing the shoes are not trivial. The people, equipment, and the appropriate vehicle would all cost money to deploy. How could the expenditure be justified when set against other needs?

You could argue that the telephone company on whose lines the shoes are hanging should remove them. They are responsible for the maintenance of the lines, so they have the responsibility to fix the problem. However, the company could respond that as long as services aren’t being affected, it’s not their job to remove shoes. After all, they don’t chase away the birds that perch on the lines.

The final answer suggested by the concept of the Big Society is that we, the citizen should do it. After all, it is our quality of life that is being affected, and if it happens in ‘our square mile’ we should mobilize to remove the eyesore. The problem is that few of us have the right apparatus (let alone the insurance cover) to enable us to get reach the shoes and bring them down. Herein lies one of the Big Society’s biggest challenges: How do you provide citizens with the tools they need in order to do deliver services that they would normally expect to be done by others?

One community in rural Devon did manage to find a way around this problem.

The good folks of Okehampton in Mid Devon were repeatedly told by BT that the majority of their homes would never have access to broadband because they lived too far from the exchange and it was too expensive to install.

It was a community with an unmet need that neither the public nor private sectors could justify solving.

However, despite being quoted at least £400,000 to build the facility required, by clubbing together and using new state-of-the-art technology, the village has been able to provide the service themselves.

According to the Okehampton People, the technology uses a line leased from BT that comes in through the local chapel in an underground cable, and is broadcast from the church tower via a radio signal. Houses with a receiver now get the speed they need.

It’s not a free solution. The article states:

“The line costs £7,500 per year, distributed between the 150 households signed up to the service. Each pays £18 per month. The set up cost was £50,000, with £6,000 raised through community events such as curry nights, and much of the rest from a grant from Linking the Environment and Farming’s Dartmoor Fund. The group also had support from South Hams District Council.”

It’s a very small example, but it does demonstrate that the Big Society ethos can solve problems that would otherwise have been left undone if left to the public or private sector.

So what does this mean for that pair of shoes?

Well, they were still hanging on the line last time I checked. However, I’m willing to attempt to crowd source a solution.

So, if you have any bright ideas about how they could be removed safely and cost effectively, drop them into the comments box below and let’s see what happens…