Social Hallucinations

How to Live to 100

This is definitely something one must share :) Great and not so surprising tips

 

via BabyCreative Blog

Color outside the lines

Being creative is what gives advantage today and allows to differentiate from the mass of me-too products and people. Creative meaning novelty and utility. Sometimes to get an attention you deserve you need to color outside the lines and find inspiration other places...Like this packages.

You have something what seems to be a carton of McDonald's chips on the right but is in fact celery and blueberries packaged as medicine. 

   
 

via BabyCreative blog

Dictractions foster creativity

It was good to read this article in Wired:'How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive' that breaks the army of voices who present how distracting Facebook and Twitter can be and how much loss they generate for companies. This is just a one side of story as "social networks are particularly well suited to stoking the creative mind"

 
From my own experienced being focused for 8 hours on power points slides or excel sheets doesn't take me really productive. On the contrary it imprisons me in the fast tracks of routine thinking. There is nothing more inspiring than sharing thoughts with other people, finding impulses from completely different and not really connected with the problem you are working on sources. Our minds need to be kept fit and challenged to work properly.So stay connected and never stop exploring, sharing and learning. Play. Create. Share.

Photo by Adrian Wallet

"little humor, many happiness"

Time flies, projects flows - strategies, ideas , solving problems...everything seems comples and then out of the sudden I stumble into something as simple as...

...grassy page marker

 

Moving from boring thing like a book marker into something that is not only functional but beautiful and adds value without being too pompous. Simplicity is what makes difference. 

"little humor, many happiness" 

Love it!

Making is Connecting

The new promise of creativity and innovation by connecting digital tools, activism, happiness and social capital by David Gauntlett

Digital tools aren't really worth much unless they are enable people to do stuff, innovate, initiate the change. Brilliant.

Are People Turning into Distrusted Media?

Definition of media got extended significantly over many years, starting from newspapers to social media that are media disseminated through social interaction or even people. Are people media? Are we the mere instruments conveying information that are currently losing trust of other people. Can our communicative abilities be reduced to objects that transmits information?

I don't agree with Armano's theory of decreasing trust in people as the result of overall decrease of trust in media, the correlation doesn't imply the causation. Following Armano's deduction, we could easily come to the conclusion that we are on the way to slow social disaster of mistrust and alienation along the growth of social media. This is oversimplifying of human relations built on trust. Trust is essential to human relations and is fundamental for social interaction and their development. The question lies in how far circles of trust stretch. 

"Trust surveys"  suffer from the lack of understanding of what people define as friends/peers. Those surveys deliver mere numbers without any understandings. Facts.

As I wrote two days ago, the main culprit here are "friends" and our language. We should maybe look at the decreasing trust in friends / peers as the result of the devaluation of friendship caused by media as Facebook. We have experienced rapid growth of our circle of friends with people who were in fact strangers to us. 

I say it once more: we still trust "people like us" but we are simply not sure whether Johns we follow on Twitter are really like us...

Homo Skepticus?

The couple of last years we've been sticking to mantra "people trust people like themselves" (Edelman Trust Barometer) to convince business establishment to jump into social media wagon, to understand better how people act and activate the power of WoM.

We've always trusted the circle of friends, so called significant others and their recommendatiosn mattered a lot us as the key influential factors. We've done this and will keep on doing this as anything else would break the social ties and lead us to alienation.

Edelman comes with the new 2010 results of the Trust barometer and something interesting happens - friends/peers as those whom we trust drop from 45% in 2008 to 25% in 2010.

 
It is quite natural the question about our skepticism and our ability to trust arise.

I don't think we trust less our friends and peers. I don't think we've become more skeptical. I just think we are in the phase where we rethink the word friend / peer. The word friend got stretched widely due to social networks. We call friends people we've never met in our lives and people we have no common history with. We do have hundreds of friends on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo...whatever you call it. The social networks devalued word friend. Anyone can be my friend today. It just costs one click and you have a new friend. But it ain't so easy and we are aware of that. We are aware that social networks bring also "virtual friends" we can't really trust because we simply don't know them, don't know their agenda and there is no really point of reference between our and their lives. Who are really those hundreds of people we follow on Twitter, we connect with on Facebook? We know the faces, we know the key facts we can find out from info tab and status updates. What really connects you with other people are common experiences...

Web revolutionized our lives for sure but there are still some barriers we need to overcome, like integrating online lives with offline lives. Meeting people we know online, exchanging offline experiences will be the way to create trust. Online relationships won't replace face to face time and sharing of real time experiences.

We still trust "people like us" but we are simply not sure whether Johns we follow on Twitter are really like us...

Photo by mek22

via AdAge

Unhappy Hipsters

"He had a hard time distinguishing the relationship between needs, wants, and technology."

 

The latest blog found - sharp and witty - Unhappy hipsters - musings on sad and deprived of joy life of urbanites. Really good and worth to follow for good pictures and commentary on the modern life. 

HT: Angus Whines
 

How Web Has Reshaped Our Lives

The global brain, the endless flow of information, communication, work...Internet of the most revolutionary tools of these times. 

I have been with Web with over 10 years now and it has major influence on the way I work, learn about things, get in touch with people and meet people. Making business, sharing knowledge is easy and wide accessible to those who are connected. Internet created the intellectual wealth.

The impact of Web on our lives and its importance for the world has made BBC to create TV program dedicated to this subject: How 20 years of Web reshaped our lives - The Virtual Revolution.

There is no doubt Web influences our lives. The biggest question is now how we are going to use it to improve and fix the world and enrich lives of those who are living on the suburbs of World Wide Web, beyond the reach.

via Influx

Meaningful Branded Content

Amazing project from Red Bull Stratos. Breaking the barriers and exploration. Really WOW in terms of idea and doing something meaningful. The idea is incredible: they send skydiver and base jumper Felix Baumgartner to at least 120,000 feet above the earth and he will attempt a stratospheric free fall jump - the longest in the history of man - and hopefully will become the first human to break the speed of sound with his own body. It is so awesome!

"Red Bull Stratos will attempt to make history and deliver valuable learnings for medical and scientific advancement that will aid the exploration of space in future years."

Making a difference and making something extraordinary! I am so in love in this project.

The Good Stuff

When conversations matter

 via MisEntropy