But just how could Google’s new service impact our daily lives?

On paper it’s not all that exciting, a rebake of what we all ready have. It could easily be seen as just another useless social network developed solely to jump on the popularist bandwagon, I mean, why should I switch from Twitter to this? What makes it so special? Just how will I get Facebook contacts and Twitter followers to switch? After all a social network is worthles with no people to socialise with, Google’s other project, Wave is a fine example of this problem.

The thing is, all this aside I’m really excited about Buzz. Not so long ago I had an idea of what Twitter could become. The idea was a much greater focus on location awareness, making it a dominant feature. I wanted to use Twitter to meet and discuss local issues with local people, this became a greater desire since moving to London too! I had grand ideas of people forming discussion groups around local issues, letting councillors, police and other authorities know what local issues people are really interested in, the issues no one bothers to report, the low level, but incredibly important stuff day to day.

Imagine people getting together to develop an idea or project in the local area. Moving power back to people on a local level.

This kind of thinking is what excites me most about Buzz, sure there’s gonna be a ton of crap on there, spam and chatty noise. But the ability to act as a catalyst to local discussion is what I find really fascinating. In a time of decreased social cohesion and community, when people are beginning to grow up spending more time on computers than socialising in real life, something which bridges the gap is invaluable!

Buzz’s focus is on nearby discussion, this is what in my mind is the killer feature which separates it from the rest, it allows for easy local discovery of people in a way that hasn’t been possible before.

Then to cap it off there’s the potential to add a massive amount of value using Google’s other new product, Wave. Wave is an online communication system designed to replace email, it’s aimed at making collaboration easier and removes many of the difficulties associated with email communication.

Imagine starting a discussion with a group of local people, trying to setup a community vegetable garden or something similar, just throwing ideas back and forth with Buzz. Then, you realise there’s potential in the idea, so you want to involve more local people, this is where Wave could help. Imagine moving the Buzz over to a wave with a single click, you could send a link to local business’, residents committees, members of the local authority and maybe the local allotment group. From here the ability for a group of local people to self manage and organise grows massively. This kind of direct action and communication is where I believe these services are aimed. Sure, people could go along to a monthly residents association and put an idea forward, but being able to discuss in realtime, no matter where you are and when is the important factor and the potential for social change, if harnessed in this way is massive.

Admitently the service will be exploited by spammers and flooded by inane comments about Tv celebs, but dreaming can become reality too!

Sound and the Psyche

We live our lives being constantly immersed in artificial sound, so much of it is so intrusive it’s a wonder that we can block it all out.

The modern world is a cacophony of noises, unlike the natural world that our minds evolved to exist in. Communication between animals and nature has grown to co-exist over millions of years, each sound has become moulded by the environment it exists in, different species of bird have calls that exist within different frequency bandwidths, so the sparrow doesn’t get confused by the magpie or the finch.

This isn’t anything new to us, music is composed with the same sympathy, guitar and bass co-exist because of the intrinsic relationship and space in which the reside, drums sit on top, but not along side, and vocals smack bang in the middle. This is what makes a good mix, and ultimately makes a pretty good song an amazing recording. But this didn’t pop up overnight, mixing and composing have evolved techniques which bring this all together, make it tight and not confuse the hell out of our ears.

So why is the sound of the everyday such a mess, why do we all have to drown it out with yet more sound from our iPods?

Walking down the street in London you’re bound to hear hundreds of car horns, trains rumbling, alarms ringing. You get on the bus and there’s beeps, bells and all sorts of other sounds to alert and distract, and that’s before you over hear some kids not-so-excellent collection of 808 saturated rap and auto-tuned vocals!

Some of these everyday sounds exist for a reason, to alert & warn, to attract attention and advertise something, to soothe, to irritate. But all of them exist to change your state of mind, mostly not for the better.

On a recent trip to Hungary I was amazed to hear classical and local folk music being played in the subway stations, I was shocked, but also calmed, it worked, and made my journey so much more relaxing.

But why isn’t more care taken to think about where a product or service will be placed, to design sound aesthetically just as software interfaces and physical housing of the devices are designed?

It’s becoming apparent to me that this is going to start happening more and more, just as sound design techniques from Hollywood cinema have made their way into third rate TV shows, care and attention to the aesthetics of everyday sound is going to become more prevalent.

But to make that really happen, the world’s sounds need organising just as the natural world has it’s distinct, yet evolved sound for almost everything. our artificial sounds, which at present seem to just be tacked on at the last minute need nuance, elegance, and appreciation of their purpose and role. We need to tackle the ever increasing issue of noise overload. As more devices and technology is placed out there to communicate with us, it needs to speak the language of our brain, one which didn’t evolve for this world we inhabit. Sound needs to take us back to our evolutionary home, even if just to allow us to work in a further reaching future.

However, at the same time it seems to have increased our need to procrastinate. Notice my use of need here.

Procrastination is a good thing, in moderation, it’s time off, like play or sleeping it allows our brains time to relax and let the subconscious, our real creative tool take stock of what’s going on.

Viva la Procrastination!

However, when your day involves intense computer work, whether coding, designing or writing, there’s just too many distractions. I’m finding it now, I spend my days in a studio making sound effects for animation, yet I feel the need to regularly take a break and tweet or check facebook. In my book, that’s fine, information workers and creative types need time off. There’s no wonder that people which work with information, play with information, It’s what we know.

I love reading blogs, Twitter, Facebook, pointless forum discussions and constantly updated news sites, it teaches me new things, keeps me thinking and up to date. However the problem I find is mixing work and pleasure.

I have a firm belief that in order to keep things simple and minimal the two shouldn’t be mixed. So maybe the goal should be to work tools focused solely on work, in an attempt to reduce distraction, just as a fisherman is probably too tired of fishing at the end of the week to spend a lazy Sunday angling.

So that’s why for the next few weeks I’m going to block all my pleasure time in my laptop and solely use my iPhone, it can do everything my laptop can, and keep that distinction there too.

Things have changed alot since moving to London, I’m no longer looking for work in such broad fields and I’m more comfortable in focusing in on my sound design work. Hopefully because of the update I’ll feel more inclined to update this blog, I’ve already got a few posts ready to go and lots of seeds of ideas for new projects to work on.

I’m aiming to update atleast once a week, mostly from my iPhone. this is in an attempt to condition myself Into using my laptop more for work and less for the Internet slacking off that blogs, news and Twitter promotes!

I’m sure you know what I mean

Lou

However there was in interesting statistic from the BBC’s reporting, almost 40% of young people now go to university, up from 4% a while ago. Being a fresh graduate this gives me mixed feelings. Whilst part of me thinks all people should be provided with every opportunity to go to university and broaden their mind in the way which university provides and have the chance to specialise in a field they’re passionate about I wonder what long term effect this will have? It already seems that here in Britain we have an attitude towards life that we deserve all our luxuries, that at whatever cost it’s our right to have such a broad, luxurious diet, to have the latest TV and the shiniest car, somehow we’re better than those who don’t (deserve) these things. But how will this affect all those people that go into university expecting to get a highly paid job in the field in which they studied? Do 50% of jobs really require a degree, we can’t just keep outsource the essential, but unskilled jobs needed to support our society.

Are we going to find that a majority of the people that leave university not being successful in their field become disillusioned only to find themselves still looking for work, but also being over qualified for the work that’s available?

University should be a place for safe, experimental ideas, a place which recognises the value of failure in creating masterpieces; a genius has to fall flat on their face before the apple falls on their head. This kind of attitude is what we need to be pushing, even more so in the creative subjects. Hitting grades and targets, whilst important training for the real world shouldn’t be the priority, we need to encourage unrestrained creativity and exploration, not churning out graded grey suits ready for the job centre queue.

So where is this going to lead us? Obviously we need to keep raising the bar at one point we didn’t have free education, people denounced teaching all children to read and write, time moves on and we need to provide better education and higher standards, one day a university education may become just as common and expected as college is now, and whilst in theory this is a good thing, is it worth the debt and the short comings of the job market?

A more educated and informed public is important, but at what cost, definitely not £20,000 per year like some universities want…

The Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb – author of ‘Fooled By Randomness’ and ‘The Black Swan’ today published in the Guardian an open letter to the UK’s main opposition party leader, David Cameron. In it he outlines where he believes Barack Obama has made grave mistakes with his handling of the US economic recovery by handing power and resources back to the very people that caused the so called “banking crisis” in the first place, and why the UK shouldn’t follow.

But what can we learn from this as creative individuals?

This is all based on Taleb’s (not so new) idea of a Black Swan, as he puts it:

“What is a Black Swan? It is a low-probability, high-impact event that, because of its rarity and the instability of the environment, cannot be scientifically evaluated in terms of risk and return. Although Black Swans are rarely predicted, they are retrospectively seen as having been anticipated, which makes us overestimate our abilities to see them coming. Black Swans can emerge as a result of our intellectual arrogance and our ignorance of our limitations. Some elements of the future are simply beyond our grasp.

Much of history has been dominated by Black Swans, both positive and negative. These deviations are the main reason economic theories and forecasts do not work, since the exceptional and unforeseen high-impact event plays a large role in economic life.“

But how does this relate to our creative industry?

Underestimation of the random event is at the heart of the Black Swan idea. It’s also at the heart of our industry. Very few people are successful in the creative world due to skill alone, this was demonstrated by Matthew Salganik’s 2006 experiment into music downloads (‘Nudge’ – Thaler & Sunstein, 2009) in which he, and his co-authors created multiple ‘artificial music markets’ populated them with the same music and consumers and saw no one song to be popular amongst all markets, but most importantly, there was no trend linking popularity to a specific song. In one market a song could be number 1, in the next it could be a failure. These trends were primarily linked to whoever got to the top first, not the best, or most skilfully composed songs.

We need to remember this, everyday that we’re working in our field. The big break is just as important as it ever was, the internet hasn’t increased access to wealth for the most skilled, but rather inflated the chances of the lucky. This is in no way a democratic career path, we need to increase our chances of exposure to that one, key, positive random event that leads to the next job. However we then need our skill to take over.

Once the Black Swan lands, we need to know how to ride it, what the best way to sit on this beast so as not to fall off. We need to Black Swan to propel us from our position of nothingness to place where we have a chance of survival in the murky waters of the creative industry.

Skill alone is much less likely to get you anywhere, remember that the ‘concert’ pianist who only ever plays in his room is no real concert pianist.

But what about negative Black Swan events?

Just as the one positive Black Swan can make your career, there are negative events everywhere. This may more common than positive events (however, I don’t really know) but they are far more viscous. Humans have a particular knack for being affected more by negative events than positive ones, about 2.5x more. So if you start with £20 and earn £10 you’ll be happy, but if  start with £20 and you loose £10 you’ll  feel the sting around 2.5x more, and this is cumulative.

As far as I see it, the best way to insulate yourself from these events is regular, incremental increases in wealth, whether monetary, contacts or projects, and spread the majority of your time amongst safe, stable projects, the kind that bring in a steady income. But the key point is how you use this stability. Stability is leverage, from a stable position we have the room to tackle a large risky project, we make space for a positive random event to come our way, and that could be the big one.

We can learn a lot from Taleb’s position that too much debt is bad. Whether that debt be financial, status or time, don’t think it’ll last forever.

It’s my move to London I’m talking about, I’ll be packing up and moving from sunny Scarborough (North Yorkshire) to London (Bounds Green to be precise). From here I’ll be starting serious freelance sound, music and web design work. I have a position at Iguana Studio in Brixton, here I’ll be doing studio tech, maintenance and production. I’ve also hopefully got some work lined up with another friend, advertising composer – Craig Botes, this will be freelance mixing and I’m going to be shadowing Mark Bradley at Village Productions (Dagenham), that one involves sound design and composing for animation.

On top of those I’ve now secured part time work for GoGen, this will be telesale-type work, working on behalf of charities, hopefully that’ll pay the rent allowing me to push forward with my real interests, music, sound design and web design.

Lastly, there’s a project brewing with a good friend of mine, Jake Hemming, this will be centred around providing primary school children access to more experimental methods of working with music. There’ll be much more info about that coming in the next few weeks.

I’m going to miss this place (Scarborough) though, the sea air, the beautiful surroundings and the friendly people, I know it’s going to be a far cry from London, but it’s just all swings and roundabouts.

So I finished my day job a week early, in preparation for the imminent move to London and decided I needed to use my new found free time to the fullest. So out came pen and notepad. I knew I had to take this week somewhere, but where?

Well I decided the best move was to stop putting off the creation of ColoursToBe.co.uk and get on with it. So I made a plan, David Allen style. Now 5 days later the site is up, people can browse a portfolio of my work, get a feel for what ColoursToBe is all about and contact me directly for a quote. All in all a productive week.

However the best bit was the immediate exposure of my work, suddenly people were complementing the site and my style, and I even got some enquiries within the first few days. That’s progress!

So I’m going to be moving the site forward, implementing some more database back end goodness and, refining the design, pushing the SEO and constantly keeping the content updating. So, please expect me to be writing about this journey, where London takes ColoursToBe and more info on my love of GTD.