Some real green action in SA

Thanks to a cunning little banner ad on the Mail and Guardian this evening (making me wonder if they are starting to sell their adspace on user behaviour models or interests, and if chrome is mining me for every click and search and rss feed... a topic for another debate, another time) I discovered that South Africa has its very own electric car design. Granted, an electric car is only as clean as the national grid's electricity supply, which, in our case, is hideously filthy thanks to Eskom's obsession with coal. But it's an exciting step towards a cleaner future. Good on the Government and the IDC for the investment!

And on the same day that I drove past the first enormous wind turbine being erected in Coega. Maybe we won't be the last country to come to the table, after all

The future of Collective Experience

I had a strange thought while debating the growth of closed social networks with a friend this morning: that the only things that offer true collective experience are mass media, and terrorism.

Everyone remembers where they were when September 11 happened. Everyone remembers what they were doing when the London Underground was bombed. Massive and terrible events like that shake us from our little bubbles that we move in. It's not that our lives are isolated - we are more connected than ever before - but our connections are still exclusive; they are determined by shared interests or passions or careers. It takes something like that to make us break out of our closed networks and feel empathy for a larger group.

The other thing that let us do so was mass media. You used to be pretty sure that when you went to school in the morning, your classmates would have watched the same show as you the night before. You could discuss the stupidity of the star-crossed teen lovers characters, or argue over who looked hotter in the beach scene. Tannies had heard the same joke on the radio as their gardener's nephew, and seen the same ad. Mass media was blunt and irrelevant a lot of the time, but the very fact of its inability to target accurately meant it forced people to have collective experiences that had the potential to bring them together. They had something in common to talk about.

As digital media becomes ever more fragmented and targeted, we are fed information and content and shows and advertising that is supremely relevant to us. It taps into our interests and idiosyncrasies. We never have to sit through shows we hate anymore, waiting for something better to come on. But we also never get challenged. We read things about matters we already think about. We chat with people whose opinions we admire or agree with. It's great that we can connect around shared interests with people from around the world. But does it mean we no longer share experiences with the people from a few blocks away?

Is personalised media ultimately divisive, widening the rift between a Constantia trustafarian and a Gugulethu mom? What collective experiences do we have left, other than terrorism or natural disaster, to bring us together and spark our human empathy? We think we're throwing off the shackles of geography and building global community on our own terms, but perhaps the most local connections are the most real and seeing only what interests us limits our ability to grow.

The guy you met last week

I managed to make an instant enemy a couple of weeks ago. I happened to be looking at a beautiful leather Fossil laptop bag; a bag I could never afford but couldn't help trying on. My friend walked past with a friend of his. I gushed about how much I loved the bag. His friend decided I was a pretentious knob who spends his life buying R2000 bags and condescending to everyone who doesn't own one.

Admittedly, I wouldn't normally bother myself with someone who makes judgements so quickly, but because that particular summary of my personality jars so startlingly with the kind of person I think I am, it got me thinking about the randomness of first impressions. The timing of when you meet someone really does determine what they think of you. If I were weeping that day, or eating at Spur, I would have seemed like an entirely different person.

But it's much more than impressions. All of the perceptions we have about ourselves and each other and things are time-specific. I feel a particular way about lawyers now, for example, that I did not a few years ago. I have opinions and preferences that are new. I relate to my friends as the people they are in this particular lifestage, in their particular circumstances. I identify myself as 26, and a brand strategist, and a Capetonian. But not one of those identities is permanent, and not one of them was true two years ago. We have good days, and funny days and days when we're too tired to make conversation. We are generous and stingy, young and old, idealistic and jaded. We miss great loves because we were perfect for each other at the wrong time, or in sequence.

The more I think about it, the more I think we are are just balls of constant change blaring through life. So the trick is to never take anything personally, because the conditions that form people's perceptions of you right now are transient, and relatively random. Timing isn't just the key to great jokes, great loves and great brands.

All there is, really, is timing.

At what point does one panic?

I have a propensity to panic. I have been known to force doctors to run expensive blood tests on me for my self-diagnosed mortal tragedies that turned out to be nothing more than pulled muscles. I have to drug myself so heavily when I fly than I cannot speak. And I’ve gotten off the tube many times long before my station because I thought it was about to be bombed by those who were selfish enough to wear puffy jackets in summer.

But one thing I have never panicked about is “where the country is going”, to use the term of so many opinionated expats (and would-be expats). It’s always seemed like a bizarre and tedious thing to discuss when the evidence has always pointed to us growing wealthier, more stable, more democratic and safer. It’s the kind of thing you listen to your friends’ parents go on about and politely wait for them to finish before changing the subject: it’s lazy, slightly bigoted and irrelevant. If you want to talk politics, talk about real issues, like health reform or why the World Bank approved Eskom’s filthy coal-loan. Don’t come out with archaic knee-jerk statements like “we’re going the way of Zimbabwe” because we quite obviously are not.

But this Malema thing has made me uneasy. For the first time in my life, I’m a bit anxious about the state of the nation. Is there in fact an underground movement swelling, to kill the boers? My Afrikaans colleagues were certainly not too happy about their relatives who live on farms when we chatted about this today. I remember reading about the Rwandan genocide at university and thinking, how the hell could these people not see it coming? The incitements to violence are so obvious in the media. But they just thought it wasn’t real.

And how do we know whether what we see in the media is worthy of panic or not? Is this a tide sweeping the country, or a lunatic fringe? And does all the publicity Malema receives in the media, though it’s negative, not just give him more power?

It makes me sad that organisations like the AWB even exist. And it makes me sad to hear the angry tirades of the ANCYL. I think of all the great leaders who built this country, from Nelson Mandela to Desmond Tutu and all the artists and fashion designers and musicians who brought us integrated normality. But am I living in a bubble, in the dream they created? Whose reality has critical mass, I guess, is the real question? And is it time to panic?

Happiness requires no adsl line

Seth recently wrote a piece pointing out that most digital natives are not particularly valuable to advertisers because they don’t pay any real attention. Everyone loves measuring trackbacks and impressions, but just because you can measure these things doesn’t mean you should, because the world today has spawned what he calls a glance-and-click culture. This culture probably began with TV channel-surfing and extends all the way to hopping between six parties in a night out and chatroulette’s amusingly callous ‘nexting’ of people. We think we are cramming more valuable, interesting and entertaining content into our lives but all we are doing is devoting less time to any one thing. The speed of internet connectivity cannot change the amount of hours in a day and so something has to give. So far it’s been our attention spans, patience, focus and concentration.


And I don’t decry this from a marketing point of view. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the pressure is on for marketers to be quick and add value. It’s actually exciting that it’s harder to get – and hold – people’s attention, because it ups the game and means we have to work harder to deliver only what is relevant, only when it is relevant – and to invest in people as the real communication channel.

But I really don’t think this constant distraction is going to do us any favours as a species, or as individuals. Glance-and-click may be the only way to feel you’re getting a taste of the flood of content available, but nothing of true value is experienced in ten seconds. I've noticed I now skip tracks on my ipod before they’re even finished because I’m bored and want to move on, and I constantly get impatient the moment someone answers my call because the conversation is taking up too much of my time. I used to meditate enough to remember that true peace and contentment come from sustained and intense concentration on one thing. Your breath. Or a sound. Focusing all of your attention on what you are doing right now enables you to live in the present, and that has profoundly transformative abilities. It’s no coincidence that artists lock themselves away, or that Jesus disappeared into the desert for so many years; everything, from works of artistic genius to spiritual contentment, comes from focus and attention.

So I was very amused to read of a new app that enables people to disconnect by disabling internet connectivity for a predefined amount of time (and its password protected for the junkies who crack). Avoiding distraction requires serious discipline because distraction is easier than just being. And now that even our most remote corners have been connected up (you get 3G in the Transkei!), there’s nowhere to hide. You’ve gotta make the decision yourself and can’t rely on geography to liberate you.

So I'm going to bite the bullet and close TweetDeck, shut down my mail, turn off my blackberry and try to smell, feel, hear and see where I really am right now. Hell, for this long weekend, I even plan on forcing myself to listen to some classical music; music that takes ten minutes, not ten seconds, to get to the point. I hope I can find the patience to be content.

The Creativity Hub

So if we assume for a minute that the world isn’t in fact ending in December 2012, then there are some pretty exciting plans afoot for our beloved city. Word on the street is that everybody’s favourite premier, Helen Zille, has Cape Town earmarked to become a creative capital of the world. I think that’s a fantastic strategy! For a start, it's already a city that's teeming with creative buzz. And creativity and innovation are what make regions such as California so successful. And it means politics which is about solutions, not problems. Instead of the familiar nationalistic diatribes against colonialism and racism, we find ourselves with the prospect of an intelligent, dynamic and forward-thinking strategy; from whinging to action. And becoming a creative capital of the world is exciting for many reasons:

It means us residents will live in a city which fosters the arts, innovation and creativity. More gallery openings, more live gigs, better graffiti, quirkier designers, more innovative companies that are inspiring places to work and inject energy into the environment. Nothing stimulates growth better than creativity. 

It means the best part of globalisation – the spread of ideas and of interesting people. Opening our city to the world’s most remarkable personalities and ideas. And opening our city's residents to our own creative geniuses. A city always in Beta. It’ll open our eyes, widen our frame of reference, and dispel any parochialism that may linger.

I love the idea of the 21^st Century as a sort of neo-medieval network of global cities. A city is a much more tangible place to relate to than a country. We are citizens of cities, and our cities have a distinct character and history. Nations, on the other hand, are contrived and never did us any favours. The problem, of course, is that the nation still decides on immigration policy and so if Helen’s ingenious plan to win the war on talent and attract innovation to the mothercity is to work, it looks like a battle for regional autonomy also needs to take place. South Africa as a federation? Ha! We live in exciting times.

Fantasy to make you move

I finally saw Avatar last night, after weeks of it being sold out every night and then me disappearing for the vac into a province that is only now catching on to the newfangled concept of cinema.  It was just as fantastic as I had been anticipating (and I’m a master at sleepless-child-at-christmas anticipation.) The visuals and imagery were gratuitously stunning – to the point where you are genuinely disappointed to have to rejoin the real world afterwards. I was also delighted to discover an actor worthy of a crush again! Let’s hope Hollywood is coming out of its obsession with prepubescents. In return, I guess I’ll have to become open-minded enough to consider marrying an Aussie. But predictably, what really tickled me about Avatar was the allegory. So I engaged the one person I know puts up with my idealistic rants (my brother) in an email debate about the evils of the West. And he told me, after a few well-placed supremacist remarks to make my blood boil, that the problem with ‘green crusaders’ is their lack of a sense of humour.

Let’s disentangle the Avatar allegory a little. It was not only about the destruction of the environment and all the natural wisdom and biodiversity in it, but also about the subjugation of indigenous peoples by colonialists. The first was started by the West and is now pursued ferociously by everyone; the second was particular to the West but driven by the same economic forces that drive the first. And try as I might, I can’t really see what’s funny about either of them. But I do see his point. As he said, being overly earnest doesn’t get anyone’s attention. Entertain people or they will wander off. So the trick is to find the humour in an essentially grim subject. But entertainment is different to humour. The arts world has been entertaining us with stories of our stupidity for years. I remember reading The Wump World as a little boy, and, more recently, movies like Wall-E and Avatar make similar pleas. Humour, on the other hand, lets people off the hook and lets them feel better about not doing anything. And I'm not convinced entertainment galvanises people into action either. So how exactly do you change people’s behaviour to fix the world? It’s a good thing I’m in marketing – maybe one day I’ll know the answer to that.

In the meantime, I guess I better throw some alien sex scenes into my book. 

Happy New Year!

So 2010 is upon us, and it feels pretty good. I’m hoping that the rule with New Years Eve parties is similar to that expounded on Sex and the City about weddings; that the more disastrous the wedding, the better the marriage. Because my New Years Eve was spent surrounded by food I’m allergic to, missing the party I was intending to go to, and paying R250 for a terrible cover band in a nondescript venue in a town in which I knew almost no people. It culminated in my passing out on the pavement at 2am like a derelict homeless person or teenage Essex girl and having to be rescued by my father - something that has never happened in all my 25 and three quarter years. But the defeat, symbolic as it was of my emotional state towards the end of last year, was oddly cathartic. Somehow in that broken mess I found my resolve, my backbone and my optimism. So instead of throwing my voice in with those who actually felt The Recession and shouting good riddance to 2009, I’m looking forward to 2010 with an unfamiliar and welcome lightness of being. If the Mayans are right, we’ve got less than three years to work with, and I’m not going to lose another moment. The non-believer in New Year’s resolutions finds himself plotting everything from running the Two Oceans to learning violin, falling in love, decorating the hell out of my new flat, and finishing my book. This is going to be the year, people. Yee-fucking-ha! as the cowboys get to say.