Monkeys with typewriters

As Nick Carr predicted in The Big Switch, some of our most familiar career paths are being rendered obsolete  by technology: the IT manager is one who may have little more to do than doodle on post-it notes in the office of the future.

Currently, the IT department is a powerful gatekeeper. When I was doing the research for Monkeys with Typewriters (and increasingly since), the IT department was all too often cited as a major stumbling block when it came to introducing new, social technologies across the workplace. As one senior civil servant bluntly (and grumpily) put it, 

“The IT department’s agenda is to fulfil their aims.  It's not to support us in our aims.  So if you ask can I do this or not, if I take this route it would be a lot of work for them.  The best route is no work for them at all so they would choose no.  Always choose no.”

But as we know, the walls are coming down. And, once the impact of the digitally-literate generation taken hold, there’s more chance we’ll get the social organisations we strive for.  Smart employers will see this change coming, and embrace it:

“To maximise efficiency among tech savvy workers,” says trend forecaster William Higham, “companies will need to adopt new working practices. Restrictions on personal technology use will need to be reassessed. So too will the current practice of relying on traditional IT departments for input on new technology resources, as knowledge is democratised across departments by the experience of personal use.”

Tom Standage, The Economist’s Digital Editor, makes a similar point when talking specifically about social media: “People who are entering the workforce now think that this is how software works. Some managers talk about Facebook and other [social] networks as being time wasters, but in fact the opposite is true. This is the way that software is increasingly going to look, and that will impact on the way companies are run, because when you have a general discussion about things on a Facebook “wall”, you tend to get much less email and much less wasted time.”

So, time to stop restricting your employees in their use of social media, and start seeing it as a training investment.

Photo: Amarand Agasi

Last weekend my friend Jill got married to her lovely fiance Saf. The wedding was at Castlerigg Stone Circle and the bride wore purple, but the real first for me (and to be honest I'll be surprised to ever see its like again, not in this generation anyway), was that the whole thing was planned entirely on Facebook.

No invitations, no wedding list, no complicated maps or instructions: the bride set up an event page and the guests self-organised. There was a ceremony and a stonking great party, but what people did in and around and between those was up to them. 

That’s how a handful of us came to do a three hour hike with three children under six, some of them dressed in fake fur and tiaras (but all of them carrying ice cream). 

Big thanks to Jill and Saf - a truly wonderful day!

(And thanks to Jean Morris for the fab wedding pic)

(download)

Click here to download:

How_to_get_married_in_the_21st.zip (428 KB)

In these dark days of global uncertainty, it’s good to remember why we’re all here in the first place. I saw this photo recently on Richard Arnott’s blog and pinned it for future reference: sage advice for tough economic times (original idea from Sidekick Studios’ Nick Marsh).

The great thing about Pinterest is that it’s not only useful on a personal level, it has great applications for business – as Chris Brogan discusses in the clip above.

More than anything else, Pinterest is a search engine that will drive traffic to your site when used in the right way.

Kate Spade and Wholefoods are good examples of brands using the platform effectively. And you don’t have to be a manufacturer or retailer: Pinterest works equally well for spreading ideas, as organisations like The Guardian and Enough Project are showing. 

If you're a blogger, Yang of ChilliSauce has written this particularly useful step-by-step guide.

I’m a bit of a tech-luddite when it comes to new stuff. But Pinterest grabbed me right away – mainly because we’d recently moved and I needed some home furnishing ideas – boom! An online moodboard that can be instantly added to and shared – how damn convenient.

Clearly a lot of other people think so too, because Pinterest is growing at a phenomenal rate – currently more than four million users worldwide. Eighty per cent of those are women (although uptake skews towards men in the UK).

First came blogging, then micro-blogging, now photo-blogging. We’re increasingly busy in terms of the daily information we need to process: if a picture paints a thousand words, ideas can be communicated in an instant. It’s no wonder applications like Instagram and Pinterest are of the moment.

It’s quite amazing the amount of vitriol 25 year old filmmaker Lena Dunham has attracted on YouTube. From “over-rated, self-indulgent [and] un-funny” through “Lena should wear shoes she knows how to walk in” to “I’ve dated this type..batshit crazy – RUN!”.

But Lena is into self-parody, so this stuff must be perfect fodder for her filmmaking, and for her upcoming HBO series, Girls (billed as a grittier, more stroppy Sex and The City so surely only a matter of time before it hits the UK).

Lena’s first feature, Tiny Furniture (trailer above), stars herself, her mum and her sister and is mostly shot in her family’s New York apartment on a Canon 7D. It won the audience award at SXSW two years ago and has been praised for its realism and honesty.

The film will be in cinemas across the UK from tonight (Friday). Believe me, if I had a babysitter, I’d be watching it!

Spring has sprung...and it's time to get blogging! If you're an occasional reader of this blog (thank you), you may have noticed a sudden flurry of activity over the last few days. Yes indeed, after nearly a year of inactivity (apart from the odd RSA live blog), I've decided to renew my blogging vows.

Yes I DO promise to love, honour and cherish "Monkeys With Typewriters" - lavishing it with more frequent attention and keeping it enhanced, nipped and tucked in all the right places.

It's been unusually warm and sunny here in London this week, so the perfect time to get down to some social reporting with The RSA, led by the awesome David Wilcox. So far I've reported from two events, experimenting with uploading video direct from the iPhone. There've been some hiccups along the way, but I'm loving the instantness of everything (point+shoot+blog+connect). Looking forward to doing a lot more of this, and to getting more RSA Fellows on board: the monkeys will out!

Lunch with the fab Jamie Coomber the other week reignited my love of Instagram, so I'll be using that more, and pinning the results on Pinterest, to see if that ignites any new connections (while still loving Flickr, of course).

Along with RSA social reporting and a more visual style, there'll be my usual monkey-with-typewriter musings on the impact of social technologies on the way we work: focusing on collaborative, grassrootsy, networked approaches. So yes, I'll be cherry-picking - but this sector needs some optimism bias (there's enough dirt-digging already out there).

Finally, I'll be posting on stuff that ties in with the broader collaborative behaviours identified in Monkeys With Typewriters: co-creation, passion, learning, openness, listening and generosity. So topics will include anything from diversity (listening) through service design (co-creation) to social enterprise (generosity).

At least, that's how I think it's going to play out. If it starts raining, I may feel quite differently...