An entangled web - redux

Affordable Anti-Retro Drugs from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

Couple of days ago I spoke about Minority reporting or the lack of its presence in kick starting and revving the agenda.

Yes there are lots of sites that give a long tail to up the ante, but...

a) They're not all networked. Why, many are in competition for the same eye balls.
b) Now, this is interesting, their sites are not professionally produced. But why should this matter?

At the new new journalism gathering speaker Julia Whitney, who's Head of Design & User Experience, Journalism BBC Future Media & Technology, (mouthful huh!) said something many of us knew along.

That teenagers and possibly many of us respond to sites according to the level of production and design aesthetic.

It coexists with the content.

Minority Reports
Minority issues do not necessarily have to be about race and culture, though given the skewed politics in he UK, this wouldn't be a bad thing.

I believe it has to do with shared values, finding common ground, for issues that receive scant or little attention.

The world around us is slowly dying, or not, from catastrophes strife and pestilence and big business blithely marches on to swell profits.

Gordon Gecko's "greed is good" is back (it never went away) and quite literally, as a city friend tells me they're shooting Wall Street II in his area

Di Caprio's 11th hour shown on Channel 4, a doom-laden affair, is something we could and should pay more attention to.

The environments imploding, but hey who cares we're all be gone before something cataclysmic happens. You know run out of water.

anti-retro virus drugs and compulsory licenses is another, which makes generic drugs cheaper and affordable for developing countries.

I shot this short whilst attending a meeting at Chatham House.

And then there are the social issues surrounding old aged health, youth crime, etc, minority issues because we groan, sigh, shrug only after hearing of another death.

That's not to say there's sterling work going on in all the aforementioned fields.

I came across this on Project Michelle: Only 3% of all Asian Americans are registered as bone marrow donors.

Michelle is desperately looking for a bone marrow transplant, but the former stats work against her.

Why are there so few bone marrow givers?

Because, you could deduce, there's been a lack of innovative campaigning, educational films, more time given to minority issues etc that suggest when you do turn up for a test you're not going to have a needle the size of a cattle prod shoved into you.


A social story
Last week on my way to Uni I came across an elderly woman howling in the streets. I passed her by before I stopped and doubled back.

She was locked outside of her house. But the door was wide open.

She just couldn't walk back. After a couple of minutes of figuring out and helping her back into her house, I called the police.

Their immediate response was there was little they could do.

Uh refer it to someone else, would have helped.

So I rang social services. After a while they rang back, also at first slightly flummoxed.

"Er I don't know this woman from a bar of soap", I said, "but she does need help".


Web social 2.o help
The web, touted in the late 90s was going to tackle this. Correction we were going to tackle this and more.

Info flows that would open us up to anything and it has, but the dominant issues of the old: power and money have stayed.

An item on BBC radio's PM news programme revealed survey on websites offering UK small business enterprises advice showed there were hundreds giving misleading information.

We've got competitive again with what was a free gift to us, the ability to share info and look at ways of solving some of these seemingly intractables.

Somehow we're getting tied up in an entangled web, which we might just have to disentangle, if we're to know what makes the other person standing next to us tick.