Once again I find myself not agreeing with the Daily Mail. An article earlier this year painted a bleak picture of today’s youths brought up believing they could have it all come crashing down to earth when faced with the harsh realities of recessionary Britain. TV shows are blamed for “Rigid goals, an idealised trajectory and a world-owes-me-something attitude”. However, the smart people at Demos have uncovered a different picture. The Wishful Thinking study asked Britons ranging from pensioners to teenage mums to academics, about their hopes and dreams. Perhaps surprisingly, their dreams were not dissimilar. What was most interesting of all was that not a single respondent cited celebrity or fame. The few dreams about careers (less than 5 per cent of dreams) centred on job stability. Rather than set us up for disappointment, psychology and happiness research points to the fact that individuals are somehow hardwired to hope for a better outcome. And if people were encouraged to do more to fulfill their dreams and to imagine possible futures, society would certainly be healthier, happier, and more resilient. Perhaps there is a role for shows like X Factor to support and mobilise people to achieve their goals. Be more active and lucid in the dreaming process.

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Skateistan is Afghanistan’s and the world’s first co-educational skateboarding school. It aims to engage growing numbers of urban and troubled youths in Afghanistan through skateboarding. It also teaches them about civic responsibility, IT, the arts, and languages – if they choose too. At this school, it’s the students who decide what they want to learn. The school then connects them with teachers who will enable them to develop the skills that they consider important. Since Skateistan has been active in Kabul, skateboarding has taken off as a mass youth culture. The movement has been turned into a film Skateistan – To live and skate Kabul, as part of the Diesel New Voices campaign. The film tells the story of two young Afghan skaters, a boy and girl. The beautifully shot documentary follows them through the streets of the city as they skate through the corridors of the battered and broken Darul Aman Palace, and play on their boards with other kids in the empty Russian swimming pool on Bibi Mahru Hill (which has never been filled with water and was used for executions under Taliban rule). Skateistan represents the power of skate culture as a means to bring kids together against a backdrop of war, violence and oppression. For Afghani girls in particular, being part of the Skatistan tribe has the potential to show them an altogether new kind of freedom.

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The graffiti scene started controversially. Frequently (and wrongly) associated with gang behaviour and territorial markings, it was positioned as a destructive force, an activity that divides communities and exacerbates social divides. Now, however, it has become the youth project of choice to inspire a sense of community and ownership of environment. From Solo One’s work in Stockwell to Mohammed Ali’s mural project to celebrate cultural diversity in Brsitol, up and down the country graffiti is bringing communities together and providing them with a public and collaborative outlet for their creativity. It’s fitting then, that this week renowned graffiti artist Eine has been painting our street with ‘ANTI ANTI ANTI’ on one side and, commissioned by Mother, ‘PRO PRO PRO’ on the other. We’re working on a short documentary of the project so what this space! Attitudes toward graffiti are slowly changing. It is now beginning to be seen as a legitimate art form, a creative form of self expression and, vitally, a force for good in our communities. Long may that continue.


Image Credit:
Mark Waites.

It’s accepted by the best arts organisations that a company doesn’t innovate to grow, it grows to innovate. This isn’t such a common view in big business. Yet maybe therein lies the future for sustainable corporate advantage, as some economists argue. It might seem tenuous to hold up Damien Hirst as a model of responsible capitalism. And yet he says the best business advice he ever received was use the money to chase the art, not the art to chase the money. Even the New York Times is arguing that pursuit of profits is actively hurting capitalism, prompting fury among economic commentators: “What it boils down to is that when corporations are strip-mining their near-record profits, as opposed to reinvesting them, the results for society are devastating.” Diaghilev reinvested all profits in revolutionary productions that made the Ballets Russes successful and magnetic to talent, at the time and to this day. Maybe thinking like a great impresario will be part of the new economic model.

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Time magazine has just put an author on their cover for the first time in a decade. Interesting timing. The author, Jonathan Franzen is heralded in the piece as having written the ‘Great American Novel’ with his 10-years-in-the-making Freedom. Oprah has selected it for her bookclub and Barrack Obama announced that he read it on holiday. Franzen has spoken out about his belief that fiction writers are not regarded highly enough as part of culture. But what this confirms to us is that there is still a great appreciation of simply brilliant story telling, be that on screen or as the humble, scruffed up, shared paperback, argued by many to be the most democratic method of disseminating texts ever invented.

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Who isn’t up for a little bribe? Well, fans of UNIQLO certainly are, the Japanese clothing brand recently released a discount competition on Twitter, where the more people tweeted about a certain UNIQLO item, the more the price went down. It was the most tweeted subject on Twitter during its 2 day run. UNIQLO marked the end of the comeptition by launching its new UK online store. Clearly, the competition was a clever way to get people tweeting about the brand, but more so it was a great way to raise online interest and awareness of the brand on the eve of its online store launch. Others brands have embraced this strategy. Domino’s has recently attributed much of its profits increase to its new social media strategy, which includes rewarding all its Foursquare mayors with weekly free pizza. But at the same time, consumers are becoming wiser to the number of online discounts and can now find many of the be discounts without ever having to do much.

In a recent TED talk, Seth Priebatsch, the ‘Chief Ninja’ of SCVNGR (why can’t I have a title like that?) outlined how gaming dynamics will be used over the next ten years to encourage us to do stuff in the real world. One really nice example he mentioned was awarding patients points for taking their pills on time. Epic win, Apple’s app of the week this week, is another example of this thinking. It’s a combined to-do list and RPG (roleplaying game) that gives you points and loot for doing the stuff you’ve told it you should. THORIN AWESOME – my character – has just levelled-up for completing the task ‘Write Something for the weekend’. It was ‘A test of stamina’ worth 300 points. Could this be the answer to actually completing a to-do list? Or attracting new female and luddite, Moleskine-loving gamers?

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In Kerala, South India, people regularly visit the dying in their local community to provide them with physical and emotional support. Here, care for the dying is both a part of daily life – something young people give their time to – and a sufficiently glamorous cause for India’s celebrities. Bollywood stars attend fundraising events for projects such as Neighbourhood Network in Palliative Care, while the state’s poorest people donate Rupees and rice when they can. Back in the UK, we are dying lonelier than ever, usually in a hospital, while a distressed relative runs down a corridor to find a doctor. Macmillan nurses were set up to provide some of the humane face-to-face care for the dying, and over 100,000 people volunteer in hospices every year, but they can’t possibly help everyone dealing with death. In the UK, we seem to close the book on life without reconciliation. Worse – we leave it in the hospital waiting room. As in Kerala, we need to be brave enough to make death part of life.

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It’s one of those things we’ve all talked about, “Like, we so need to encourage connection in the real world, not in the Facebook world, man.” And we’ve all been beaten to it. Hats off to DDB Düsseldorf for highlighting the ridiculousness of wasting so much of our time on social networks in such a comedy post-social manner. As part of Diesel’s Be Stupid campaign, the agency created FacePark – a one-day only analogue version of FaceBook, complete with cardboard cutout profiles. People could become friends with others by attaching their name to a friend’s cardboard profile and add ‘Like’ stickers to people, groups and comments. Yeah, sounds a bit stupid – but I guess that’s the point, right?

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