There’s a piece in the Guardian in which DJ and film-maker Don Letts dispenses a few observations about culture and society. There’s one line in it that some friends of mine on Twitter (professional musicians and DJs, as it happens) have seized upon and retweeted as a bit of a ‘hell yeah!’ to the bumper [...]
Categories: culture
Tagged: Art, Creativity, culture, Film, Music
I’ve been having conversations over the past 24 hours about the ‘value’ of social media. The social transparency and personal profile that this kind of medium affords is one of those things that crops up from time to time in articles such as this one in Techcrunch and this one in Music Think Tank – [...]
Categories: culture,Family,Music,Technology
We’ve recently moved into a new neighbourhood, and I’ve been checking out the local spots. I love the record store here (apparently there’s a better website on the way) – and our local pub is a fantastic venue for all sorts of great live gigs – the sort of international calibre stuff you wouldn’t expect [...]
Categories: culture,Technology
Photo by DoktorSpinn I saw an article being linked to from Twitter this morning. It was entitled 10 Reasons PR Should Embrace Twitter. I thought I should go check it out, partly because I regularly guest lecture about the internet on a PR module at Birmingham City University, and partly because I had a feeling [...]
Categories: Business,culture,Technology
Jez introduces his film My friend and colleague Jez (of Dubber and Jez fame) produced a documentary film about music heritage in Birmingham. It’s called Made In Birmingham: Reggae, Punk, Bhangra. Today was the private invitation-only premiere of that film at the MAC. The one-hour documentary was screened to a cinema packed full of creative [...]
Categories: Birmingham,culture,Music
Tagged: documentary, Film
Ruth, Martín & Me in downtown Medellín To say a trip was “life-changing” is an awful cliché. But I’ve been trying to think of other ways to describe my time in Colombia, and I keep coming back to that one phrase as a fair and accurate description. I met such inspirational people, went to such [...]
I’m working with an organisation called Punch Records at the moment on what’s called a Knowledge Transfer project. The idea is to put academics together with businesses and cultural organisations in order to try and make university knowledge ‘useful’ in the real world. This might take some explaining, but there’s a cool payoff which I [...]
Categories: Art,culture,University
Tagged: propaganda, protest, South Africa, UK
[Video link] I’m in London today with my New Music Strategies co-ninja Steve Lawson, working with an arts organisation called Heart n Soul, helping them with their online presence. They specialise in access to arts for people with learning disabilities. They’re also behind the fantastic band The Fish Police – and we’ll be working with [...]
Tagged: consultancy, web
Photo by “lapolab” I’ve been talking about this a lot recently, and it seemed appropriate to try and capture my thoughts about it here in blog form while it’s still pretty fresh. Most of the ideas aren’t mine, but like all academics, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants in order to see a little [...]
Categories: culture,Technology
One of the things I wasn’t expecting when I came to the Sounds Digital conference in London was that the person I have the most in common with in terms of understanding of music, culture and media would be a Vice President of Global Digital Operations for Sony Music. I’ve actually had to reconsider what [...]
Categories: culture,Music,New Music Strategies
Tagged: Matthew Hawn, Sounds Digital
