Hello Stevie

Picture source : cafepress.com

This is not a blog about greeting Stevie Gladdis, our well known joint head of Challenge and Innovation.  Instead a welcome to Stevie, the start up that turns your social network feeds into “beautiful television experience”.  Or in other words flipboard for telly.

As Jem Lloyd Williams remarked to me, whether the experience is “beautiful” or not may depend on your network of friends.  As the possibility now exists of staying in touch with anyone you have ever met (even casually because it is of course so much easier to follow or friend than actually to meet up in person and befriend), the need to edit your network will become greater.  Especially if you are to rely on them to curate your TV experience for you .

Facebook and Twitter deliver a very human experience of staying in touch with people in your community.  This was how most human’s lived until the second half of the twentieth century which is one of the reasons it seems so natural. 

Of course not everyone stayed in the town or village where they grew up.  Throughout human civilisation people have migrated to new environments where they hope to start afresh.  Sometimes you have to break with the past, to start again in a new place – you either will never have seen or have long forgotten  Mary Tyler Moore  “You just might make it after all ” but it sums this up wonderfully.   It’s the exact opposite of Cheers (probably also long forgotten) but sometimes you want to go where nobody knows your name .  Both of these programmes will feature on my curated TV, together with Ted’s more recent and very funny show Bored to Death.

Perhaps the next phase of social media will include some emigration.  Moving to a new social networking site would be like moving to a new city.  You’d take some friends with you perhaps but perhaps you’d reinvent yourself socially too.  Zurker  invitations are floating around teenagers in NW London.  Part of the appeal is of course the share ownership.  But part of the appeal is the ability to start again without having to unfriend (defriend) anyone.

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