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San Sharma @ Scanner Central

Last night I went to my first Scanner Central event. I’ve been meaning to go for quite some time… although as I said to John Williams when he asked me how I’d heard of them, I can’t remember any more, but it was something to do with reading Barbara Sher ‘s book and then finding that John had been on one of her holidays abroad, and had since set up something in London! It’s a bit of a trek from Winchester (about 1.5 hours each way), so I may not be able to go every month, but it’s great to meet other people who change interests so often, and John wants to encourage people to work together to get some of those ideas into production, rather than giving up as soon as you’re bored with it! I guess I’m more of a longer-term scanner, as I DO have lots of short-term interests, but also have some long term ones, centred around learning, academia, learning, contemporary contemporary Christianity, and wartime posters!

San Sharma gave a really interesting talk (apparently only his second time of public speaking: wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t said!), most of which was familiar to me, but it’s always great to see that I’m on the same wavelength as others, and there’s always a couple of things you come across that you go “ah ha” to! Most of the tools are listed from San’s presentation (see below), but gave some interesting context for social media also!
  • Any business not in social media is not likely to survive for long in the modern world.
  • Social media allows you to express different parts of yourself, as you talk you find a theme/style that you like and others who like it. So you connect with others with whom you have things in common.
  • Social media – offers accessible publishing tools for everybody, for many to many dialogues.
  • It has changed the fundamental nature of news media, from institutions to the media, the masses decide what’s hot (see how quickly the news about Michael Jackson’s death got out)
  • It’s now about how good you are, not who you know, or who you work for.
  • Twitter is rather like a city, where you overhear random conversations. A lot of the conversation is random, but this is similar to real-life where chit-chat hold human groups together. No one cares what you had for breakfast except you, but you’ll tell others anyway (we’re talking offline, as much as online!)
  • Social media is just another tool, you can write a novel with a biro, typewriter, computer, blog… all different tools, although changes the writing/reading experience somewhat.
  • Social media offers an opportunity to build meaningful relationships, and follow industry news (whether you’re pulling it down or pushing it up)
  • Twitter: Should it change it’s question from “What are you doing?” to change the kind of responses that it gets?!
  • Mass media offers a mass experience for events, for example, for the final of the Apprentice, felt a bit like was watching it with the rest of the nation in the front room, following Twitter feeds!
More Information:
  • See San Sharma’s presentation here (6MB, PDF) (picture)
  • I have been using Vistaprint, but love the Minicards that Moo uses (San does some work for Moo, and a number of Scanners had the cards)
  • Handy tools: Knowem; DandyID
Other Presentations

By Digital Fingerprint

Digiexplorer (not guru), Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing @ Manchester Metropolitan University. Interested in digital literacy and digital cultureĀ  in the third sector (especially faith). Author of 'Raising Children in a Digital Age', regularly checks hashtag #DigitalParenting.

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