Tag : people

This week, Raymond Lyttle joined us as Financial Controller. He used to manage finance at Thomson Tour Operators and Marsh Insurance, (the guy in the image above is not him, to be clear!) and is probably the least geeky of the Many (at least for now!). I asked Raymond a few questions as he settled into his first week at Made by Many:

1. What's your opinion on technology and how do you use it?

I thought I was fairly techy - till I got here! I'm nowhere near as techy as I should be if you compare me to the rest of Made by Many, but as far as the finance industry is concerned, I think I'm fine!

Yesterday’s annoying article-of-the-day has to have been Richard Hillgrove’s piece in the Guardian in which he lays out his vision for social networking sites in the aftermath of the Ryan Giggs comedy road show.

I saw Mark Earls talk at Planningness in Brooklyn: How to understand and create social influence, and since then I have found myself thinking a lot about the video of the dancing man at the Sasquatch Music Festival that he showed us.

Mark's talk was about Social Learning. The basic premise, people learn through observation - a phenomenon he was able to demonstrate with an eager audience. Mark has described this type of open social 'copying' at a group level as:

The engine by which stuff gets pulled through populations, from technology to health habits

And the point he makes about the Sasquatch dancing man is how it's NOT about the intervention of influencers, but rather it's about everyone reacting to the growing crowd in a kind of  cascade. The video made me think more about the way we should try and design social spaces to be more open - possibly open enough to allow people to lose themselves in the crowd. It seems to me that being able to lose even a little a bit of your 'self' within a semi-chaotic social experience is a type of primal joy that everyone - everyone except the lone nut - enjoys.