Leila Johnston's posts

I recently caught up with a former Cambridge University lecturer of mine, David Trotter. As well as being an extremely inspiring teacher, David is an expert on literature and cinema between the world wars, and has a particular interest in the social effects of communication technology. It was fascinating chatting to David – we're looking at the same thing through different lenses and there's clearly so much to be gained, on both sides, from these kind of exchanges. Read on for the surprising origins of social media, what really happens when tech goes head-to-head with nature, and more.

Imperica magazine recently asked me if I would be interested in taking part in an 'In Conversation With' on their site. 

We're lucky enough to share this space with a really interesting and smart group of people, and Duncan and I thought it would be fun to tell some of their stories. We've kicked off with a chat with  Murray Steele, a Rails developer from Unboxed who works for us so much he is now completely 'one of the family'... He's also one of the brains behind the regular Ruby meet-up LRUG and the annual Ruby Manor conference. Find out more over the turn!

Duncan and I have been working up creative ideas together ­– and separately – for a few years. Some get to the prototype stage while others are developed in sketches, wikis and excited emails before being set aside or segued into something else. There’s a range to it, but a lot of our ideas seem to have to do with trying to find meaning in networks. We’ve noticed that the internet started off with one problem and ended up with the opposite one: too few users have become too many, not enough information has become too much. With so much undifferentiated stuff, and so many strangers so close by, we're facing a new set of problems around filtering and making sense of things. We might not have the answers, but we’ve definitely had contrary fun thinking about it all. Check out our conversation about some of the stuff we’ve made over the turn…

There's no doubt 'storytelling' is a huge buzzword at the moment. There are numerous talks, articles and events about it, not least our very own Storywarp (interdisciplinary panel chat about stories, hosted by Sara and myself, this Wednesday night at our offices, see you there?)

I've been thinking about why it's suddenly become so interesting to people working in digital. Perhaps it's just the right idea at the right time, a good friendly word for the point where the trend for 'doing a social' meets our webby fascination with connected structures.

I think it's important, though, to remember that stories aren't the same thing as content, and it seems to me that storytelling isn't always as social and inclusive as we might think. Maybe to be truly inclusive you need objectivity, and to be truly objective you need limits. When you have limits you have context, and where there's a context, there's somewhere to inject content. 

I have put a few of my thoughts on this together in a deck, as a starting point...