Urban screens manifesto

Read the messages and understand the direction the urban narrative want you to take.

Do not protest openly if you do like the message. Take time off your mobile phone and read the poetry of screens around you.

Do not deface the screens.

Exploration 1

This is a project in the Moving Screens class for my MA in Digital Media at Sussex University. We are experimenting with the notion that more often than not we miss the obvious things around us.

I have to list 10 things that I did not notice immediately I sat down.

Here they are:

1) cobweb on the plug socket
2) Black spot on my cream wall
3) Hair on my comb
4) Curtains are now dirty
5) Dust
6) Copy of The Sun under my study table (been there I think for a month)
7) Empty packet of Kettle crisps
8) Toothbrush
9) Circle patterns of my ceiling
10)Tabasco peper sauce (always thought the sticker said Brasco for some reason)

Lovebirds or Heartbreak: Top Valentine’s Day Playlists on Facebook

by Jonathan Chang

Do you have a go-to break up song? An anthem you find yourself listening to on repeat when you switch your relationship status to “Single?” Or what about that song you love listening to when you’re "In a relationship?” Every day, people are breaking up and entering into relationships on Facebook. When they do, they play songs that personify their mood. With Valentine's Day just around the corner, we looked at the songs most played by people in the U.S. on Spotify as they make their relationships and breakups "Facebook official".


Among lovebirds on Facebook, Jason Derulo takes the top spot with his hit "Don't Wanna Go Home". When users fall in love they feel like celebrating, so along with romantic songs like "Just The Way You Are" by Bruno Mars, users also play songs like "No Sleep" by Whiz Kalifa.



"The Cave" by Mumford and Sons tops the list for breakup songs. Other tracks such as "All of the Lights" by Kanye West and "Rolling in the Deep" by Adele were also frequently listened to when ending a relationship. The hip-hop star, Drake, has two songs on the break-up playlist, including “Take Care” featuring Rihanna and "Crew Love".



Songs people listen to when entering into a relationship:

"Don't Wanna Go Home" by Jason Derulo
"Love On Top" by Beyoncé
"How to Love" by Lil Wayne
"Just The Way You Are" by Bruno Mars
"Good Feeling" by Flo Rida
"It Girl" by Jason Derulo
"Stereo Hearts" by Gym Class Heroes featuring Adam Levine
"Criminal" by Britney Spears
"No Sleep" by Wiz Khalifa
"Free Fallin'" by John Mayer

Songs listened by people after ending a relationship:

"The Cave" by Mumford and Sons
"Crew Love" by Drake
"All of the Lights" by Kanye West
"Rolling in the Deep" by Adele
"Take Care" by Drake
"It Will Rain" by Bruno Mars
"We Found Love" by Rihanna & Calvin Harris
"Call It What You Want" by Foster the People
"Love You Like a Love Song" by Selena Gomez and the Scene
"Without You" by David Guetta featuring Usher

We created Spotify playlists for these mixes below - we hope you enjoy these playlists that you helped to create. Have a happy and music-filled Valentine's Day!



Facebook love mix:

http://open.spotify.com/user/slycoder/playlist/2SSUnGaPl8YtWFNYrPYHg1



Facebook breakup mix:

http://open.spotify.com/user/slycoder/playlist/4yXygxW4AtM722kquUikD0

Facebook Data

Cities worldwide host Social Media Week

A week-long event on all things social media will be held in Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo, Toronto and Washington, D.C.

Social Media Week (SMW) features free events surrounding the latest trends and topics in social and mobile media.

SMW DC features an event hosted by the International Center for Journalists thttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifitled "Innovations in Social Media in the Developing World."

Moderated by IJNet Director Jennifer Dorroh, the panel discussion will feature topics like crowdsourcing, blogging, mobile phones, mapping technologies and more.

Each year, SMW attracts more than 60,000 attendees across thousands of individually organized events, with half a million connecting to the conference online and through mobile.

SMW takes place February 13-17.

For more information, click here.

Is Zimbabwe and much of Africa "Twitterphobic"?

By John Mokwetsi

I stumbled upon a report entitled How Africa Tweets by Portland Communications and Tweetminster that analysed over 11.5 million geo-located Tweets originating on the continent during the last three months of 2011.

According to the report following a survey of 500 of Africa’s most active Tweeters, South Africa is the continent’s most active country by volume of geo-located Tweets, with over twice as many Tweets (5,030,226 during Q4 2011) as the next most active Kenya (2,476,800). Nigeria (1,646,212), Egypt (1,214,062) and Morocco (745,620) make up the remainder of the top five most active countries.

In Southern Africa, countries like Namibia and Angola have some minimal active tweeting community and countries like Malawi, Tanzania, Botswana and Zimbabwe are not mentioned showing an apathy in the use of the this online social networking service and microblogging service.

Encouraging though is the fact that 60% of Africa’s most active Tweeters are aged 20-29 itself the generation that needs to be engaged in national discourse as potential future leaders.

The disappointing factor is that the report reveals that twitter in Africa is widely used for social conversation, with 81% of those polled saying that they mainly used it for communicating with friends leaving me wondering if the golden generation is engaging in nation building issues.

All is not lost though as the same report makes a case that Twitter is becoming an important source of information in Africa. 68% of those polled said that they use Twitter to monitor news. 22% use it to search for employment opportunities.

African Twitter users are active across a range of social media, including Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn.

But what about opinion maker, our leaders, whose proximity to the grassroots is only from the bullet proof top of the range cars where they wave uncontrollably to bemused people in all forms of tattered clothes waving back?

Mark Flanagan, Portland’s Partner for Digital Communications, says: “One of the more surprising findings of this research is that more public figures have not joined Africa’s burgeoning Twittersphere. With some notable exceptions, we found that business and political leaders were largely absent from the debates playing out on Twitter across the continent. As Twitter lifts off in Africa, governments, businesses and development agencies can really no longer afford to stay out of a new space where dialogue will increasingly be taking place.”

PM Morgan Tsvangirai with a following of only 1436, maybe a reflection of Twitter apathy in Zimbabwe, has only tweeted 20 times in three months.

Well maybe Beatrice Karanja, Associate Director and head of Portland Nairobi,articulates it better when she says: “We saw the pivotal role of Twitter in the events in North Africa last year, but it is clear that Africa’s Twitter revolution is really just beginning.”

Internet trolling will finally get me off Facebook!

By John Mokwetsi

I am a latecomer to the Internet slang word, trolling, that describes the prevalent habit of posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

What prompted this blog was a BBC Panorama investigative piece that tracked and exposed online bullies in the UK who hide behind false names on social networks to post racist and abusive comments leading in worst cases to tragic ends like death.

A case in point is that of Thomas Mullaney, 15, from Bournville, in Birmingham,who killed himself in May 2010 after being threatened on Facebook.

His parents Robert and Tracy have called for a new law to specifically target bullying/Internet Trolling.

In an interview BBC Radio 1 and 5 live survey of 1,000 people aged 13 to 19 also showed 52% of them would accept a friend request on Facebook from someone they did not know directly, while 29% thought their reputation had been damaged by something they had said or shared online.

Being a Facebook junkie I have noted with concern the habit of trolling on Zimbabwean social network forum. Okay! Facebook to be more specific.

I cannot place my finger on the reason why we are so angry, so abusive and feel we can replace fact with vulgar words and slander when discussing issues that needs a logical argument only reason can solve.

Trolling has reached unparalleled levels and the amount of hate language on soccer fanpages and well-meaning advisory groups on relationships/education is scary and it gets worse as most Zimbabweans join social networks after the mobile broadband boom.

Politicians like Minister Welshman Ncube and our own PM Morgan Tsvangirai must be discovering with much disappointment that Facebook is not be the platform to engage citizens, not at this moment at least. Often discussions on policy turn into mudslinging before hitting an all time low with trolls asking about sex positions.

Recently browsing local music on Youtube, some of the comments on local music videos was unflattering and unprintable on this blog, prompting one user to ask a question I also have for you all: "Why do we pull each other down so much isusu maZimbo."?

I am not cut to be a troll but I see them on my page once in a while and for that I feel it is time to leave Facebook unless Mark and company promise a radical approach to dealing with these bullies.

My QR code story

My first encounter with QRcodes. I created my first QRcode story as a personal experiment.


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Qrcode: Using smartphones to reveal the message behind the maze!

By John Mokwetsi

For my Digital media class project we have been asked to create QRcodes and map some sort of journey that friends can follow using smartphones with qr readers to unpuzzle. I have just created one using http://qrcode.kaywa.com/.

For those with Iphones they can look for a qrcode reading app available for download for free. I use a Android Samsung and the reader is called QR Droid and available in the Android market for free download as well. QR Droid comes with a manual that I found helpful. So here is one I created try and scan it and tell me the story it is telling you.

Plastic money when it reaches Zimbabwe I will hide my Ipad and smartphone.

By John Mokwetsi

Maybe in the not so distant future we will have the liberty to use the cyberspace in Zimbabwe for more important things than Facebooking and googling our way to a college Degree.

We might discover the joys and misfortunes of mobile banking, online banking, online shopping and e-learning through sharing sites like Youtube and journal and book portals like Sage publications.

The kind of convenience that allows you to order Pizza from the comfort of your home using a mouse and a keyboard, or better still pay an extra $3 for all your groceries to be delivered on your doorsteps after you have gone into the virtual world, shelf to shelf online on a website of OK or TM supermarket.

I am talking about that kind of connected world that allows you to never again carry money (bricks of Zim dollars or the Yen, whatever we will use then), a world where a QR Code scanner on your Blackberry or Iphone can be your bus ticket or movie ticket.

It is almost a utopian thought when you imagine everyone being able to avoid the long banking queues by just fiddling on those touch screens of the smartphones we love;so as to transfer money across cities or even oceans.

What about looking at the newspaper vendor with that obvious contemptuous mirth, as if to deride him of lack of swag, as you access the Ipad version of your favourite newspaper instead of the troubles of trying to read a broadsheet like the Herald in a commuter omnibus.

So I imagine Zimbabwe ( a year, 10, 20 years from now)will be a paper moneyless society as I see here in the UK where plastic money is all I ever use to function. I am imagining (rather pessimistically) after Econet's fibre optic talk get into the real walk, and banks and the urban space follow suit with investments into digital platforms, this is the direction we will be taking.

While I am excited by the prospect of a digitally connected Zimbabwe I was forced to look at the downside of it all. I imagine Mbare Musika might not be a place a pick pocket would rather be to get that $10 off your jean back pocket after we all resort to using the Visa card for cash transactions.

Crime might get more complicated and more aggressive than a wallet snatch if I am to read too much into a new police communication in the UK that says knifepoint robberies have gone up ten percent in the 12 months to September 2011 as more people carry smartphones. ebooks, and Ipads. There has been a rise in the killings from previous years because of these gadgets everyone seems to love only next to their pets.

Forget the more complicated crimes in which hackers can get your online banking details in what is known as "phishing".

This phishing is loosely when fraudsters trick people into entering their personal details on a website or in an e-mail.

It is that moment in an alley in Glenview when cornered by a scar-faced guy and the other the size of the Reserve Bank building, when the shiny Ipad 2 or the Iphone 4S becomes your death trap, that scares me. I may be cynical but remember when we get there that I warned the fibre optic set to make us all networked into the new technology and way of life might also give us more than convenience.

Google maps timeline: The footsteps of a journalist

View My journalistic footsteps: John Mokwetsi in a larger map

May the mobile phone never make us introverted people

By John Mokwetsi

You must remember those 15km commuter omnibus trips into town with that talkative conductor and drunkard debating about all topics current and old from Dynamos' win to the actual date of the Zimbabwean presidential elections.

Do you even remember a good lunch with workmates chatting about the lack of creativity by bosses and wishing if you could start your own company?

Those moments when the sitting room at home was just that?

When I came to the UK last year to start my MA in Digital Media I took the habits with me only to be spectacularly culture shocked.

The ipod and the mobile phone seems to be the gadgets of choice in public transport to discourage conversation.

Often nibbling through the mobile phone will be the guy sitting next to you for a 2 hour trip by coach from Brighton to London Victoria station.

British people spend more time on the mobile or the moving screen as intellectuals call them, than in real conversations. With earphones plugged in, even the students who you expect naturally would be more conversation-friendly, rarely speak to each other and for a man so used to the easy going of a good old chat with a stranger at Market Square commuter's rank in Harare, I have become used also to Facebooking or tweeting than to stare at people who would not want to be noticed they are even there.

The Blackberry, the Iphone, the Ipod are all tools for an introverted society.

In fact you can possibly stand for 30 minutes at a Bus Stop and likely chat on Whatsapp with a colleague in Zimbabwe than the stranger standing staring into space nonchalantly, earphones on, besides you.

I often joke with a South African friend here who despite being vehemently opposed to Facebook and other social networks at first calling them "verbal conversation killers" is nowadays seemingly more fascinated with the pinging sound of his Blackberry Torch 9860 BBM service than he is of a decent conversation during class breaks.

Now seeing that Zimbabwe was estimated to be reaching a Mobile penetration rate of 72% by end of 2011 and according to industry estimates, there are more than 500 million mobile phone
subscribers in Africa now, up from 246 million in 2008 I am afraid the continent famed for its hospitable people might start to feel more in love with Facebook on their 3G compatible devices than it will be with that nagging aunt or a colleague at work.

Stiff competition in Africa’s broadband market sparked by undersea cables has started forcing down telecommunication prices in the region, with mobile phone service providers announcing significant reductions in Internet service prices.

The development of underground and underwater fiber optic cables will be a major foundational infrastructure in Africa.

In fact according to http://www.mobilemonday.net in 2010 a total of 4.54 Terabytes of cable capacity was available across 13 submarine cables in Africa but these were further expected to expand to 24.5 Terabytes by 2011.

And I applaud the rebirth of my continent technology-wise but I must warn that those conversations (forced or otherwise) we are used to and that have been passed from generation to generation as a mark of the importance of family and the ethic of ubuntu might be the major sufferer in this great development.

Unraveling crowdsourcing and making a point for teamwork in online journalism

Source: Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving : Daren Brabham. Convergence Vol 14

By John Mokwetsi

You could be one of those techno-geeks sitting in an office hoping to do a Mark Zuckerberg and start you own Facebook equivalent.

IT seems the model of an individual creative mind has been overtaken by crowdsourcing and year in year out wise business decisions in the digital field have come from forward thinking companies and individuals outsourcing from users. The importance of collaborative intelligence can never be underrated in these times where a thin line between professional and amateur has become blurred from the naked eye.

"The old-fashioned notion of an individual with a dream of perfection is being replaced by distributed problem solving and team-based multi-disciplinary practice. The reality for advanced design today is dominated by three ideas: distributed, plural, collaborative. It is no longer about one designer, one client, one solution, one place. Problems are taken up everywhere, solutions are developed and tested and contributed to the global commons, and those ideas are tested against other solutions. The effect of this is to imagine a future for design that is both more modest and more ambitious." (Brian Mau, 2004: 17)

Coined by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine the term crowdsourcing describes a new web-based business model that harnesses the creative solutions of a distributed network of individuals through what amounts to an open call for proposals.

Howe offers the following definition: Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.

A good example is Wikipedia that does not rely on professional researchers for its information but from all over the world.

In journalism, citizen journalists photos and articles contributed to newspapers is another form of crowdsourcing. A good example is Now public and allvoices. Where as the print reporter or broadcast reporter is still relying on that politician friend for the scoop, all good stories and tips are now coming from that cleaner and coffee making lady with an annoying voice but crucially is with access to the Internet. The cleaner who can easily anonymously sms that crowdsourcing platform a forward-thinking web based newspaper provides as a way of admitting that their eyes are limited and cannot be the see-all as the word Watchdog might insinuate.

Crowdsourcing is not merely a web 2.0 buzzword, but is instead a strategic model to attract an interested, motivated crowd of individuals capable of providing solutions superior in quality and quantity to those that even traditional forms of business can.

Brabham cites in his highly acclaimed article that companies like Threadless have benefited from crowdsourcing designs for their T-shirts from the general public.

Goldcorp, a Canadian gold mining company, developed the ‘Goldcorp Challenge’ in March 2000. ‘Participants from around the world were encouraged to examine the geologic data [from Goldcorp’s Red Lake Mine] and submit proposals identifying potential targets where the next 6 million ounces of gold will be found’ on the Ontario, Canada, property (Goldcorp Challenge Winners!, 2001: 6).

By offering more than US $500,000 in prize money to 25 top finalists who identified the most gold deposits, Goldcorp attracted ‘more than 475,000 hits’ to the Challenge’s website and ‘more than 1400 online prospectors from 51 countries registered as Challenge participants’ (Goldcorp
Challenge Winners!, 2001: 6).

The numerous solutions from the crowd confirmed many of Goldcorp’s suspected deposits and identified several new ones, 110 deposits in all. Goldcorp’s subsequent ‘Global Search Challenge’, with US$2 million in cash and capital investments available for winning, launched in 2001.

Maybe it is high time Africa and online newsrooms (if we can call them that) stop pretending one man can run a digital platform. There is need to harness the power of the layman in shaping ideas. Despite not being able to pay workers great minds out there are ready to contribute ideas to that old CEO who might be afraid to listen to the "genius" in his company.

Crowdsourcing is also a good example of how the employers in the Web 2.0 bubble (newspapers online, digital marketing, social media etc) have to realise maybe the man who appears good enough in the office has not much to offer than the layman they pass on their way to those resort out of town love nest.

In short, crowdsourcing works because of the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ principle: the idea that a crowd – a collection of individuals – is much more likely to get the right answer than a single individual.