I always asked myself how would have been watching “OC” if you live in Orange County or “Gossip Girl” if you really are a rich Upper East Side teenager. Following “Er” or “Grey’s Anatomy” if you work as a doctor or “CSI” if you are a cop. But I know for sure what does watching “Mad Men” means if in your life you are one of them; yes if you are an ad man. Specifically (without taking any credit) I was and I am both a Peggy and a Don Draper. I dealt with more than a dozen of Pete Campbell and helped me a lot of Joan (in some cases as much as busty). I did a hundreds of presentations, created a lot of slogans, spent as many – too much – week ends and festivities in the agency. I spent a thousand nights for as many pitches and dealt whit any kind of clients.
Everyone talks about “Mad Men”. About how much “well done” it is. But, I ask myself, how can they judge? Which standard uses who doesn’t know this world from the inside? Following “Grey’s Anatomy” I never understood if what I was seeing was the truth or a series of really well done bullshits. Namely, interns live really that way? And are they really treated like that? Do that kind of procedures really exist? Is it really possible that a 16 weeks fetus can stay in an incubator and survive? I had to ask my cousin, a real doctor, to clear my mind. After all, how could I know? That’s the point: the same is about “Mad Men”. Because in this case it’s me, whit a few others but not all, who can guarantee. And here I am doing it: believe me, there is no bullshits, it’s not a fiction. In a few words doing this job, in every single role, aspect and detail, was and still is (maybe just in a less cool way) exactly like this. In the good or in the bad it’s something that you too can judge.
Web professionals have an unmissable appointment in Europe too: they will meet all together in Barcelona from the 4th to the 7th of July at “WebVisions” (Pompeu Fabra University Roc Boronat, 138), the renowned meeting for web experts that in 2012 will take place in Portland (May 16-18) and Chicago (September 26-29) too.
Like Brad M. Smith (WebVisions Executive Director) says, “WebVisions” explores the future of design, content creation, user experience and business strategy in an event that inspires learning, collaboration and entrepreneurism. Anyway “WebVisions” claim speaks clearly:“explore the future of the web”. In a few words if you want to know what will happen, you must be there. Actually the meeting agenda is impressive: studio tours and networking parties, followed by a day of workshops and two full days of sessions, panels and keynotes, plus music, film screenings, a Hackathon for Social Good, Business Innovation and Education Lab and other special events.
And to close again with their own words, “WebVisions explores the future of the Web and mobile design, technology, user experience and business strategy. We’re changing the world, one byte at a time”.
Too full of promises to say no. Don’t you think?
Sometimes freedom, free will, opportunity to choose can be a trap or become a prison in hands that are not well able to manage those fortunes. Have you ever experience to be in front of a lot of opportunities and instead of feeling happy about that, you feel oppressed, frustrated or even totally stuck by the incapacity to choose?
Also, have you ever experienced to pursue a road and instead of being satisfied, you live that choice in a bad way, obsessed by the idea that another road could have been better; or that you are doing a thing but just for the matter that you choose that one, automatically you will never do all the others that you would have anyway wanted to do?
Have you ever though that in some ways having too much possibilities could be a minus instead of a plus? Maybe it’s true that, for example, who is poorer or simply more mediocre is really happier because he is more free from the chance of doing, having, reaching and so as well thinking?
This concept has been explained very well by Giuseppe Tornatore’s movie The Legend of 1900. The main character “T.D. Lemon Novecento” never got down from the ship, never went to the world, if anything the world went to him, cruise after cruise.
And when his best friend Max dared to ask him why he never wanted to get down on the mainland, he answered: “Are you crazy? How are you able, people who live in the world, to make decisions, to choose in a place so wide and rich of possibilities? If you just think about how many roads are there…”. And then the most important, acute, smart question: “How do you decide for the best one?”.
That’s right: how do we do? How do I do? And you? How do you make your choices?
Do you think that making gifts is just a consumerist habit of which we are accustomed victims unable to come up against?
Well, here’s my gift for you: the renowned and really interesting vision of Marcel Mauss, French sociologist who – in 1923 – published his essay named precisely “The Gift”.
Mauss’s theory focuses on the fact that exchanging objects between groups builds relationships between humans. His theory drew on a wide range of ethnographic examples, especially on Maori tribes. Mauss decomposed the act of giving into three phases: giving (the first step in building social relationships), receiving (you can’t refuse the gift you received), and above all reciprocating (demonstrating social integrity): gifts, you should remember that, always imply a reciprocity. In his book, Mauss describes the Maori Hau, which means the “spirit of the gift”. This spirit was the source of reciprocity in exchange, enforcing a return of some kind. In Polynesia, failing to reciprocate means losing mana, the person’s spiritual source of authority and wealth.
However the gift is not an exchange profit-making. Not at all.
According to Mauss, the transactions between giver and receiver transcend the division between the spiritual and the material in a way that is almost “magical”. The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, since the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: “the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them”.
Fascinating theory don’t you think? Al least, next time we’ll have to make a gift, we can feel philosophers.
It looks like an echography this picture of the Costa Concordia taken from the satellite. An echography in which it’s immediately obvious the presence of something horrible, anomalous, that you would have never liked to see. And find. The Concordia ship, badly lying down there, is something frightening, a monster in a wrong position. A tumor that already killed and that nobody knows how to extract, how to remove from that place.
Who is already dead by that tumor, who lived it as the worst nightmare, doesn’t have any fault. Now everybody can see the Costa Concordia as it appears, and they are afraid that this “tumor” could extend, that could explode scattering his macabre metastasis; nevertheless, the worst thing is that real tumors come from an unknown source. Here, on the other hand, there is a giant signature of his author and partners in crime of this tremendous disaster: in this way, accepting such a bad echography, becomes something impossible.
