Just wow

A girl in California doesn’t just watch music videos, she choreographs them. A young man in Egypt doesn’t witness riots in Tahrir Square, he captures them on his smartphone, potentially creating millions more witnesses in the process. These people are active content consumers. Not satisfied to simply observe media like their exclusively television-raised, passive parents, they want to be a part of it: To touch it, feel it, add to, subtract from, and shape it. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they are compelled to share it.

The whole article is here.  It’s quite a long article but it shows why social media is a paradigm shift on how we view the world the world had changed.

I watched the film Invictus last week. It’s been on my to-watch list for an age. I thought it was about Rugby but I didn’t realise it was as much about the politics of South Africa and the role it played in Nelson Mandela’s governance of the country and in the country’s at least partial reconciliation with the Apartheid era. I thoroughly enjoyed the film, not realising that Invictus was in fact a poem by William Ernest Henley. I’ve reproduced it below

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

The last two lines make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Apparently, the Oklahoma Bomber Timothy McVeigh quoted the poem in his final letter before being executed by the State of Indiana in 2001.

The word Invictus is Latin for “unconquered”

Posted via email from Mark Hendy