Happy New Year to you all!

Hope you’ve managed to take a peek and some of the reviews we’ve been getting. They’re all hitting exactly the mark we were trying to reach with the book, and we hope there’ll be a few more to come (especially after our UK book launch reception at JWT’s offices in London later this month).

We’ve been slowly adding pages to this site with excerpts from each Pioneer’s chapter to give you a flavour of what each of their stories holds.

Here are the first 10:

Thomas Gensemer – Blue State Digital

June Cohen – TED Talks

Denzyl Feigelson – Artists Without a Lable

Avinash Kaushik – Google Analytics

Danny Sullivan – Search Engine Land

Gurbaksh Chahal – RadiumOne

Jaron Lanier – Microsoft & Virtual Reality

Vanessa Fox – Google and Nine By Blue

John Winsor – Victors and Spoils

Angel Chen – OgilvyOne China

We’ll add more soon. We’re managing this site ourselves and we have day jobs, so it can be a bit time consuming!

Phantom Text Messages

In other news we picked up this article by Tom Chatfield on the BBC about phantom text messages and it mentions Jaron Lanier (read an excerpt from his chapter by clicking on his name above), and talks about his thoughts on social media.

Chatfield says:

“Lanier’s is a critique above what he has elsewhere called the “antihuman” perversity of many technologies: of how exploitative and reductive habits can ensnare us, via tasty digital carrots and daunting sticks. Endless sharing and clicks on “like” are, after all, far easier than taking the time to work out what we actually feel – let alone express it – while personal identity can become little more than a perpetual present of status updates, drop-down-menu preferences and instant interactions.”

This rallies well with our interview with him and his book “You are Not a Gadget” where he calls out “cybernetic totalists” in Silicon Valley for stifling creativity and individuality.

All really excellent food for thought as we continue on this social/digital rollercoaster to goodness knows where!

Not sure we have experience one of those Phantom Text Messages though.

Have you?

Mel & Paul

(Photo Credit: Gummy mobile phones)