17.9.10

Introductory Rant From The Latest WANCer

As an introduction,

Ben Hope
Radio major (to graduate in 5 weeks all things going well)
Hard worker, big talker, some time party animal

I enjoy a decent amount of music, and talking about music and the world at large and politics and economics and oh so many things. I take the outlook that knowledge is a wonderful thing that we can never really have enough of.
I’ll be the first to admit I can have a difficulty in getting across an idea in written form, but I will try my best.
When I approached Hugh to become a WANCer I wasn’t sure what I would write about, i enjoy the business side of radio and media, because let’s face it that where the money is and there is nothing i love more than dollar bills in my pocket. I enjoy schmoozing clients, talking to people about what interests them and them making heaps of money by doing it. I also love a bit of audio production, and still marvel at the awesomeness of creating a something and trying to find that intersecting point whereby your creation comes to life in the listeners mind.
I also enjoy a good rant.

After intro’s, let us get serious, well sort of.

The world used to be so slow. In the days pre World War I stuff was pretty good. I mean sure people had to deal with the fact a common cold could kill them, 40% of women died in childbirth because doctors didn’t wash their hands and Heinz hadn’t thought up ketchup, but on the whole it’s a time I wish I existed in.

Back then it was simple to be a human, you got up at sunrise, did some menial labour job, got paid, home before dark, read a book, listened to a bit of the wireless or the evening paper to follow the breaking stories of some crackpot American inventor harnessing electricity, flushing toilets and the progress of the Titanic. How exciting!

When you look back in time, those past generations of ourselves did so much more than we have, the biggest thing the modern world can claim is perfecting the art of lying politicians, warfare and and reality TV shows.
Now days we have this intrusive media sphere shaping our lives, the continual shrinking of privacy and personal space. It used to be if you wanted people to care about you or vice versa you had to go talk to them, now its a simple friend request and your ‘mates’ with half the freaking globe. This may sound like old tosh, and that I’m just bitter I don’t have 1000 friends but its more of a fact I really don’t like the modern world.

I dislike the new deranged ideas of architecture with it’s sharp lines, excessive use of glass and using off-white to accentuate sparseness. I dislike that 4 percent of the population hold 80% of the wealth (and the instilled belief that it shouldn’t be regulated by the people because one day they too could be that wealthy), I dislike that entire countries are held to ransom for the idea of democracy, I dislike the threat of nuclear war and I especially dislike the fact that though there are heaps of great people trying to solve this ‘global warming’ thing, damn car companies are squashing the greatest of ideas (my personal favourite is putting hoses into the atmosphere, pumping up sulphur gas to give the impression of a volcanic eruption, it’ll cost about 50 million to set up, but that’s a lot less than the projected 1.6 billion per YEAR Ford & the American’s think we need to spend).

As you can tell, I dislike a lot of things, currently at the top of my list is men with incorrectly tied ties, people who start sentences with ‘so’ and twitter. Twitter I feel is ruining the fabric of society, I understand the ramifications of this and will take your disagreements, but they must be in 140 characters or less.
Currently twitter is in the process of reformatting their website, keeping the same chronological feed on the right while allowing pictures and videos embedded to play on the left. This was done for the users Twitter CEO Evan Williams said “It’s all about getting more out of Twitter in a lot less time.”. A lot less time? Are you serious, it’s already a 140 character maximum bullshit boring ass “technological marvel” that lets famous people say witty funny things that were more than likely not thought up by them in the first place, in the hope of being retweeted and thus gaining more fans, some peoples need for acceptance and to be liked is truly sick.

My main grudge against twitter is actually attack on social media and how they suck away the precious moments of our lives.. Already our society is pretty fast moving, new things appear in days and before we have had time to process, understand and accept its reformatted to something new.

No wonder old people complain about this ever changing world. I have a tough time remembering what Aotea Square used to look like. That is worrying, at my age i should be able too but what is really at the core of it, i just never took the time. Social media formats like twitter, Facebook or Myspace and those other faceless technological behemoths seem to suck away the hours, especially for those of us with extra time on our hands (and those with jobs let us all admit to the cheeky Facebook check, just in case you got a comment or tagged).

So that’s me in a nutshell, I’ll try not to be such a doomsayer and an old curmudgeon next time, but occasionally I can get pretty wound up.


- Thought by Ben Hope.

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