Embracing Non-Linear Paths: Building a Life, Not Just a Career
While the world has changed a great deal, we seem to be struggling to find new ways of living. The typical path from birth feels linear - kindergarten, primary school, high school, university, job, career, live life when we retire. Over the last 30 or so years of my working life, I have bounced between multiple, often unrelated industries, with writing at the core. Writing stemmed less from my studies and more because it is something that I enjoy doing occasionally, and then I put the work into the craft. It doesn’t hurt that I'm relatively decent at it, from articles and poetry (for a...
The Endless Cycle of Signing Up and Forgetting: My Experience with Digital Platforms
I like the Internet. I like wandering down random rabbit holes in service of curiousity. I like how it exposes me to ideas and experiences that are far removed from me. I also like exploring the multitude of platforms, and their respective apps (or vica versa). While social media has become less my thing, I still have the habit of signing up for random things, just to see how they work. I was one of those who downloaded what felt like every app and then never used it afterwards. I still have apps on my phones that I haven’t opened in two years and yet I still can’t bring myself to delete...
Tech Writing in the Age of Speed: How to Catch Up and Stay Relevant
In another lifetime, I was a tech writer. I obsessively followed what was happening, attended countless launches in South Africa and around the world, and wrote about technology and innovation on my blog (for example, this very old review of the Samsung i8910) and in magazines. When I joined Destiny Man magazine as the editor in 2010, I had to start cutting back on writing specifically on tech because of the demands on my time. Plus, I was writing more across the board. After a few issues, the magazine hired someone else to write the technology pages. And, gradually, I stopped receiving...
Navigating the Social Media Limbo: Where Do We Go From Here?
Recently, I realised that Twitter has been my go-to social network for over a decade, but I rarely go on it now. When I do, I remember why I started to pull back from it when Elon Musk bought it, although the signs were already there - I wrote about it during lockdown in The Twitter Abyss. Social media doesn’t have the same hold on me it had previously, especially when it felt necessary for promotion/marketing and building awareness around my work. Nowadays, my posts' reach and/or engagement doesn’t feel as significant as it used to. A part of me feels we are at an inflection point where...
Working on the OPPO Find N2 Flip launch
There was a time when I used to write on technology for my site and various publications. One of the early blog posts I ever did on my site when I got my domain was on Nokia's music store, a very long time ago. When I was submerged in that world, I had the opportunity to attend many a tech launch, particularly for smartphones, even getting to travel to launches and tech experiences internationally. I got to visit CES in Las Vegas, tour the Google offices in San Francisco, go dogsledding and to see the northern lights in Sweden, and attend a smartphone launch in Paris, amongst others. After a...
Some of the books I read in 2022
Every year, I promise myself that I will get this right and then the year comes and goes. Having been on Goodreads since 2012, I always set myself Reading Challenge for the year. In my first three years, I didn’t meet that challenge, for example, only reading 10 of the 50 I had set in 2012 and 24 of the targeted 30 in 2014. 2019, 2020 and 2021 were good years, having read 43/35 books, 59/50 and 55/55 respectively. For this reason, I was quite ambitious in 2022, with the intention of reading at least 60 books and, I must say, I started the year really well but faded quite a bit in the last...
For the love of music
This is the first draft of an essay published in Listen To Your Footsteps. I did make some edits for the final version. I have loved music for as long as I can remember. My father had a record (vinyl) collection that he regularly added to on his travels around the world. I now own that collection and there are few things that give me as much joy as listening to the soundtrack of my childhood. It was a rule that every Sunday morning, I wash the cars. As revenge, I would pull the speakers from the hifi as close to the door as I could and blast my selected artist or genre so I could hear it...
Music writing is not easy
I wrote this for a print magazine but it was rejected and I wrote something else for them so figured why not share it here. Writing a column is a funny old thing. In the days when print was the be-all and end-all, being asked to write a column was akin to being given the holy grail. Or at least a map of sorts, a la Da Vinci code. Print space was and continues to be at a premium. And, while I have been fortunate enough to scribble many a column over the years, being asked to write this one has had me at sixes and sevens. The ‘column-writing muscle’ hasn’t been exercised in a minute. After an...
Media, content, streaming and the like
Recently, I had an interesting back and forth with a friend who is media owner, debating the merits of the different revenue models available to us, including subscriptions, paywalls and the like. In my mind, the main challenge with all of this is that the data and information we have on these is primarily from the US, which is a very different market. I still contend that an American media consumer is more included to pay for content that an African consumer, regardless of the country, including South Africa. This is partly due to priority and means. I reckon, on the list of things many of...
Why I watch the Tour de France every year
Recently I tweeted something about the Tour de France, having just finished watching highlights of the day’s stage and a friend responded, with “Still with the #TourdeFrance. Requesting the original thread about how you fell in love with it.” In my early days on Twitter, I did a series of tweets – before threads were threads – on why I watch the Tour de France every year. It is the only cycling race I follow religiously. When I was writing my book Listen To Your Footsteps, I wrote a short essay on the same topic, but it didn’t make the final edit; it didn’t feel like it fit. But, in response...
What would happen if your website disappeared?
I started my website in 2009 and, albeit erratically, have shared writing and thoughts on a wide range of topics on it since then. There was my ‘tech journo’ phase when I was plugged into that world and wrote posts on launches, new gadgets, innovations, etc. In fact, one of my first posts was on Nokia, when it was still dominating the market. There’s been my extended music phase where I have written about artists, albums and everything in between, including attempting to create regular features like Digital Crates, where I share musicians and albums I ‘discover’ and Life Soundtrack, where I...
Book Extract: Trying to remember
This is the fourth in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc. Memory is a funny old thing. You tell a story so many times, you start to question how much of it actually happened. With each telling of the experience, you smooth out the edges, the things that didn’t quite fit in, to the point where you can tell it at the drop of a hat. When I started performing poetry, I had to learn the craft of standing on a stage in front of people, would, generally, get increasingly...
How To Work Better
In my post Owning Your Platform, I wrote about how, having written and worked for a number of media outlets and brands, a lot of my writing has disappeared into the ether. Fortunately, I have multiple folders with versions of some of the things that I have written. In the interests of ensuring that they aren’t totally lost, I have started sharing some of them here. This is something I wrote in 2020, having spent most of 2019 exploring the idea of productivity and using the time I work efficiently to create more time for other aspects of life. I probably went through at least 8 books and...
Owning Your Platform
In October 2021, Facebook experienced an outage which also meant that Instagram and Whatsapp also went down. And everyone turned to Twitter to complain. In early February 2022, Twitter also experienced some problems with loading Tweets. When these outages happen, I am always reminded of discussions I have had, over the years, with various corporate and media platforms on the importance of owning your platform – in other words a website that you pay for - and using social media as a way of amplifying your stories. Social media has become pervasive in ways that we initially couldn’t imagine....
There are benefits to taking up hobbies
Some time, in the last 20 years, we became busy. It was around the time mobile phones started to fill the gaps in between everything else. Prior to this, we were simply connected to those around us physically and time seemed to move at a different pace. When you were in the office, or at home, you were only available via landline phone – if you had one – or if someone actually visited you. In the car, you had the radio or your thoughts. In a queue, you had something to read, if you remembered to bring something, your...
Book Extract: Escape
This is the fourth in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc. THE RUSSIAN author Fyodor Dostoevsky is quoted as having said, ‘To think too much is a disease.’ I have always wondered how one measures thinking too much. I have spent a lifetime in my head and been told I think too much. I have always felt, in some instances, we don’t think enough and what children should be taught is how to think. So many things in the world seem to happen because zero thought has been put into a situation...