Interactivism this Weekend

In an effort to broaden my portmanteau I’ve been revisiting skills from a set of archived, customised CVs and using LinkedIn to slowly update the world (or whoever’s watching) with the vast panoply of experience I seem to have somewhat erratically accrued. It’s not difficult, in six decades, to develop quite a broad range of skills. Harder I think, to have concentrated on or honed just one.

What’s interesting so far has been to compare the enthusiasm with which I’ve been updating the photography specific career CV with exhibitions, commissions and whatnot, with the sense of ennui which pervades most of the catalogue of work I did before a pre-emptive retirement due to ill-health back in 2000. It’s no good being ill these days, of course. The government of millionnaires has decided we’re all filthy cheating scroungers. And we all know how hard it is to earn a crust making art (but more on that another time).

So, casting through for some transferable goodness I found the following:

- masses of teaching skills & experience, incl D32/33 assessor and lots of work with post-experience and adult returners.

- IT (as it used to be called), web building and a heft of social media aptitude.

- recent teaching experience, showing artists how to make WordPress sites, and showing lots of people how to use Facebook and Twitter.

- the wisdom of those 60 years, some residual charm and a desire to right a few inequalities make the world a fairer place.

And so it was, after mulling all these and many other rambling ideas over with one of my very oldest friends, Retrospective Life Streaming for Elders was born.

The Big Idea is to get people of my age group and generation, maybe 10 years or so below to anywhere up and above, in contact with just enough of the internet to enable them to share their own history. There’s a huge pressure to get elders onto the internet, and as yet I’m not too sure where all that comes from except that some of us gen baby boom tend to have adequate pensions, the buying power that comes from empty nests, perhaps paid-for houses, and localgov in all its incarnations can save money by going paperless(ish) or personless(ish) for many of its services. More to learn here definitely.

But I’m really not about to join this crusade, to evangelise the internet for shopping or paying a utility bill or fix-my-street or whatever. No. Doesn’t make any economic sense to have to buy a computer, even the cheapest, work out how to get it hooked up, broadbanded at too-much too-slow per month, and then face that enormous mountain to get proficient at shopping at Aldi when there’s a local free bus that will take you if you have the legs for it.

My Idea is to provide advocates, maybe paid by the elder, maybe supplied by a local school or college, maybe from the immediate family, to work in partnership to get aspects of that life online. Let’s face it, if you’re not online now, with a findable website or social media page (Facebook or Twitter or whatever), half the world will think you don’t exist. That might not be important to you now, but it is important for social historians, your family, and whole generations of work risk being lost in dusty boxes left out for the recycling when my generation and our elders start to disappear.

It’s already happening. Look up feminist authors, famous in the 1970s and 80s, activists in Trades Union or peace movements. If they have a history on the internet, it will be partial, Amazon booksellers may hold a title, there may or may not be a Wikipedia listing, there might be a fleeting reference or a mention in a blog. Think of all the Greenham Common women, all CNDers, the Poll Tax protesters, the women-against-pit-closures, the quiet people making big differences in their local communities. It will be as if they never existed.

So last weekend, the pilot, the guinea pig, the willing first go at beginning one of these, a first Retrospective Life Streamer. We did get emotional, necessary really, but huge things were achieved. The subject is an eminent social scientist, a professor emeritus and former vice-chancellor who really needs a Wikipedia page and website of her own. We are nearly there, only 4 days (backed by about 400 days of thinking) later. I’m so proud of her. Really proud. Of course there will be a lot more to do in coming weeks and months, but the work is so important, and such  a privilege.

Lots more questions than answers at the moment, but to take things forward, after a purely accidental co-incidental serendipitous late night talk on Twitter with the originator of Simpl, one @dominiccampbell, I put in an application and am lucky enough for my Idea to have been invited to take part in Simpl.co‘s Interactivism event, this weekend in London.

My application is here: Retrospective Life Streaming for Elders.

The event notice and all the other Ideas are here: Interactivism

Am I excited? Oh yes!

Issues I hope we can cover or confront – and we get a facilitator and a group of bright sparks including a Gransnetter (yeay!) to winkle all this out over the two days – include:

- Advocacy, non interventional, facilitatory, the access/social model rather than the remedial/medical, to use words from the disability able-ment movement. How to draw out the Elder’s experience without layering over with complexity or the other’s motivation or needs. The words will come, better ones than these.

- Scalability. How we can work in communities, across small towns, local authority areas, who would make good or best fit providers. How do we find them, family members, education, history, heritage, or localised school projects, what?

- Tech that’s really, really friendly. I’m a big fan of WordPress but before one gets there there are browsers to learn how to use, photos to resize and upload, lots of skills to show and share, maybe even scanning services to find for that essential shoebox of photos.

- Photos, phew, thank goodness for them. That’s often all we have.

- Conquering THE FEAR. We are shovelled daily with garbage about Facebook being full of paedophiles and Twitter full of meaningless jabber. It’s enough to drive the fearless to ignore it all or scoff. And when the first steps are cautiously made there are complex issues of privacy, of how much to show and share of one’s current life, fear of burglars, of being seen by the whole world. Very humane concerns which need to be taken properly seriously.

But I learned this today:

ONLY 39% not online are over 65. Not as many as you thought, huh? Compares to 70% in social housing. Via here.

Yvette and the big burly sculptor who lives here are looking after my house while I’m away, oh vagabond thieves of the internet, and all my tech is coming with me.

If you’re coming, say hi on Twitter or Facebook, one-click buttons are up there top-right. Hashtag is #interactivism, I’ll follow you back.

Another photo, you say? Why not.

She’s 83 and doesn’t do jigsaws any more. Not now she has an iMac.

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