I’m a big fan of recycling. If you can use something more than once or find it a new home, then it saves you and everyone else money (not to mention resources, the environment, etc. etc.). But should you recycle an advert?

Sprint’s agency clearly think so. Check out these two adverts – can you spot the difference?

Freeview have been running their channel advert (by Leo Burnett) for over 5 months in the UK, using stray balloons as a metaphor for how many TV channels they can give you. It seems Sprint have taken this idea and applied it to a new market (the USA) and a new medium (mobile apps). It completely lacks the personality, and turns the apps into giant blimps hovering over New York.

Recycling advertising should be good for the planet. It might mean fewer international film shoots, lower electricity usage at the edit suite and less coffee consumed by the crew and creatives. But in reality all of this is still going to happen. One advert can never work for two brands.

Skimping on ideas is a false economy. Advertising (both the creative and the media placement) is about buying people’s consideration. The more familiar it is, the less likely it is to garner someone’s attention. Adverting also takes a major role is defining a brand.

Ideas might not have an expiry date but at least make sure they’re fresh.

(Courtesy of the Flickr Commons)

Even at 21, the Internet is getting on a bit. He/she/it is no longer the new medium they once were and it’s become just another part of daily life. No one is making “Tomorrow’s World” style programs about it any more – much of the mystery has gone. If the Internet were a celebrity, it would be onto its second autobiography by now.

Instead digital fans have started writing their own. The Digital Archaeology project was created to document breakthroughs in Internet technology (for both hardware and the code that’s translated on-screen). Running from Tim Berner’s Lee right through to Agent Provocateur, the project looks back on the journey so far with more than a touch of nostalgia. However, history did not begin with the Internet, so what about our analogue past?

When you’re 5 you don’t think much about the past. You’re so inexperienced with life that the whole of your short existence merges into one moment. Yesterday and last year pretty much the same as today and tomorrow.

But it slowly dawns on you that there was life B.M. (“before me”). Your parents must have been children once and your grandparents too. There is a whole world that happened before you existed, which has shaped everything around you. Kings fought and died, nations were founded and schools were built, making your life the way it is. When you’re a child these seem like distant stories – no different to picture books and stories that we read. The only difference is that some are labelled as real.

We all learn about the past in the same way. Once we’ve got beyond the difficulty of understanding worlds happened before and beyond our own, we start with the key narratives. First the Romans, then the Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans. We rattle through the key events up until the Second World War, and then we go back to fill in the gaps, and dwell upon the detail.

The Net is a recent phenomenon (recent in terms of human history), but thanks to our fascination with the past and the dedication of a few people, it now spans the whole of human knowledge. In the same way that we learn about history in classrooms, we’re populating the Internet with the key figures from the past.

(We’re talking well beyond Wikipedia here:)

• London Lives – a history of the city through 240,000 digitized manuscripts.
• British newspaper archive - an archive. Of newspapers. From the UK.
• Old Bailey online - over 300 years worth of archives from Britain’s most famous law court.
• Archive.org – an archive for… everything. Especially cool is the Wayback machine, letting you see past incarnations of websites.

See more examples on Brainpickings.

The net can now keep us as connected to the past as it does with the present. The difficulty is the amount of information available. Online information connects us to millions of years of history featuring hundreds of civilizations. Maria Popova, editor of Brainpickings explains this problem:

“as the sheer volume of information that becomes available and accessible to us increases, we become increasingly paralyzed to actually access all.” (Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance)

Although there are 1000′s of years of human history still to document online, the main issue is what to do with it all. Doing something “for posterity” just doesn’t cut it any more, and with the amount of data and websites expanding year-on-year, digital history should earn its place. So how do you make this information interesting and attractive? How do should we curate the past online?

Getting people to engage with information from the past is no mean feat, but it can be done. Sites like the London Lives help to “keep it relevant” for the kids, and anyone with curiosity for the past. The magic lies in the interface, the way in which you make bridges with the data/ facts.

Even if the past is more your thing, contemporary websites can teach us a lot about using information:

Make it searchable

The simplest and possibly most handy tool is to digitize historical information and make it searchable. Google Ngram viewer allows you to track trends in word usage throughout the history of published literature.

Telling a story

Storify is a tool that allows you to piece together social content (updates, photos, trending terms) into a linear story flow, creating your own narrative from social content. Essentially, it’s about picking the choice bits of information to tell a chronological story. Which is exactly what historians do.

Don’t hide the good stuff

The new Facebook timeline is also structured into a chronology, but its real beauty is in the way it gives you access to your friends’ personal profiles. It was designed to make the most of your entire online profile, bringing together photos, check-in’s, and social activity to build a “page-of-you”. Gone are the silos (huge information buckets for photos, status updates, check-ins, etc.) and in is a personalised visualisation of your life.

If this little sortie into online history has taught me anything, it’s that information is not in short supply, even for the ancient world. While it’s important to synchronise the digital present with everything that happened before the Internet, there’s a lot more to it than that. Online history should be less about filling in the gaps and more about engaging people with the past. The information is there, we just have to use it.

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The past 18 months have challenged the Net’s independence. We’ve had the Afghan war logs, Embassy-gate and the pursuit of Julian Assange. In response, hackers attacked companies that had refused to host the Wikileaks website. Weeks later authoritarian Arab governments were trying to stamp out revolution by removing citizen’s internet access, and elsewhere citizens who are granted unrestricted access to the net successfully hacked Sony’s Playstation network and stole huge amounts of user data. In the UK we’ve witnessed the battle between Twitter users and celebrities who want to hide their private scandals from the press. It’s getting messy and there’s a growing struggle between groups who want a controlled internet and those who want absolute liberty.

I’ve found three things that illustrate this conflict:

1. The Stuxnet virus

Is this the world’s first cyber weapon?

2. Internet activism

Are groups like Lulzsec good rebels (Star Wars):

or bad ones (Your only live twice)?

When does digital activism become terrorism?

3. DIY revolution

With Western governments trying to reign in rogue elements at home (by rogue elements read: anyone from hackers to file sharers), they seem to be adopting a different policy abroad, with freedom kits like this.

Another example of this confusing approach (or hypocrisy) is Hilary Clinton demanding freedom of the Internet abroad while the US government restricts websites at home.

On the one side we have governments and organisations that would prefer a more monitored internet. This can be in the interest of protecting internet users but it’s also a step closer towards internet censorship, which we have seen in
Egypt, Syria and of course China.

For a long time, the internet has been largely self-regulated, and this is what most advocates of a free internet want. These people support the freedom to exercise their full individual and political rights online and in principle I’m with them. At times, however, this strays towards anarchic and illegal activities. Are the actions of hackers like Lulzsec the first instances of internet terrorism? This feels like people taking their Internet freedoms too far.

There are international statutes that cover shipping and air travel because they take place in international territories. The internet occurs in both international and national territories. It’s not some third space, it is a space in its own right. The net allows transmission of services, of money and, fundamentally, data from one place to another. Information and ownership of that information is something we’re only just beginning to tackle at a national level, and something most of us still don’t understand. To enshrine it in international law seems overly pre-emptive and restrictive; it’s the people, not the government who benefit most from this.

I support the need for individuals to be protected online but all too often protection becomes restriction. One of the vital qualities of the internet is that it is free and it needs to stay like that. Remove this and all the benefits that Don Tapscott talks about in The Net Generation are lost (accessible democracy, education for all, efficient working and unbridled creativity).

Access to the internet is becoming a fundamental human right. As with all human rights, they are defended as long as they don’t restrict another individual’s rights. Freedom of expression, of information and of opportunity should exist online and be protected, whether marauding identity thieves, hackers or restrictive governments.

Living in the age of the “long tail“, blockbuster success is even harder to come by. Which is exactly what makes this article in the Guardian so curious. Following the UK’s riots in August, the newspaper looked at recent survey results from British teenagers. Over 80% of kids wanted to be famous, but only 50% could answer what they wanted to be famous for.

So what does this mean? Are they a) so unimaginative, they can’t even dream up a future career for themselves, b) hopelessly unrealistic, or c) naive to the point that they don’t know what fame requires?

Celebrity has got a lot of bad press over the past 10 years, but it’s not completely soulless. People have certainly always cheated, misbehaved and gained/ lost weight, but it’s our obsessive fascination with it that’s turned it into something grotesque. Being famous is not intrinsically bad and the desire to be well known can have positive results.

Fame itself suggests quality. It can mean everything being good at something (writing for example – JK Rowling is undeniably good at writing children’s literature, even literature for adults), all the way through to being the absolute best at what you do. Famous guitarists like Jimmy Page, Joe Satriani and Slash are famous because they are/ were brilliant at one thing.

Fame goes well beyond the entertainment industry, and is associated more than ever with the business world, especially business success. Everyone from Dragons Den investors to engineering entrepreneurs like James Dyson to Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin are famous because they’ve created something successful. Men are now more likely to idolize and take entrepreneurs as role models than sports people.

Even people who have changed the world through technology (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Tim Berners Lee) are now famous. For me this show that fame can be a by-product of success. It’s often the result of skill, intelligence and dedication and shows you’re highly valued by other people. Footballers, especially, are acknowledged for their by clubs and supporters (I still think they’re grossly overpaid for the work they do). However, everyone here is at least famous for something.

It’s an ironic quirk that you can be well known for doing nothing, or even for being ordinary, and yet somehow people can make a career of it. At it’s best, this is an attention seeking performance; at its worst, fame becomes infamy and drives people to drastic measures. Some terrible acts have been carried out by people desperate for attention, and wanting to be famous if often one of the drivers of serial killers.

Fortunately, the moderate form of this stupidity is more common. The celebs that grace the pages of heat, now, and Closer magazines are frequently famous simply because their publicists are still able to get them featured. We’re beginning to see the difference between fame and celebrity: one is purely populist, the other suggests something more enduring. Celebs are unlikely to be remembered if they stop appearing in press. Fame is more intrinsic, the result of an extraordinary person. You can be famous without being a celeb, which I think says it all.

So I don’t have a problem with people wanting to be famous. It’s like a prize, or a title given to people who’ve done something special, regardless of whether it resonates with tens of people or with millions. If you’ve worked hard and achieved something that other people value, then you’ve earned the right to the fame, money or power that it brings.

The problem with the 50% who don’t know what they want to be famous for is they’re even less likely to get it. There are millions of others who have the same vague ambition with no clue how to get there. This is not necessarily the sign of a direction-less generation; it’s what happens when you’ve still got a lot of growing up to do.