Fast Web Media

The Digital Q&A: Richard Bennett

May 14th, 2009

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Every digital agency needs design talent - the girls and boys who, in their distressed denim and obscure japanese t-shirt clad way, turn a client’s vision into something beautiful. So this week we quiz FastWebMedia’s graphic designer/crayon jockey on what it is he does and why he gets to do it on such an expensive computer…

Q: What does being a graphic designer entail?

A: Taking lots of words and turning them into pictures.

Q: What do you enjoy about it?

A: Besides getting paid to do what I enjoy, I’d say the best part is that every day I learn a new little trick or shortcut to help me improve my skills.

Q: What are the main challenges?

A: I’d say the main challenge is the same as any designer and that’s the initial stage where you have a brief and a blank canvas and think “Right, where do I start?!”

Q: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned in your time at Fast Web Media?

A: That everything can change at the drop of a hat and planning is the key to keeping everything ticking along nicely.

Q: What are your favourite sites or online applications?

A: Colourlovers, Bleep, LastFM, Boomkat, Archive.

Q: Ever googled yourself?

A: No, I dread to think what might turn up.

Q: What one buzzphrase would you like to see outlawed from meetings?

A: I haven’t been to enough meetings to get annoyed by any buzzphrases. Yet.

Q: What was the last thing you bought online?

A: Plane tickets and the new Tim Exile album.

Q: Does offline media still matter to you?

A: Absolutely. Regardless of advances in digital and online media, they’re never going to replace the pleasure of having a physical product. I can read a magazine in the bath but I’m not tempted to do the same with my laptop.

Q: What’s exciting you about digital right now?

A: I’m glad to see that digital design trends currently seems to be moving back to a more minimal, almost D.I.Y aesthetic.

Q: Finally, how come designers get nicer computers then the rest of us?!

A: Umm, because we’re prettier than everyone else and need computers to match

The Internet: Is It Rotting Your Brain?

April 24th, 2009

“We like social media that enhances your life” says this very web site. It seems Susan Greenfield - director of the Royal Institution – begs to differ. As a backlash against social networks gains pace in the media, Lady Greenfield has been giving repeated warnings of the dangers of social media, stating that it could actually be changing the way children think.

It’s a dire vision of Facebook and its ilk creating of a generation of children who according to her: “are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity”.

By the mid 21st century we’ll all be acting like guests on the Jeremy Kyle show, in other words. Society will be dominated by an entire generation of bumbling sociopathic dimwits incapable of thinking beyond the impermanence and frivolity of a Tweet. It’s a worrying argument given Susan Greenfield is a neurologist concerned with the way in which technology impacts on the brain’s development.

Kyle: International expert on bumbling sociopathic dimwits

Kyle: International expert on bumbling sociopathic dimwits

However, it’s also an argument riddled with flaws. It ignores the fact that online social media is just one chunk of media consumed and utilised by a generation whose cultural lives are richer – in quantity if not quality - than any generation before. You can’t just lump ‘Facebook users’ as one homogeneous group who do nothing but post status updates. The young people Lady Greenfield fears for also watch films and TV shows reliant on cohesive narratives, while the publishing phenomenon of the last decade has been a series of novels for young readers that are long, intricately plotted and involve a baffling fictional sport.

In claiming that the online social world is instant, sensationalist and without context the ‘Facebook will destroy our brains’ argument also relies on a very narrow understanding of social media. Even something as seemingly simple as an online photo album has a narrative structure and as people are tagged and comments are left that narrative evolves, making it dynamic and more interesting for it.

Every time I see this I am getting stupider

Every time I see this I am getting stupider

Most of all though, the ‘Facebook rots your brain’ argument relies on the simplistic belief that technology is changing us yet remains utterly beyond our control. A more nuanced view is that we’re involved in a relationship with technology; shaping it as we find new ways to use it and evolving with it. And, as an aside, Facebook doesn’t make young people ‘short attention spanned, live for the moment, sensationalists’; being young is what makes young people like that.

The media we use has always changed how we think not just as individuals but as a society – Marshall McLuhan was making this point 47 years ago in the Gutenberg Galaxy and his theories still make for interesting reading, though apparently your frontal lobe has been so damaged by online social networking you’ll never be able to read a book again. You probably haven’t even got this far down the blog.

If you have though, let us have your views on the benefits and dangers of social networking and the way it presents information. Does Susan Greenfield have a point? Are there bits of social media more worthy of derison than others (I think at FWM we’d highlight the use of instant messenger in an openplan office as technological tyranny, for example). And does the fact that I’m about to post this on Facebook and Twitter undermine my objectivity?

Q&A: Stephen O’Malley - Content Director

April 14th, 2009

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This week we put some questions to Stephen O’Malley. Stephen was one of FastWebMedia’s first ever employees back in the early 1990’s. Having led the way in producing football sites online he is now FastWebMedia’s content director, reponsible for overseeing content for the entire client list as well as media brands owned by FastWebMedia. As his profile page reveals, he likes Manchester United, music and the occasional pint…

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Q: What does being a content director entail?

A: It’s mainly about good ideas and bringing them to life digitally, it’s also about website concepts and ensuring we’re giving our customers the very best service.

Q: What do you enjoy about it?

A: The role enables me to have two bases, London and Manchester, which is great. It also never gets boring!

Q: What are the main challenges?

A: Without doubt the advances in technology, which come at an amazing rate, you’ve got to keep your eye firmly on the ball.

Q: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned in your time at Fast Web Media?

A: I’ve learnt good business sense, but most of all i’ve acquired lots of ‘digital’ knowledge.

Q: What are your favourite sites or online applications?

A: Spotify, 4thegame, Red Issue, The Guardian, BBC i-player

Q: Ever googled yourself?

A: Yes, yes I have, however I seem to share my Irish name with a ‘doom metal’ guitarist from the USA who takes all the rankings!

Q: What one buzzphrase would you like to see outlawed from meetings?

A: ‘Thinking outside the box for a moment’

Q: What was the last thing you bought online?

A: A book called ‘Gangs of Manchester’ it’s about street scuttling youth culture in the late 1800s; it’s fascinating , and proves teenagers weren’t product of the 20th Century.

Q: Does offline media still matter to you?

A: I buy the Guardian on a Saturday and the Observer on a Sunday, I haven’t bought a magazine in years. I suspect daily papers will start to disappear in the next two years….

Q: What’s exciting you about digital right now?

A: I’m working on many new projects for new and existing customers, but the recent advances in digital mobile communication are getting most of my attention, it’s like the war between Betamax and VHS in the early eighties.

What makes a sporting hero?

April 1st, 2009

The appointment of Alan Shearer as Newcastle manager with the club in real danger of dropping out of the Premier League raises an interesting question about sporting heroism. Keep them up and Shearer’s legend as a hero without equal on Tyneside will just grow stronger. But if he takes them down, will Shearer become a fallen idol?

Unlikely. Ask any Newcastle fan for their sporting hero and 9 out of 10 will name Shearer. If Newcastle stay up he will get credit whereas if they go down Mike Ashley will get the blame. That’s how idolised he is on Tyneside.

So why do sporting heroes inspire such loyalty, even those (unlike Shearer) who make some pretty dreadful decisions outside sport? Well, think about every pass you’ve fluffed, catch you’ve dropped and putt you’ve missed. That’s why sporting heroes are so important and so cherished to us; they do the things we wish we could, but can’t. And, in doing so, they provide us with memories that linger.

If you’ve taken a look at the Meet the Team section of fastwebmedia.com you’ll have discovered that all our staff have named their sporting hero as part of their profile. And the results make for interesting reading:

50% of our sporting heroes are footballers

12.5% are American

31% are or were based in Manchester

Aside from the footballers there two rugby players, two cricketers, a golfer, a boxer, a horse, and a plasterer from Gloucester who briefly attained fame in the 1980’s for nearly killing himself ski-jumping. A man so inept, in fact, that the IOC changed the rules to stop him competing. Heroes come in all shapes and sizes.

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The Eagle: Well meaning but essentially inept.

That’s probably because our views of sporting heroism are subjective and not always for the most obvious reasons. For our CEO Mike Flynn, Eric Cantona’s example to the younger players who would follow him at Manchester United was as important as his achievements on the field. My own sporting hero is Malcolm Marshall largely for the way he made lethal fast bowling look so effortless but partly for that time he broke his hand in a test match and then swaggered out (wearing a sun hat rather than a helmet) and proceeded to bat one-handed.

Marshall bats one-handed. The cheek of it

Marshall bats one-handed. The cheek of it

Special mention should also go to the sporting heroes who didn’t make it through the final cut; Neville Southall in our Director of Sales Hugo Sharman’s case with Hugo noting that Carl Lewis is his sporting hero in a ‘photo finish ahead of Neville Southall’. It’s hard to imagine a photo finish between Carl Lewis and Big Nev unless it involved time lapse photography but it’s nice to see that our understanding of what constitutes heroism is more nuanced than just someone who wins everything, every time.

So enough about us; who is your sporting hero or heroine? Tell us, tell us why, make your case – the more eclectic and unusual the better

Hi, We’re Fast Web Media

March 12th, 2009

Did you know that most professional chefs rarely cook at home? Seriously, they live on wine gums and toast.  If you rocked up to Raymond Blanc’s gaff expecting a bit of supper you’d be lucky to be served a bag of crisps.

Things were going in a similar direction here at Fast Web Media – we’d become so obsessed with making web sites for other people we were in danger of forgetting our own online home.

So, we’ve rolled our sleeves up, got to work and the result is a relaunch of www.fastwebmedia.com

You know, even though we’ve been doing this sort of thing since back in the day - back when digital was a type of watch and Rick Astley was an actual worldwide phenomenon, not just a Youtube one - we still get excited about new site launches. When it’s your own site, it’s even more nerve-racking. So we hope fastwebmedia.com tells you everything you want to know about what we do, how we do it, and who we do it for.

Fast Web Media are never gonna let you down

Like Rick, we're never gonna let you down

On top of that you can virtually hang out with us by following us on Twitter, contacting us, or reading this blog. It’s here that we’ll post on the issues that matter – cutting edge digital developments, new technologies, the way online media is changing our offline lives, who makes the best brews in the office – the important stuff. Heck, we might even blog about what it means to blog if we’re feeling particularly postmodern one afternoon.

We’ve also devoted a bit of bandwidth to the guys and girls who make Fast Web Media what it is. There are cartoons of us too; maybe not the greatest cartoons ever (Dangermouse, Top Cat and The Racoons are the greatest cartoons ever, in that order) but they’re worth checking out if only to discover which member of staff describes Tony Cascarino as their sporting hero and which oddball doesn’t like coffee.

Right, that’s enough for a first entry. Subscribe to this blog right now, or miss out on industry insights, new research ideas, and photos of us playing beerpong…

Beerpong Championships. Serious Business.

Beerpong Championships. Serious Business.