From The Morgue

I never expected Shihad’s anthem to be “Home Again”. NZ’s mightiest live act released their third album in ’96 and it was a departure from the heavy intensity of their first two releases, defiantly poppy and restless. (It’s a great album to sing along to.) “Home Again” is a touring musician’s thin promise/apology to his partner, a charming upbeat track with no small undercurrent of melancholy. It has become the song with which Shihad are most identified, their ultimate crowd-pleaser.
Kiwis like songs about going away and coming home again. This shared affection comes from a number of different strands in our national identity. It’s most obvious in how our middle-class youth (which is a lot of us) habitually embark on the Big OE, the overseas experience, and take off to Europe (sometimes other destinations) for a couple of years. It’s also visible in the large number of New Zealanders living overseas (the global Kiwi “diaspora“), or the relationship many Maori have with a home marae. The bare facts of geography are also influential – when you’re a big island a long way from anywhere, leaving the island and coming back to it become important concerns.
Which brings me to the Returning to New Zealand pages on the Careers NZ website. This set of information was the pet project of a friend of mine, and I’m pleased to send some eyeballs in its direction.
It’s really just three pages, with supporting docs and links. The first is about preparing to return home, with advice and ideas for people who are ready to come back. Then, unsurprisingly given it’s a Careers NZ site, there’s a page about seeking employment back in NZ – definitely worth consideration, as the job market in NZ is its own beastie, quite unlike those in other countries. Finally, there’s a page on settling back in, the cultural and mental adjustments you need to dig back into the local scene (including “reverse culture shock“).
It’s a good wee resource, and I hope it gets found by people who are about to make the jump back – it will surely be of help. There’s also a short survey for recent returners – you might want to click through if that’s you.
You know, I remember vividly getting off the plane, back in Wellington for the first time in years, and the way the sky looked, and the sharp colours of the trees, and most of all the crazy colourful wooden houses clinging to the hillsides. It was very strange and very familiar all at once, and it was a great feeling. I loved coming home.

At a course I was on the other day, the tutor asked us to sell her on Twitter, the micro-blogging service that continues to be the flavour of the moment. What was the point of it?
The other web-native in the class related how Twitter is essential for her professional networking as someone who works in web; and how her active network of real-world connections effectively drive their social activity through Twitter.
It made me wonder about my own relationship with and use of Twitter. I signed up at the end of March, mostly to secure my preferred username. Since then, I’ve sort of figured out a rhythm for using it, and on reflection I think it has had a small but curious impact on my life.
I view Twitter as an ongoing conversation which I dip into from time to time. Sometimes I’ll click through the archives and catch up; mostly I just see what people are saying right now. The conversation aspect is important, as questions and replies ripple back-and-forth across the 180-odd people who I follow.
However, those followers aren’t all of a piece.

• There’s my real-world crew, people I know and care about whose activities are of interest to me just because of that connection.
• There’s my content-providers, people who I don’t know at all but who consistently provide curious and interesting things to look at (a significant chunk of Friday linky comes from Twitter).
• There’s my political agents, people who are tracking and promoting political angles in which I’m interested.
• And there’s my “famous people”, generally creative types who communicate on a massively one-to-many scale about whatever the heck they want.

Two effects on my headspace from this.
First, the world seems smaller. It really does become one big conversation, and connections between people seem magnified. UK writer Warren Ellis chats with recent arrival in Wellington Meredith Yayanos who swaps jokes with William Gibson while heading out to watch the dolphins just mentioned by friend Jack Elder who compares notes with friend Suraya who converses with Warren Ellis… and round and round it goes. It magnifies network effects, and NZ is already home to some pretty intense network effects. It makes the world seem pretty small.
Second, it’s shown me a new kind of “fandom” (for want of a better word). I’ve been following Dollhouse, as regular readers know, and the Twitter presence of that show is pretty strong. Many of the Dollhouse peeps are on Twitter and they all seem to be friendly with each other and hang out a lot; more importantly, they all were quite up front about what it was like fighting to keep their show on the air, and then lamenting its cancellation, and finally celebrating the fact that they are in a show they really believe in. And they clearly respond to and appreciate the community of readers around them. Its a view into the collaborative creative energy that I haven’t seen before, and that I really appreciate. (Longtime readers will also know I’ll a big fan of collaborative creative energy…) It’s something that I didn’t expect to appreciate – I was all snobbish and sniffy about following actors on favourite shows – but turns out, I like it, at least for this set of people.
So, yeah, Twitter. Not essential. Not for everyone. But definitely an interesting tool that can be harnessed in more ways that I initially expected, and one that will keep being part of my online presence.
(I also have been known to ask “what’s your at?” to people, asking for their Twitter ID. Heh.)
(Related to that last note – in conversation with a Yoof the other day, I heard for the first time the expression “typed up” meaning “found on the internet”, e.g. “He typed up this video of a kid dressed as Batman wrestling his mom”. Interesting usage for word geeks to note!)