What was it that  made an attempt to celebrate diversity turn parochial?

I went to see Gay Icons last week-end  and left the National Portrait Gallery feeling both puzzled and disappointed.

The exhibition was put together by ten selectors, including Billie Jean King and Elton John, who were asked to name six people - who may or may not be gay - “whom they personally regard as inspirational, or an icon for them”.
Gay Icons missed a great opportunity to celebrate prominent figures for their roles as advocates of gay rights. Instead, some of the people selected appear to have been chosen only for personal reasons. Awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic gets only a few brief mentions.

The exhibition also lacks diversity in terms of nationality. Most of the people in it are either British or American. How sad!

Here is a list of people who were totally ignored but ought to have been part of the exhibition in terms of what they represent as gay icons:

- Greek poet Constantine Cavafy
- German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder
- Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka
- Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar
- Greek soprano Maria Callas
- American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe
- Italian film directors Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luchino Visconti
- US movie star Rock Hudson
- English novelist E.M. Forster
- American author Gore Vidal

Our spirit cannot travel as fast as our body. That’s how someone explained jet lag to me.

I just got back from San Francisco and my spirit is all over the place. Although I have been desperately trying to tie it to the cup of Ghirardelli coffee on my desk,  my mind keeps replaying many of the conversations I heard last week in California.

One bit keeps coming back again and again.

Sir Ken Robinson, the innovation expert, was talking at IABC’s conference about the ability of human beings to learn foreign languages.

His take is pretty much that if you don’t learn a foreign language at an early age, your chance to be able to do it in your 20s is slim.

What a sad and elitist view…

And this coming from an otherwise inspiring speaker.

If Sir Ken is right, this would mean that only those children who have the fortune to travel or live abroad or grow up in a multicultural household, will be able to speak other languages and function in a multicultural setting.

Luckily, this is not how the world of tomorrow is likely to turn out.

China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world. I believe not all the Chinese who are studying English today have learned it from their parents or by travelling abroad.

The ability to develop a passion for communicating with other cultures and learning foreign languages is not a prerogative of the more fortunate and has never been.

Take the example of Billy Wilder who grew up in Austria-Hungary speaking German, had to escape first to France and then to America in the 1930s, learned French and English in his 20s and went on to write the screenplay of what is considered an icon of American film making.

Thank God for “Some Like It Hot”!  

We communicators often end up upsetting somebody.

Whom  do you upset?

In my current job, I upset those people who think that using Web 2.0 to talk with employees and journalists is the equivalent of turning the comms function into the online version of Animal House (…. I would still like the Toga Party though).

In a job I had years ago, it happened when I was trying to convince management of the importance of treating CSR  as a core component of their message and not like a pet project.

Hearing Seth Godin speak at TED about the importance of challenging the status quo was immensely refreshing.

The earthquake in Abruzzi has brought back childhood memories.

Italy is crisscrossed by seismic lines. The earthquake of 1976, which destroyed several towns in the north-eastern region of Friuli, stands out clearly in my memory.

It was an early evening in May. It had been unseasonably warm. I was in bed reading to my mother a story I had just written. Out of the blue came a loud roar like an angry thunder and the house started shaking. Mother grabbed me and we ran out. The aftershocks continued for months. I once woke up in the early morning and the bed was moving.

I also remember my school collecting clothes for the survivors of the earthquake of the region around Naples in 1980.

It is memories like these that bring the human side of natural disasters home to us.

This morning, tired of the sterilised reporting on CNN, I began scanning the Facebook pages of my Italian friends for stories.

I stumbled into an incredible one.

Giampaolo Giuliani, an expert at the Gran Sasso national laboratory, had apparently warned the authorities a week before the earthquake about some seismic activity he had been detecting. He was denounced for spreading false news!

If you read Italian, it is worth checking out the comments on Dazebao about the incident.

They embody the power of social media… and make you think that the days of TV reporting, as we know it, are counted.

Photo: thanks to itn.co.uk

Barak Obama has really done it for us communicators.

I am talking about his social media campaign. In Europe these days, everybody wants it and everybody wants to be like him.

The interactive web was there before and change had started happening a long time ago. The enormous favour Obama has done to us is to awaken public consciousness to these new tools.

This was the subject of a talk I attended last night.

Obama’s wisdom has been to realise that the world had changed and to go for it.

Through his MyBarakObama.com site, he gave supporters the tools to take ownership of their part of the campaign. 27,000 groups were created on the site. These organised 50,000 events in the last 3 weeks of the campaign (100,000 were organised in total). Control of these events was left to the organisers and their communities.

The Obama campaign was present on YouTube with 14,500 hours. This corresponds to £ 32 million worth of TV spots!

People will be studying the social media side of the Obama phenomenon for many years to come.

But, the most interesting lesson for us communicators is the sense of connection that Obama was able to create through his online presence. This is what we have to able to create in our work.

We have to generate so much passion around an issue that people will want to spend several un-paid hours of their week to comment on it.

I heard something else last night that got me thinking: “where people hung out yesterday is not where they are going to hang out tomorrow”. It’s all part of the acceleration we are going through and it’s all so exciting.

I live in a country where people don’t always show their feelings. So every time I go to Italy, a wave of emotions hits me like a wall the moment I get off the plane.

You have to know that my family always thought of me as being too “German” (as in cold and reserved)…You get the picture!

The same emotional wave hit me again in Verona last week when I picked up the Italian issue of Vanity Fair.

It features an article dripping with anxiety and emotional pain over Facebook.

The author writes about her reluctance to surf Facebook for fear of seeing the profiles of the people who have hurt her most in life.

She lists a woman who was the love interest of someone she fancied in high school. And a French guy who kissed her one night years ago and did not even bother to say “hi” the next day.

I don’t know you…but I am extremely intrigued by the role that Facebook is playing is helping people get in touch with their past and process different experiences.

Since I blogged about my “reunion” with Melania, I have had people telling me stories about making peace with friends and relatives on Facebook after many years.

If you have a Facebook story packed with emotions…please write to me.

A friend of mine and I were discussing greed on the phone this morning.

We were saying how greed has failed big time at macro-level…. but at micro-level, it seems to be alive and kicking…that’s what my friend’s story was about.

I also have a greed story.

I got an email last week from someone I met at a function. It said that although he didn’t have time to read my blog…would I mind referring any clients to him…and also… would I know someone in the Middle East who could help him out with a project….

Seriously…!! Did he think this was really going to work?

Would someone please tell this function-hunting guy with a severe lack of social skills that we are living in the Web 2.0 era and the way you build social capital is by participating in other people’s interests and sharing….

You can see this happening every day in the conversations going on in LinkedIn groups. People are volunteering expertise and information that years ago they would have only been willing to sell.

Is the spirit of the interactive web going to kill greed for good?

If you are still having doubts about the world undergoing an acceleration, you need to watch this video.

It gave me goose bumps.

These are definitely exponential times.

As a former journalist, it blew my mind to find out that a week’s worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.

And did you know that if MySpace were a country, it would be the 5th largest in the world (between Indonesia and Brazil)?!?

Today is the first day of the Year of the Ox.

According to a message I got: “The Ox symbolises prosperity through diligence and hard work. President Obama was born under the sign of the Ox. The Chinese zodiac describes people who share the Ox sign as born leaders. They are steadfast and solid, patient and honest.”

From my friend Gina, I got a little video about Chinese wisdom. Check it out. I have never been happier to be a “cracked-pot” friend and family member!

Is the internet altering your sense of time?

I had an interesting conversation with Vassiliki this morning who is doing research at the University of Patras in Greece about communication ethics and the web.

As a child, I was obsessed with the concept of time.

Time felt so artificial and I was sure that it wasn’t real.

I even started writing a book about a group of people who had managed to live outside time. They lived in a big baroque villa on a cliff overlooking a stormy sea. The tile of the book was La Casa delle Bambole (the doll house). I never finished it. I showed it to someone who found it way too weird… and that was it.

Vassiliki and I were wondering whether a new type of time is surfacing and governing our interactions on the web… from how quickly we respond to comment on a blog to how often we update our mood on Facebook.

Is the fact that we are constantly in touch with people in other time zones expanding our perception of time?

Time to take up my childhood project again.

Photo: thanks to timerecorders.co.uk