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Let me start off by saying that I don’t do TV. And by that I mean I haven’t owned, watched or plugged one in, of my own volition, for nearly four years. Our executive producer has always found this somewhat at odds with our business practice, given that the pitch which I created and of which I shared delivery nearly 16 months ago, secured the rights to the holistic branding strategy and information design of an entirely new cross-media broadcast channel in South Africa, now known as VUZU. TV is dead. It was a sentiment to which I subscribed because I felt that the non-linearity and modularity of the Internet has fundamentally altered the landscape of media consumption and distribution. It was the sentiment I also happily shared as part of my pitch to a boardroom of goggle-eyed channel representatives who somehow were still convinced to sign us up after I said it. Our departure point with the channel design was to address a new generation of culturally mobile and techengrossed Africans – the Stunnerwearing, afro-bouffant sporting, popsicle-coloured street renegades – a movement which, as Bongani Madondo recently wrote, “is no movement at all, unbound by group dynamics and external pressure… [where] they don’t seem to share (or
need) a cultural stimulus”. With its planned cross-continental expansion, the cultural and technological (which these days can be freely interchanged with social) potential of the channel was highly significant. Design and technology, or rather technology-based communication systems, are heavily inter-related. Design is now employed, perhaps in its most important guise yet, by developers in the realm of personal digital communication. The success of an idea is often solely determined by the degree of adoption, and more importantly, its continued evolution by the users themselves. Forum discussions, opinion polls and other open-source collaborative processes are largely influencing the continual shaping of communication platforms such as Facebook and the various Google offerings, among others. Here, open source design takes effect in not only the structural architecture of such online products, but also in terms of administrative or legislative concerns – privacy rights and terms of use, more specifically. The adoption of open-source Linux systems by certain local governmental entities seems to indicate, if remotely, that traditional legislature might well, theoretically, go the same way. It fits with my similar