Daisy on: Social Media

 

The recent release of JK Rowling’s first book for adults and opening of Emma Watson’s new film The Perks of Being a Wallflower have both been characterised by the media as a bid to move away from their past personas and become known for something else. We should be watching closely to see if they are successful: Those of us who grew up with Harry Potter, having been the first generation to publish our youth on the internet, now face a similar need to reinvent ourselves.

I’ve always thought that people not getting jobs on the basis of a misjudged Facebook status or ironic tweet was something of an urban myth, or at least exaggerated by the tabloids, but I now think I was naïve. Last week I heard of a large firm where their recruitment process had narrowed it down to two people with almost identical skills and experience. The director pulled up their Facebook profiles, saw a photo where one of them was holding a cigarette and went with the other candidate. Brutal.

… originally published on Ideas Mag! Click below to continue reading:

http://www.ideastap.com/ideasmag/all-articles/daisy-on-social-media

Daisy on: Carrie Bradshaw’s flat

 

Artist Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde has created a series of detailed floorplans of the living spaces that hold perhaps the biggest place in our collective imagination: the sets of TV sitcoms, including Friends, The Big Bang Theory and Sex and the City.

Not that I needed them: I could already find my way blindfolded toward Carrie’s writing desk, through the ridiculously large walk-in-wardrobe and into the seldom-seen kitchen containing the oven where she stores shoes. Not bad for a weekly newspaper columnist who must spend the majority of her pay cheque on clothes and cosmopolitans!

TV sitcoms, especially US ones with large studio audiences, are well known to stretch the truth with the size of their characters’ apartments. There’s Carrie of course, in her New York brownstone; Rachel, who works as a waitress and later at an entry-level job in fashion, yet manages to pay half the rent for the spacious loft apartment detailed by Lizarralde in all it’s palatial glory; and don’t even get me started on Penny from The Big Bang Theory – a waitress and mostly resting actress who apparently affords a huge and stylish one-bedroom flat all to herself.

 ….this was originally published on IdeasMag! Click on the link below to continue reading:

http://www.ideastap.com/ideasmag/all-articles/daisy-on-carries-flat

Daisy on: The rise of ‘FOMO’

It’s four am.

The hosts crashed out hours ago, in their own or other people’s bedrooms. The neighbours, placated or played-out, have stopped hammering half-heartedly on the wall. In the kitchen there remains two or three warm bottles of beer, the ice long since melted; a questionable foreign liqueur; several untouched bottles of Shloer… and me.

I suffer from serious fomo. For the uninitiated (which, until Sunday was me) that’s faux-ironic shorthand for “fear of missing out”. The feeling that you have to be present, that the one time you aren’t something amazing is bound to happen and then, hello regret!

…. originally published on Ideas Mag! Click below to continue reading:

http://www.ideastap.com/ideasmag/all-articles/daisy-on-the-fear-of-missing-out