By Elle OG
On Thursday, Hotwire’s annual Boot Camp took place in London. Each year we get our European offices together in one of the cities where we’re based (London, Madrid, Paris, Frankfurt and Milan) for two days of team building and getting to know one another a bit better.
This year the first day of Boot Camp was hosted by the Institute of Ideas to create our very own Battle of Ideas. Three sessions dealt with key issues around the theme of embracing innovation in an age of risk aversion, with speakers from across a range of industries giving us their opinions – and provoking some very interesting debates. As a technology-focused agency innovation is a topic close to our hearts as the response from the audience clearly demonstrated. 120 impassioned Hotwirers can spark quite a debate!
The three sessions of the day were risk aversion, surveillance society and the world at their fingertips.
The guest speakers for each session ranged from top bloggers (and I’m not just talking about our in-house talent) and industry authorities to clients like Tiscali and ipVA, each of whom offered their own perspective on their sessions. Rather than go into the detail of each one (although I’m more than happy to do so over a pint – I’m easy to find!) I wanted to highlight the one thing that stood out most for me during the day – the importance of the conversation itself.
It jumped most strongly into my mind when we talked about the impact of the internet on the next generation. The audience split instantly into parents and the childless and at first we stood on opposite sides of a fairly hefty divide. We talked about the importance of looking after our future, and how we can protect and educate children in the present without hiding them from the truths of the world that they’ll have to face one day or, equally, over-exposing them to too much information at too young an age. And in the end we came to a kind of agreement: whatever we do, we have to do it together.
This is just as true of the challenge of innovation. Some of the best ideas in the world may come from that eureka! moment in the bathtub, but there are far more that come from us working together and combining our different opinions and perspectives to knock down the barriers and find a new, better solution.
After all, if you don’t have that conversation, you’ve only got yourself to rely on for the answer. And nowhere is this more true than in PR, where the variety of people, opinions and ideas is what creates great work and award winning campaigns.
One of the issues that stood out to me from the ‘World at their fingertips’ debate was the difficulty that some parents have in deciding how to monitor their children’s internet access.
The problem being the internet is still a relatively new phenomenon. For kids today, the web isn’t anything new, it’s second nature and they have learnt about the internet’s increasingly capabilities as it has evolved. But their parents have not enjoyed such luxuries and have had to tackle the challenges the web throws at them head-on and more often than not, at the same time as their children. Online it has not been a case of parent teaches child – in fact, the opposite is often true. As the young become evermore web savvy and technically astute, the generation above is often one step behind, continuously playing to catch-up to uncover the new trends and crazes online – whether this be awareness of the latest social networking site, or more poignantly awareness of the risks associated with membership of these sites.
If we’re to protect children then one thing is clear, we all need to work together to find a way to educate them on safe ways of using the web.