An interesting project – and might be just the thing to do with students on Monday morning!

From the 1000thingsthatmatter website:

We’ve been asked to make a short film about the future of telecoms, and we’ve come to a somewhat grand hypothesis:

If meaning is created through language then our society is created through its communications technology.

The words we use to describe our world change our experience of it. Similarly, the channels we use to access information, to meet and make friends, to share learning and memories and to debate the issues shape the society we live in.

Over the next few decades, environmental crisis, deficits in world energy and food supplies and the need to co-operate globally to address these complex challenges will generate pressures, successes and changes in every size of community. From the family to the neighbourhood, the city to the nation state and across unions of states, things will be different. The telecoms companies are not just observers on the sidelines of these changes. The communications technologies and channels provided to our citizens, businesses, scientists and community leaders shape the nature of the solutions to our emerging problems. The communications industry cannot wait out the crisis: they must be at the center of the solution. Our film encourages the decision makers to stop worrying about the question “what will people pay for this tomorrow” and instead ask “what will people care about tomorrow?” In short: Do Something that Matters.

We hope to gather a sample of 1000 things that matter. Things that matter enough that you want to tell us about them. The entries here will inform the film and some may directly be used within it – particularly those which are provided as video or images. The film will be distributed on DVD to the top people in the telecoms industry and may also be available on the internet.
The film is being funded by Accenture, but the editorial and content rests with us. We think that with economic models crumbling around them, business leaders and policy makers have never been more receptive to ideas about direction which don’t depend upon financial projections.