Fake it, until you make it!

For a generation of guitar and drum players, watching kids and young adults bouncing around with plastic guitars with big colored buttons should be depressing. The future of instrument playing is ruined, right? Well, it turns out that game play actually generates interest in the 'real thing.'

Research from one of Britain's largest music charities, Youth Music, has shown that up to ‘2.5 million children have picked up real guitars and drums after playing music-themed video games like guitar hero.’

The report conducted by Youth Music found that of the 12 million young people aged from 3 to 18, more than half played music games. A fifth of those gamers said that they now played an instrument after catching the musical bug from the games. So it appears that many of us start out faking it and then decide that we should have a go at the real thing.

So what might be the lesson here, when education is mixed with entertainment everyone wins. Capture my imagination and you capture me.

(Source: timesonline.co.uk)

Tweeting, broadcasting your inner voice

Reading tweets can be a little addictive. I am following 1,871 people on Twitter, the majority of whom I have really no idea who they are. I am surprised on a daily basis by the type of thoughts people freely tweet. While I imagine most tweeters use a 'thought filter,' out of the large group I am following there is a crowd who broadcast their inner voice obviously without any 'thought filter.'

At the outset I imagined Twitter as a great new communication service for friends to quickly communicate with each other, no longer any need to log into an email account and compose. Having been on twitter for some months, I am realizing that it seems to be much more of platform for people to express themselves freely. As ideas and thoughts float across people minds, their inner voice now has its own radio station. I am hoping that the same inner voice that manifested a thought might also ask you ' are you sure you want to broadcast this particular thought to the world, we might want to keep this one to ourselves.'