Explore NZ Perspectives Online
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This document contains short quotes from various New Zealanders on a wide range of topics such as experimentation, censorship, celebrity, education, passion, sexism, teamwork, bravery, progress, journalism, freedom, and more. Each quote is attributed to the person who said it and identifies their occupation or background. The quotes offer insights but do not have a clear connection between them or an overall cohesive theme.
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Explore NZ Perspectives Online
- 1. New Zealanders Explain the Internet
- 2. BUT FIRST: “I need your WIFI password to Skpye with my dad.” —Jesus H. Christ (raconteur)
- 3. ON EXPERIMENTATION: “I mean, the general rule is if you're not prepared to make a mistake, you're not going to make much progress.” —Maurice Wilkins (physicist & biologist)
- 4. ON CENSORSHIP: “For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.” —Janet Frame (author)
- 5. ON HOAXES: “I wish I had Wonder Woman's magic lasso like her to make people tell the truth.” —Kylie Bax (model & actress)
- 6. ON GEEK CULTURE: “To me, Darth Vader is the epitome of evil.” —Manu Bennett (actor)
- 7. ON AMERICAN EXPORTS: “Tell people you're a Canadian or a Kiwi when you travel and they'll adore you.” —Daniel Gillies (actor)
- 8. ON DIGITAL DIETS: “It's just a matter of understanding what's necessary and discipline yourself to do it.” —Arthur Lydiard (runner & coach)
- 9. ON ACTIVISM: “The quest for peace begins in the home, in the school and in the workplace.” —Silvia Cartwright (former Governor-General)
- 10. ON PUBLISHING: “A lot of writing's going down dead ends that don't go anywhere.” —Andrew Dominik (director & screenwriter)
- 11. ON CELEBRITY: “People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.” —Edmund Hillary (explorer)
- 12. ON FINDING YOUR TRIBE: “I was a kid who didn't have a lot of self-esteem.” —Melanie Lynskey (actress)
- 13. ON ANONYMITY: “I was able to grow up and do silly things and have a life with only a small amount of public scrutiny.” —Keisha Castle-Hughes (actress)
- 14. ON NARRATIVES: “Writing is a passion I have never understood, yet a storyteller is all I have ever wanted to be.” —Ruth Park (author)
- 15. ON INSPIRATION: “I, personally, have found reading a continual support to writing.” —Margaret Mahy (author)
- 16. ON PASSION: “Love has the quality of informing almost everything - even one's work.” —Sylvia Ashton-Warner (writer, poet & educator)
- 17. ON SEXISM: “I'm a writer first and a woman after.” —Katherine Mansfield (modernist writer)
- 18. ON ONLINE DATING: “It makes it very exciting don't you think to live in an age of, of discovery of human personality this way?” —John Money (sexologist & author)
- 19. ON CHANGE: “Happiness comes from... Some curious adjustment to life.” —Hugh Walpole (novelist)
- 20. ON CHALLENGES: “That's always an interesting concept when you try to make your dream into a reality and you come up against the facts of exactly what it is you're attempting to do.” —Karl Urban (actor)
- 21. ON GETTING PAID: “Personally, I've never done things just for money.” —Glenn Turner (cricketer)
- 22. ON COMMENT THREADS; “Treat everyone the same until you find out they're an idiot.” —Lucy Lawless (actress & activist)
- 23. ON TEAMWORK: “Collaboration is the best way to work. It's the only way to work, really. Everyone's there because they have a set of skills to offer across the board.” —Antony Starr (actor)
- 24. ON MODERATING: “Peace is a fragile thing. It takes courage to secure it. It takes wisdom to maintain it.” —Jenny Shipley (former Prime Minister)
- 25. ON SEARCH: “This sounds an extraordinary statement to make, but in fact all truth is very ordinary.’ —Brian Perkins (broadcaster)
- 26. ON FREELANCING: “Sometimes I think, 'Oh, I wish I just had a nice job where you're getting a salary.' Just sometimes.” —Temuera Morrison (actor)
- 27. ON BRAVERY: “How do I take a step? How do I lift my foot off the ground, move it through the air a little bit and then bring it down? I had to teach myself to walk again.” —Jonah Lomu (rugby player)
- 28. ON SELFIES: “All you need is a bad angle and suddenly you're 30 pounds overweight.” —Rachel Hunter (model & actress)
- 29. ON EDUCATION: “You get what you're good enough to take.” —David Kirk (rugby player)
- 30. ON HATERS: “I was bullied and regarded as little bit of an oddball myself.” —Peter Jackson (Groundskeeper, Middle Earth)
- 31. ON PROGRESS: “A huge change has taken place in my lifetime.” —Michael King (historian)
- 32. ON CONTENT: “People are consuming more than ever, but I think they want a bit of honesty and depth.” —Kimbra (recording artist)
- 33. ON CONNECTIVITY: “The world, whether we like it or not, will become more and more borderless.” —John Key (Prime Minister)
- 34. ON OPPORTUNITY: “I always thought I'd go to university and then get a real job, you know. Now I want to do stuff that really makes me happy.” —Martin Henderson (actor)
- 35. ON JOURNALISM: “With any good story, you need the adversary, the heroes and villains. You need a good mixture to make it work.” —Phil Keoghan (television personality)
- 36. ON FREEDOM: “I'm completely in charge of my own life now. Sometimes there's no one there to slap me on the hand and say: 'Stop being so bullish and bossy,' and things like that.” —Kiri Te Kanawa (opera singer)
- 37. ON MANUFACTURED OUTRAGE: “We used to say that he who threw the biggest tantrum won the day.” —Neil Finn (recording artist)
- 38. ON CURIOSITY: “A good education should leave much to be desired.” —Alan Gregg (musician)
- 39. ON CAT VIDEOS: “Dumbing down takes many forms: art that is good for you, museums that flatter you, universities that increase your self-esteem. Culture, after all, is really about you.” —Denis Dutton (philosopher & web entrepreneur)
- 40. ON BLATHERING: “Business can talk itself into a blue funk.” —Helen Clark (former Prime Minister)
Editor's Notes
- I wondered, when I was first invited here, what I should talk about. Well, I’m a cartoonist, so I should cartoon something. Right? Well, how about the internet? I mean, this is a conference about just that very thing! But It’s such a big topic. So many layers—it’s a giant digital onion. Hmm. Anyway, I ended up setting up you New Zealanders to explain the internet, in your own words. It’ll be rapid fire, and rather tangental—as if I were the voice in your head while you surf around online.
- But before I go any further: I must issue a disclaimer. The internet is great at taking quotes out of context, misattributing them, and turning them into social objects that render the original commentary utterly irrelevant to the reader. It’s often amazing and frequently annoying, but it’s rarely done maliciously. And so today I’ll carry on that tradition of taking things entirely out of context and using them for my own, narratively motivated ends. And now that THAT’S out of the way—
- Not sure if your idea has merit? Throw it up online and see if anybody shares it, agrees with it, hates it, or loves it. Repeat until something sticks and gets some momentum behind it. This is “why the hell not” method works for everybody from tech start-ups to artists. And with the cost of trying ideas out is so deliciously low, and the possible rewards are astronomically high, the internet is a great place to try just about anything. Try anything—don’t censor your ideas. Which brings us to the next quote—
- The internet is fast becoming less of a free and open platform and more of a regulated medium. Online privacy is pretty much a thing of the past. Big business is deciding what we can find through search, and our feeds are edited by advertising algorythims. And, of course, it’s all being spun that it’s for our own good. For our own safety. And perhaps the most Orwellian, ‘to optimize our experience.’ It’s frightening stuff. And it’s real. Unlike a lot of OTHER things online—
- If it’s not creepy pasta—the urban legends of the internet, then it’s faked blooper reels, fictional girlfriends from Canada, phishing scams, link-bait headlines, or a “current” photo that’s decades old. As the saying goes, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog—but nowadays, we all suspect every story has a few fleas anyway. And if you aren’t harboring any fleas of deception, you probably have some other embarrassing, geeky thing going on. And that’s cool—
- Because things that were nerdy and geeky and previously niche are now recognized and accessible for everybody. Geekery is has transformed from the realm of perpetual virgins into something cool, somehow. This is the interent’s doing. The popular kids have taken over the geek spaces, and the geeks are surprised, horrified, flattered, and confused by the gentrification of their favorite things. But nothing, and nobody, stays in one spot for long anymore—
- When I was living in London, I heard someone say the word NEBRASKA from roughly two blocks away. Amazingly, he wasn’t yelling. He was just being an American abroad. Americans tend to be loud and bossy presumptuous, and our loud and bossy and presumptuous culture, oddly enough, is our biggest export. Thankfully, time zones mean that at least for a few hours a day, the internet is mostly free of us, and there’s much less yelling in all caps. And speaking of spending time offline—
- How many times do we refresh our feeds in an hour? Check statuses? Inboxes? Notifications? Too many times. When it comes to media consumptions, less is more, I think, because most of what we read and see and subscribe to is addictive, digital junk food. It’s digital crack we all consume in vast quantities. Weaning ourselves form our blue screens is difficult, but it’s amazing what you can learn when you unplug for a while. The real world needs you as much as your digital one does.
- Which brings us to the idea of activism. Is it enough to grant a microfinance loan of twenty five to a woman half a world away? To click like? To text a few bucks every time there’s a newsworthy disaster? What does it mean to be an online activist? I like this quote because it answers those questions—it says to do your good deeds in the real world, where they’re needed most. But not all needs are desperate—sometimes, people just need a little poetry.
- So let’s talk publishing. There are eleventy gazillion blogs and twitter accounts and facebook timelines and linkedin profiles and abandoned homepages out there. And most of them are only read by the person who wrote them. The internet is a blank sheet of paper, an block of uncut marble, a clean slate. We can all write whatever we want practically anywhere we want—and even if no one reads it, the exercise enriches us. Quality and fame aren’t always linked anyway—
- What is extraordinary anymore? Summiting Everest? Getting 20 million hits? The most memorable people online aren’t the ones who wanted to “get famous” they’re the ones who wanted to make something, do something, share something. Online, there’s room for all types of famous—from nerdy to sexy and from brilliant to jaw-droppingly stupid. But the lasting fame, the historical kind, belongs to the doers, not the wannabes. And online, fame can be macro, and it can be micro—
- And anymore, micro is where people are finding themselves, and their tribes. Alone? Depressed? Trapped in a room but nothing but your virginity and an internet connection? The internet can help! Love little kittens and want to snuggle them all? There are many places for you! Hate little kittens and want to on stomp them? Fewer places, but still, even kitten stompers have a tribe! Whatever it is you love, hate, wonder about, or feel, there is a place for you online.
- But are there any places left to hide? In one big and scary and brand new way, it sucks to be young today. Practically every action they take goes on their permanent record. And by permanent record, I mean Google. I cannot imagine having instagram in college. I never would have gotten any sort of respectable job. Nobody I know would have. Maybe that’s why sketchbooks are so trendy lately. Analog = privacy. But what stories are we putting into our pages?
- The internet is being written in visual, verbal, auditory, and coded languages. You don’t have to be a wordsmith to tell a story. You don’t have to write a 100,000 word novel to be a published author anymore—you can tell a story with an image, or a currated collection of them. It’s the not format of the work, it’s the story it tells. You can even tell a life story in a tweet, like the famous line “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” And inspiration comes in so very many forms—
- Almost every brilliant, fun, helpful, wonderful person, living and dead, is just a click or so away from you at all times. AT ALL TIMES! Everyone you admire (or their work, at least) is right there to inspire you. And when you’ve got the world in your pocket, writer’s block can be vanquished with a quick sip from the information fire-hose. Just don’t get stuck wandering around in amazement, or you’ll never get your work done. Still, to get anything done, you still need—
- Passion. And lots of it. You may not be enthralled with the administrative tasks, but if those chores support your wild ideas, it’s worthwhile drudgery. You may not be overly enthusiastic about your desk job, but if it makes spending evenings with happy, well-fed children possible, the job takes on a new meaning. The internet connects us not only to each other, but to our motivations, and that’s encouraging. But you know what’s the opposite of encouraging?
- This is the oppoiste of encouraging. I’m dismissed, argued with, scolded, and invited to molest angry strangers on a regular basis online. Gross. But all I can do is delete the garbage and keep working, and encourage other lady people to do the same. Every woman on the internet knows what I’m talking about, and every man on the internet needs get used to us, because we are not getting offline to go and make you a god damn sandwich. Not to say that the sexes are in total opposition online—
- You can now, for the first time in human history, carefully choreograph your first romantic impressions. You can tweak your profile to sound like the fascinating creature you wish you were, instead of the lumbering dork you are. You can photoshop away blemishes. Meet thousands of people you never would have otherwise, and even fall in love. It’s a new world out there. And not sut for people looking to hook up.
- Nothing online is ever the same, moment to moment. From fashions to business models, the cycles are spinning faster and faster and it’s a job in and of itself to keep up. When we can get comfortable with the page of change, and adopt a rather Buddhist mindset to our work and our place in the world, we can surf the Zeitgeist instead of getting pummeled by constantly crashing waves of information and technology. And that is so much easier said than done.
- A thousand tiny adjustments are needed to navigate to pretty much anywhere—those aren’t mistakes, they’re adjustments to challenges. That’s bending instead of snapping. I have seen a lot of angry people explain why they gave up on an idea, and heard a lot of successful people explain how they changed their idea to work. That’s not failing fast, that’s just paying attention. Now, paying attention is one thing. Paying the bills is something else entirely.
- Why do we create? Why do we share what we make? The internet is showing us that art for arts sake is still a valid human motivation, and that while we sometimes have to work for money, we build for something greater, and a lot of times, the money does follow the motivation. So much skill and time and talent is out there—now, to get the guys with the checkbooks to see it. But for every payday, there are weeks of people bitching.
- The expectation online is that everyone is opinionated, set in their ways, belligerent, judgmental, and tedious. That’s because those voices are the loudest, not because they’re the majority. Subtly and nuance and thoughtfulness tend to get lost in the shouting matches. So listen for the quiet grey ideas between the loud black and white arguments. I think there’s a lot we can learn by tuning out the bores. And by looking for collaborators instead of trading barbs.
- There is a huge difference between a bunch of people assigned to a project and a group of people who came together from all corners of the world to make something happen. One is forced and awkward, the other feels natural and healthy. The internet facilitates this sort of lovely serendipitous collaboration. So share contact information freely today—speed up the digital cross-pollination. And while we’re on the subject of rewarding collaborative experiences—
- Let’s talk about moderation. There is no limit to the horrible things that can be said to strangers across the screen. And while a lot of terrible things can and do happen online, it’s amazing to me that most discourse isn’t horrible. Isn’t disgusting. Isn’t cruel. For every headline about bullying, there are thousands of friendships made online. I like to think people are good. And I hope we can even better. But we have to seek out knowledge, not just information.
- How to spell a word? What is the main ingredient in Nutella? Show me a map of the north pole. Where is my package in transit? What’s my bank balance? Google can tell you in a split second, and suddenly, knowledge feels cheap and instantly forgetable. The real discoveries continue to be the things we discover on our own. The answers google can’t find: like, What does it feel like to kiss him? And, What does home smell like at dawn on Christmas morning? And sometimes, how can I find my next gig—
- Which brings us to the land of the the funemployed. I work for myself, and for dozens of clients at once. Lots of deadlines. Lots of chores. Lots of puzzles to solve. Sometimes it’s scary, but mostly, it’s energizing. I get to come to events like this and think about so many things—and not once, not ever, do I have to listen to a boss tell me how one day, if I behave myself and work hard and pay lots and lots of dues, I can be as pathetic and miserable as he is. So on one hand, it’s easy, and on the other hand, it’s brave.
- And bravery is mandatory, not just for freelancers, but for anyone working in pixlels. Sometimes it’s hard to hit send. It takes bravery to ship. It takes gumption to reach out across the digital chasm and connect with a stranger. It’s daunting to look at a massive project and not feel small in its shadow. And the only way, as they say, to eat an entire elephant is one bite at a time. Being online is being brave, working there takes serious mental effort. Thank god we don’t have to go it completely alone—
- We’re always performing online. Selfies are portraits painted for an audience. Want to take a really good one? Think of the person you love most in the world, who motivates you to lurch out of bed every morning, the person who loves you just as you are, in spite of yourself. Snap what that memory does to your face, and, if you want to, end it to them with a note of thanks. Because you are never just yourself, who you love is a big part of you, and it shows on your face.
- Another way to get your eyes to light up is to learn a new trick. We can learn practically anything online. Lectures by great professors. Wisdom of the ancients. Information is flooding over us, all the time. Advanced calculus? You can find your way to mastering it, even if you dropped out in the ninth grade. Do we get grades for this learning? Credit for the courses we choose? Not in the forms we did in school, but knowledge always has a way of paying off—remember, geeks are cool now.
- No matter what you do, someone will hate it. Someone will rant against it. Or worse, dismiss it without a second thought. No matter how you look, someone will find you repulsive, ghastly, undesirable. No matter how you behave, someone will think you’re a horrible person. No matter what, don’t reply to these people. Just remember, when you get on stage to accept your wards, they’ll be watching, and fuming. That’s more than enough revenge. And it’s the only way to accomplish anything.
- But is all progress, well, good? Science may find the cure for cancer, but it also helped us build the nuclear bomb. I read a theory that the only reason alien beings (bear with me here) haven’t contacted us is because by the time a species can communicate beyond its own planet, it’s figured out how to destroy itself, and it has. Bummer. So yes, progress is happening, a lot of it digital, and it is up to us collectively to decide what that means. What we make today makes tomorrow.
- And we are making tons and tons of content. I’m going to read you meta-headline you’ll probably recognize:, Inside this simple package are 50 heartwarming ways to solve your all worries with simple life-hacks using household objects, and you won’t believe what happens next, Yeah. We all want content that’s deep and real and powerful—but good luck finding it out there amid the click bait. We want so much more than listicles. We really do want depth.
- And we’re finding purpose by actively aligning with others, and not just the people we know—we’re making friends everywhere. Arab Spring. Alibaba. Google translate. Imports and exports sometimes feel like quaint ideas when we can practically Skpye with anyone practically anywhere. At least most of the Americans go to bed for a few hours a day—otherwise, this borderless stuff would be completely insufferable.
- But connection is opportunity—The internet makes our career paths a lot more circuitous, a lot more interesting, and a lot more fun—because we can more easily see that there are more options than nurse, teacher, or housewife (if you’re a feminine) and tough guy or tougher guy (if you’re a masculine). We can see so many people doing so many awesome things—we have virtual mentors we’ve never met, but their examples guide us nonetheless. Instead of excuses, we want to make headlines.
- Even if instead of 15 minutes of fame, we get 15 seconds on a good day. With our limited attention spans and insatiable desire for news, history is quickly becoming a disposable commodity. Monumental news is forgotten within days. Journalism has never felt more like reality television.The heroes, villains, and plot points—no matter how artfully their characters are drawn and the stories told, and all feel like bit players in our newsfeeds.
- So we have to make our stories, and our characters, even more compelling, even more interesting, than ever before. Who do you want to be online? You can be bigger than your job descriptions. Bigger than your hometown. Smarter than your school transcripts. Kinder than your arrest record. You can be brilliant. Amazing. Iconic. Pivotal. Then again, you can also be a complete asshole, but the choice is always yours.
- And speaking of assholes, behind every innocuous opinion is a mob of easily offended netizens. Remember, just because the angry voices are the loudest, does not mean they speak for all us, nor should they stifle the real, useful conversations. Try not to dismiss prickly topics just because they don’t fit into a politically correct linguistic format. Less knee-jerk rage. More healthy curiosity. Because if there’s one thing we could definitely us emore of, it’s healthy curiosity—
- One of the wonderful features of life online is that you can slip down a rabbit hole of information. An hour of Wikipedia hopscotch can illuminate and educate, taking you into areas of information you’d never considered before. When you allow yourself to be curious, you never know who, or what, you might find online. Most of it is wonderful, some of it is disheartening, but all of it is interesting. And some of it is sickeningly, disturbingly ADORABLE.
- Yep. It’s time to discuss cute shit. You can find enough diversion online to spend your entire life not thinking, just absorbing, not doing, just viewing. When you’re not thinking about anything serious, you’re not dangerous. You’re not changing the world. You’re a non-threatening opiated member of the mob. But the cats will still be here for us, after we break some things and do some work, and earn our playtime. Don’t let the cats eat up all of your time.
- And, speaking of time, on this quote, I think I’ll call this business done for the day. We’ve covered plenty of ground. And I hope you had as much fun as I did. Thank you for all your helpful words, New Zealand.