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The Internet Is Making Us Either Stupid or Smarter; Can’t Be Both

November 3rd, 2011 | 2 Comments

Is Internet Changing the Brain? - Oliver Stollmann
In scientific, sociological, economic and education circles debate continues about whether the world wide web damages people’s brains, or aids new thinking.

Controversy about the harmful effects on brains of excessive mobile/cell phone use, particularly by young people, has become polarised, without convincing evidence either way. A consensus may have formed about the harmful effects on impressionable minds of too much TV/video/game violence, again, as affecting youngsters especially, or the dangers of too much social isolation while on-line.

The jury is still out on the long-term harm of living near pylons, transmitters, masts or any of the paraphernalia of modern living in an information-driven, technological-biased world. Some people are beginning to think that the Internet may not be the solution to the world’s problems; in fact, it may be starting a whole new set of difficulties.

A Compelling Argument

Electronic gadgetry in general and the web in particular may be changing the make-up of people’s brains, with potentially disastrous consequences, according to Nicholas Carr, writing in the UK’s Daily Telegraph and talking to the BBC. His book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2010), claimed that ‘the web was depriving our mental faculties of the regular workouts they need’.

Carr posed the question originally in 2008: Is Google making us stupid? Asking the question, raising the very possibility that people, ‘while enjoying the net’s bounties, are sacrificing ability to read and think deeply. Since then, Google Instant has been launched: it searches before a user has finished typing; it thinks for him/her.

He considered the Internet’s ‘intellectual and cultural consequences’, explaining how human thought across centuries has been shaped by ‘tools of the mind’ (alphabet, maps, printing press, clocks. computers). He argued, citing historical and scientific evidence, that brains change in response to people’s experiences. The brain is a kind of information-process entity, shaped by what it processes.

The Internet ‘encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is the ethic of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption, and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection’.

Compelling Counter-Argument

An opposing view was put forward by Jonah Lehrer, (2010) contributing editor of Wired Magazine. In giving background to Carr’s study, he quoted Socrates lamenting the invention of books which ‘create forgetfulness’ in the soul; confirmed by those who felt the printing press didn’t help; and the speed of transmission by the telegraph triggering mental illness.

Lehrer conceded that everything changes the brain, but technologies are good for the mind. He reckoned the cognitive effects of video games improve performance, visual perception, memory and sustained attention. A 2009 study by University of California neuro-scientists found performing Google searches improved selective attention and deliberate analysis. In other words, Google is making people smarter. He concluded that ‘every technology comes with trade-offs’.

There is a viewpoint that hostility to technology and blaming it for everything is down to old people, who ‘never had such new-fangled ideas in their days’. This view is articulated by TechDirt, for example, illustrating the point with the fact that people buy phones with cameras, not in spite of poorer quality than more traditional cameras, though that is improving, but because they take and send photos to others in seconds, in the now, today manner.

Information Overload

Jim Pinto, writing on InTech, the magazine for automation technologies, applications and strategies, said in 2007: ‘technology is making us stupid’, and remarked how people use it as a crutch, not a tool, to avoid thinking. People are dependent on smart phones that calculate, find directions and auto-dial; notebooks, computers and text-alerts for simple calculations, basic memories of anniversaries and to-do-lists. ‘They are losing their brain power’.

He then went on to claim, nonetheless, that increased use of online banking, travel arrangements and shopping forced people to stretch memories beyond normal. People have to remember ‘passwords, pin numbers, license plates, security ID numbers and bank ATM numbers just to get through daily life. Six out of 10 people admit to “information overload.”

Most people confess to using the same password for all on-line activity, which is a potential security risk. The fact is that, like physical exercise for the body, the brain needs stimulating challenges. Puzzles and games are increasingly popular, particularly among the elderly, to help train brains and keep them in shape.

Andres Guadamuz, from Edinburgh, wrote on Technolama, in January 2009, that whenever some new technological invention comes along, somebody somewhere will claim it is harmful/detrimental to the mind/corrupting the young/dangerous to something. However, he drew the line at text-speak, which he said was detrimental to communication.

Web blogs, serious articles, reports from universities, research bodies and educational/media/sociological institutions litter the internet. Some go further: ‘does education make us stupid?’ Or, ‘does marijuana make us stupid?’ Or, ‘does writing/reading endless blogs dull the thinking?’ Or, ‘do lots of unanswerable questions overload our brains?’ Is there actually a limit on human capacity to compute?

First published on Suite 101, 17 September 2010.

Photo: Is Internet Changing the Brain? – Oliver Stollmann

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Sorry Seems to be the Hardest (Official) Word

October 29th, 2011 | 2 Comments

Gen. MacArthur Heard Japanese War Apology - US Navy
‘Mea Culpa’ is formal admission of personal fault or error. It’s medicine that often many public figures and their organisations find hard to swallow.

The chorus of Elton John/Bernie Taupin 1976 song Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word expresses a minority sentiment about personal apology. ‘It’s sad, so sad/It’s a sad, sad situation/And it’s getting more and more absurd/It’s sad, so sad/Why can’t we talk it over/Oh it seems to me/That sorry seems to be the hardest word’. Fair enough, individually; but corporately?

Biblically, ‘sins of the father afflict unto several generations’. Some references to generational sin/punishment appear contradictory, though. In Leviticus 26:39: ‘because of their fathers’ sins they will waste away’; yet in 2 Chronicles 25:4: ‘fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sins.”’

Sincerity and Insincerity

The maxim: ‘the secret of success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made’, though credited to many comedians, may belong to Jean Giraudoux, French writer (1882-1944). PR experts advise serious preparation for public apologies, because people, the media and victims immediately smell fakery.

Lisa Belkin of The New York Times, reported by Business Outlook gave a handful of 2010‘s public apologies. ‘General Stanley McChrystal, for criticising President Obama; British Petroleum Chief Executive, Tony Hayward, apologised for destruction caused by his company’s oil well; US Representative Joe Barton apologised to Hayward and then apologised for that apology. The Pope said sorry for pain caused to Irish parishioners by paedophile priests; UK Prime Minister David Cameron for the murder by British soldiers of Irish protesters on Bloody Sunday 38 years ago’. That’s without politicians, sportsmen/women and celebrities (Ashley Cole, UK footballer; Tiger Woods, US golfer) falling short of marriage vows, and Toyota ‘for not acting quickly enough to repair faulty systems’.

She quoted Dr Lazare’s book (Univ of Massachusetts) On Apology: ‘Apologies are the most profound of human interactions. When used well, words can heal humiliation by lifting anger and guilt, allowing splintered bonds to mend’. However, in practice, they can stoke the fires of anger.

Chief Executive Hayward said BP were sorry, but ‘it’s a complex accident, caused by an unprecedented combination of failures’. Belkin called this the ‘it isn’t our fault apology’, most favoured by officials. For years, British railway companies blamed poor/late services on things beyond their control, like exceptional frozen points; leaves, snow or animals on the line’. Not their fault, then.

When call centres keep people queueing because of ‘exceptionally heavy call volumes at this time’, people know they’re being fobbed off. Belkin referenced Jennifer Robbennolt, professor of law and psychology at University of Illinois, who called failed apology statements ‘nonapology apologies’, in which victims are neither asked for forgiveness nor given any chance to grant it.

Professor Robbennolt thought successful apology should express full regret and assume responsibility. Governments and businesses can offer legislation/plans to prevent future mishaps, disasters and injustices, but that may be cold comfort to bereaved, crippled, financially-hit victims.

Belkin reported Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, who apologised after a post-mortem showed a patient died from hospital error. Without the hospital contacting the family and admitting the mistake, they wouldn’t have known. Such action has ramifications in an age of litigation and a culture of lawsuit compensation, where everything must be somebody’s fault.

Blood from a Stone: Official Regrets

Sometimes only outcries of rage from voters, patients, parents or taxpayers force contrition. In September 2010, a debacle in the UK’s tax system was uncovered. Nearly 1.5 million people were under-taxed £2bn (an average of nearly £1500 apiece), while millions were owed refunds. The UK’s PAYE (Pay As You Earn) and powers Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs have to deduct from earnings, seize papers, enter homes that critics often liken to Big Brother, failed. HMRC is the same executive branch who lost 25 million personal files in November 2007, with little more than cursory regrets.

Dave Hartnett, HMRC boss, at first denied his department was at fault, saying he ‘wasn’t sure there was a need to apologise’. But after howls of pain and MPs accusing him of being arrogantly out of touch, he was forced into what The Sun lambasted as ‘humiliating climbdown’. He said: ‘I apologise if my remarks came across as insensitive’.

The reluctant apology was for upsetting taxpayers, not for incompetence or arrogance. The responsible Minister, Treasury Chief Secretary, Danny Alexander, added his ‘sorry”, but sacked none; nobody resigned.

Matthew Moore, in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, January 2009, said that data from 30 million files was lost in just two years by government departments, through lax data-handling rules. These included loss/abuse of memory sticks; disks lost in transit; faulty DNA records; no mandatory encryption and laptops left in public places. Apologies from responsible officials? None, to speak of.

Apologising for the Past

Should people born after the event, apologise for the past? In July 2008, US House of Representatives recognized in an apology: ‘fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity’ of slavery and segregationist Jim Crow laws. German leaders and governments over the years have apologised for aspects of both world wars and the Holocaust. Such occasions have initiated reparation; or merely opened old wounds.

At the end of war in the Far East, it’s believed Japanese Emperor Hirohito told US General MacArthur: “I come before you to offer myself to the judgment of the powers you represent, to bear sole responsibility for every political and military decision made and action taken by my people in the conduct of the war’. There are those who feel that was insufficient in word and deed (compensation).

Nowadays, the Japanese have ritualised apologising with appropriate submission, proportionate to guilt. It goes from a shallow bow for casual, everyday apology, to doge-umari, the ultimate/last straw grovel, making self as small/abject as possible in front of the offended party.

The New York Times in February 2010 reported how former UK Premier Tony Blair used appearances at Iraq war enquiries as ‘an apology for war left unspoken’. Subsequent publication of his memoirs, A Journey, reassured nobody wanting contrition. He believed he was right.

Public apologies raise questions: What’s the motive? Are people accountable for their predecessors? Is anything changed? Is heart-felt apology atonement enough?

First published on Suite 101, 15 September 2010.

Photo: Gen. MacArthur Heard Japanese War Apology – US Navy

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A Life in the Day of a British Member of Parliament

October 25th, 2011 | 1 Comment

Thousands Long to Be A Member of Parliament - Secretlondon
As maligned as tax collectors, traffic wardens, estate agents and the media, British MPs’ work and lifestyles are often misunderstood and underestimated.

Fuelled by media reports and frequent lapses of common sense, MPs are perceived by many as self-serving, egotistical riders of the gravy train/scrapers of the pork barrel, anxious only to secure re-election and submit expense claims. As many lost their seats in the 2010 general election and seek to build new livesoutside Westminster, there is little public sympathy for their plight.

Even some who were re-elected may have had their hopes and ambitions of office dashed by the resulting hung parliament and a coalition government. Again, most people faced with economic and other difficulties of their own are less bothered about MPs’ situations.

Local Issues and Work

An MP’s life is divided into separate, but overlapping, compartments. In the constituency, he/she is social worker, local celebrity, trouble-shooter, industry champion, arbitrator/conciliator between factions and universal spokesperson. All these roles most MPs combine quite happily.

Local authority matters are taken on; problems with the tax, social security, education, health, transport, housing and job aspects of people’s lives are grist to the mill of the Member. Sometimes a phone call or letter on House of Commons paper can work wonders in speaking plain language, can open Kafkaesque dead-ends of bureaucracy. A word in an ear, once back in Parliament, the old boys’ network can make a huge difference.

However, it is not a given. MPs from opposition parties may find it harder when tackling the government of the day or the party in control of town halls, but all MPs are supposed to be regarded equally. The power of local media is enormous, and all MPs toil to secure reasonable coverage of their work (and therefore, of themselves).

With Westminster taking up most of a regular week, constituency casework, constituents’ surgeries, visits to school, hospitals, factories/workplaces, the housebound and lobby groups are often crammed into Fridays, weekends and when the House is in recess.

National Issues and Westminster

Out of London MPs need some sort of accommodation, which has been the cause of public disgruntlement as abuses emerged. There are receptions, meetings with lobby groups, organisations and constituents to deal with, either just visiting or coming to lobby the Member on some issue.

Proposed legislation before the House is almost always contentious, especially if it’s likely to affect somebody adversely. Often, a government will drive through measures to solve some public outcry (like dangerous dogs, salmonella, gun outrages), but the consequences are unforeseen. The MP must take account of strongly-held feelings from interested citizens, and balance them with wider pictures about other people, government agendas, international obligations.

Sometimes, the climate of the time and the drive to ‘do something’ can become an unacceptable burden, like the growth of surveillance cameras in the UK, or how so many people can be criminalised by legislation, while serious crime is not addressed so heavily. Even the weather can become a political issue.

From time to time, MPs get involved in own-specialism issues, like education, social security, finance or defence. They can sit on Select Committees, participate in enquiries, interview witnesses, produce reports that shape debate. The future of schools and the regulation of Sunday trading or the designation of winter/summer timing are typically such matters.

All the time he/she is speaking in the chamber of the House, the required Parliamentary language and conventions must be learned quickly and then followed to the letter.

International Issues

The opportunity to travel is one aspect of the job most MPs relish; sometimes visits can be useful fact-finding exercises rather than jolly outings at public expense. The Member gathers expertise in a number of areas, and often contributes to discussion at home and abroad using knowledge gathered on such trips.

The UN designation of days, months, years is not an issue directly open, but enterprising MPs use them as pegs for visits, press releases and debates. The problems caused by consumerism and global tourism are examples of the kinds of issues on which MPs will form, and be expected to articulate, views.

A future war, energy or water shortage has such wide implications that the seriousness of the MP’s role is brought into sharp relief. Even sport has a political dimension, from the national game of football (soccer) to the Olympic Games themselves.

While English is the most spoken language on earth, one of the big adjustments MPs have to make, like others, is the difference between English and American-English as confusion is a cause of friction, which MPs need to avoid.

Family and Legacy

Each MP is conscious of conflicting demands of Westminster and family life, constituency divisions and need to think. Also, avoiding costly and ridiculous mistakes or saying/doing something stupid which will forever be played on TV and the internet, are priorities.

Many keep diaries to set the record straight, to publish their side of a period in office. Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers do this publicly; but rest assured, most MPs do something to ensure a legacy they are proud of, even if few others are.

First published on Suite 101, 14 September 2010.

Photo: Thousands Long to Be A Member of Parliament – Secretlondon

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Surrealism’s Enduring Contribution to 20th Century Arts

October 20th, 2011 | Add a Comment

Surrealist Dali: Mad On Many Accounts? - Roger Higgins
Surrealist artists, painters, poets, filmmakers and writers are no longer regarded as fringe lunatics; their work & legacy of ideas have become mainstream.

According to Surrealist.com, Surrealism is ‘a style of art and literature developed in the 20th century, stressing the subconscious or non-rational significance of imagery arrived at by the exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions’. It is also, in a sense, a search for life’s meaning.

It began, possibly, with Alfred Jarry publishing his play Ubu Roi (1896) in Paris. Its mix of absurd humour and obscenity caused mayhem. Surrealism was prominent in Europe between the world wars, growing from earlier ‘Dada’, which produced anti-art that deliberately defied reason. Surrealist.com quotes poet and critic André Breton (1896-1966), the ‘Pope of Surrealism’, who published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924: ‘Surrealism is a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in an absolute reality, a surreality’.

Freud’s psychoanalysis theories heavily influenced the movement’s philosophy. Breton saw the unconscious as ‘the wellspring of the imagination’ which could be attained by poets and painters. However, Freud himself dismissed Surrealists, except Dali, as ‘quite mad’.

Surrealism in Art

Many Surrealists made art and wrote across genre boundaries, such as: Andrea de Chirico (1809 – 1952), who studied piano, wrote poetry, published a book Hermafriodito (1918), wrote ballet music (Perseus 1924) and painted/designed ballets; while Wilhelm Freddie painted images of sexuality, revolt, war and then made films.

Whether Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) should be regarded as Surrealist, is debatable. Some people detect it in his 1920s’ works and 1935 poems. Picasso.com, a website dedicated to his life and work said: ‘Picasso was for a time saluted as a forerunner of Surrealism, but his intellectual approach was basically antithetical to the irrational aesthetic of Surrealist painters’.

Perhaps the world’s foremost Surrealist artist was Salvador Dali (1904-1989), regarded by many as genius, and others as mad. Both eccentric (the book, The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Salvador Dali, 2003, quoted him owning, ‘the Rights of the Man to His Own Madness’), and methodical, the Spaniard studied daily in Madrid’s Prado museum. A double-image technique, use of dreams and subconscious streams of memory/thought became hallmarks in such iconic works as the Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937). The Persistence of Memory (1931), The Burning Giraffe (1936) and Lobster Telephone (1936).

Fellow Spaniard Joan Miro (1893-1983) enjoyed painting success and became a promoter of Surrealist art. When he worked on designs for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe’s Romeo and Juliet, he was frowned upon by the movement. He collaborated with Max Ernst (1891-1976), another ‘founding father of Surrealism’ styled by surrealist.com. He was briefly married to Peggy Guggenheim, who opened UK and US galleries to exhibit Surrealist work.

Belgian-born Rene Magritte (1902-1967) joined Surrealist activities in France, developing a unique style: figures from the ordinary world in extraordinary order. Later in the 60s and beyond, some pop artists claimed him as inspiration. Engraver, writer and painter Paul Klee (1879-1940) is credited with creating pictorial abstraction, and his work was supported by Surrealists when exhibited in France, 1925. Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was a Swiss painter and sculptor; his work influenced Surrealist idea of ‘the object’ in art’, and he later got involved in existentialism.

Surrealism in Literature

The Columbia Encyclopedia 2008 said that the ancestry of Surrealism is traced back to ‘the French poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire and the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. Surrealist writers were interested in associations and implications of words rather than literal meanings’. The Encyclopedia cited leading surrealist writers like Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos and Jean Cocteau, who was famous for surreal movies.

Aragon wrote for Surrealism as it evolved, along with collages and plastic arts manifestos. Politically active as a Communist, he influenced emerging Surrealist text, as did Frenchman Benjamin Peret (1899-1959) a Communist, who wrote revolutionary, humorous, sacrilegious poetry and edited, La Revolution Surrealiste. Eugene Grindel, aka Paul Eluard (1895-1952) was also a Communist, poetry editor and frequent spokesman for Surrealism.

Jean or Hans Arp (1887-1966), painted, made wood reliefs and collages, wrote poetry and created sculpture. Aspects of his work blended Dadaism with Surrealism. A psychoanalytical approach to rational thinking justifying the movement’s theories came from Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962).

Other practitioners of note included Britain’s Leonora Carrington who published at least half a dozen books of stories, and there was a Czech and Slovak group, formed in 1934 and almost continuously active to the present day. They produced a great deal of surrealist literature, while founding member Vitezslav Nezval alone was responsible for over 80 books.

Surrealism on Stage

Equally multi-skilled was painter, poet, director, cinematist, theatre innovator assaulting audiences’ senses, Antonin Artaud (1896–1948). His ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, according to Gabriela Stoppelman in Artaud for Beginners (2000): ‘aspires to a theatre where language of physical movement and gesture could be applied on many psychological levels’.

Until he fell out with Surrealist ideals, he espoused the ideas. Despite/because of his illnesses, mental home incarcerations and drugs, his legacy is considerable in theatrical/performance theory. Study of his work is popular among students, and his playThe Spurt (or Jet) of Blood (1925) is classic surrealism, bringing dream, fantasy, semi-reality and unlikely juxtapositions together.

Surrealism on Film

His scenario for what became The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) led to the first surrealist film, about the erotic hallucinations of a priest lusting after the wife of a general, in a style described as ‘subverting the physical, surface image’. Artaud hated the film. The British Board of Film Censors reported it: ‘apparently meaningless, but if there is meaning, it is doubtless objectionable’.

Spaniard Luis Bunuel (1900-1983), best known as a filmmaker, active in Surrealism after 1925, wrote an Artaud-derivative script of shocking Freudian images in Un Chien Andalou (1929) with Dali. He developed a catalogue of movies that Surrealist.com calls: ‘deeply rooted in the surrealist concept of dream versus reality’: The Diary of a Chambermaid (1962), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1961) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974).

Hugo Ball (1886-1927), stage director who worked in Berlin, Munich and Zurich, said of his own surrealist group, Cabaret Voltaire: ‘ the aim is to remind the world that people of independent minds live for different ideals’.

All in all, whatever genre they worked in, the Surrealists broke new ground, albeit controversially, to plough a field that has benefitted artistic experimenters, convention-challengers and boundary-pushers to this day.

First published on Suite 101, 14 September 2010.

Photo: Surrealist Dali: Mad On Many Accounts? – Roger Higgins

Thanks to Bill Howe for information on Leonora Carrington and the Czech/Slovak group.

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Queueing is Not Rocket Science, But Formulae and Theories Abound

October 13th, 2011 | Add a Comment

More Cars Mean More Roads Mean More Cars - Shyaulis Andrjus
As patience gets shorter, life busier, queues longer, first-come-first-served may be reduced to a formula or theory. But what of human behaviour?

Science and technologyworking with the arts makes sense; even mathematics and the arts, is not totally unlikely. But it seems there are maths/scientific formulae or theories for everything, even the phenomenon of queueing. Queueing is not as strong as ‘waiting’, but is a recognised phenomenon.

Comedian George Mikes said, ‘An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.’ No longer, though, are the Brits/English the world’s best at queueing. The habit, often met with bemusement by nationalities with no concept of standing in line, evolved during World War 2 through food rationing. It became a hallmark of British civility: wait in orderly fashion in shops, bus stops, offices.

An August 2010 survey by European branch of Mystery Shopping Providers Association put researchers into 2000 different queues in 24 countries, and it was found that, on average, it took over 10 minutes to reach the front of the line, twice the amount of time that it took in 2008.

Post Offices (19 minutes) and banks (18 minutes) were worse. Clothes shops and bus stations had average waits of under four minutes. Sweden topped the poll with two minutes average. This poll followed Barclaycard’s which found 40% refusing to queue more than 2 minutes (down from 50% refusing 5 minutes in 2004), while 51% will not enter a shop if they see a queue.

Queueing is Inevitable

Disaster victims queuing for water and food is an all-too frequent sight, as cultural habits give way to necessity, and could worsen in future. In some cultures, queueing is as ingrained as it was in the UK. Russia averaged longest/slowest queues. The Bulgarian passport office had the longest waits in 2010: six hours to deal with 36 people.

This is not new. Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial (1925), had a scene where Joseph K accused of an undisclosed crime encountered people who waited, literally, years without hope, meaninglessly in a court.

The internet with more online shopping, banking, booking of events/holidays, means patience with physically queuing is evaporating. However, queues remain everywhere. Some shops respond by shifting checkout positions. Unmanned tills or queues blocking shopping aisles cause supermarket rage, fueled by unsteerable trolleys.

Disneyland and other theme parks have theorized that queues are disguised with twists and turns, corners and alleys, so nobody sees the end nor estimates their wait. Tickets sold to jump queues neither solve the problem nor enhance customer satisfaction.

Mathematics and Theory of Queueing

There is mathematical theory enabling analysis of related queue processes, like arriving at rear, waiting in middle and reaching service at the front. It’s applied to storage and manufacturing processes, telecommunications and retail/service industries and designs of their outlets.

Algorithms are drawn up to aid design. The relationship between congestion and delay is analysed to understand problems. The weight of numbers at supermarkets, airport check-ins, overloaded communication systems and human error/fatigue/failure to understand, all play their part in the problem. Creating solutions is practical matter, rather than theoretical.

As population grows, expectations rise, more of everything is needed/demanded. More check out staff, phone operators, retail servers, roads, buses and planes would, in theory, solve everything.

Traffic Jams

One cause of road halt is explained as one motorist carelessly changing lanes and setting up a chain reaction down lines of vehicles, all suddenly braking to avoid collisions, leading to stand-still. This is The Chaos and Non Linear Dynamics Theory, similar to The Domino Effect or Butterfly Theory, which argue that a small disturbance in one place causes an amplifying chain effect. All well and good, but theory doesn’t prevent ‘phantom jams’.

Another theory is that more roads, wider roads ease congestion. In the UK, a privately-owned toll road was built to bypass the M6‘s worst traffic holdups. However, it’s used little, through widespread resistance to the toll. Even traffic that does use it has not reduced M6 volume.

Patrick Thornton is a social media researcher, community and social media manager for RarePlanet. In his blog Endemic, he articulated (June 2010) an opposite view that building more roads to alleviate congestion only causes more congestion.

Thornton reports that the beltway around Washington DC is being made 8 lanes each side; while in Maryland, a light rail line is to mirror their beltway. His mantra is: ‘Car use begets more car use, which causes more congestion, more pollution, more road rage and less happy people’.

Movies like the Great American Traffic Jam (1980) and Falling Down (1993) among others cash in on how traffic and gridlock are part of daily life. This is The Hollywood Formula: people will queue to pay to see disaster, death, torture, and aliens, often with human frailties.

The problem is reflected to some extent in the skies. Queues of planes on takeoff runways are commonplace; all aircraft approaching airports cannot land at once. A holding pattern keeps planes moving within designated airspace. It’s a sky-born queue, in the layout of a racetrack, taking about 4 minutes to complete, with planes landing, one at a time from the bottom of the stack.

Call Center Queues

People chafe at being held in a phone queue to call centers. Automated responses, such as ‘Your call is important to us” (when it clearly isn’t) and ‘We’re experiencing extremely heavy call levels at this time’ (when are there not heavy call levels?) don’t mitigate frustration. Neither does music nor queue numbering.

Brad Cleveland, Call Center Magazine said that predictions of queue behaviour use a formula that takes random arrival into account. He said: ‘Running scenarios with a staffing calculator (simple software program) is a great way to learn about queue behavior and resource tradeoffs’. The variables he identified are: average talk time in seconds, number of calls per 30 minutes and service level objectives.

It’s formula/theory. It’s mathematics again. Human behaviour-by-numbers; experts pontificate. However, humanity is unpredictable, impatient, hungry, angry, frustrated and stubborn. When boffins get a perfect formula for dealing with those, the robots will have taken over.

First published on Suite 101, 11 September 2010.

Photo: More Cars Mean More Roads Mean More Cars – Shyaulis Andrjus

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Movie-Inspired Tourism is a Growth Industry

October 11th, 2011 | Comments Off on Movie-Inspired Tourism is a Growth Industry

New York: Tourist Center or Film Set? - William Warby
As film audiences demand more technology and thrills, they also want high-quality locations, which they may visit later as tourists, imagining being filmed.

Many communities enjoy economic benefit from film-production: spending on hotels, restaurants, food suppliers, location fees and visitor interest, especially when the movie is a hit. People still flock to see Washington DC buildings where All The President’s Men (1976) was made, as much for the movie connections as for their political value.

Universal Studios in California and Florida have built a lucrative business on real or recreated film sets, with both guided tours of movie lots and theme-park type rides inspired by popular films, such as the Back to the Future ride. Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride actually inspired the movie franchise of the same name.

With technology, it’s possible actors will eventually be replaced, but in the meantime, movie and tourism industries are intertwined. DVD releases, Special Edition/3D versions, Directors’ Cuts promote interest; internet streaming and merchandising enhance awareness. People like to feel connected to movies.

Tourism Enhanced By Films

Tourism is the planet’s biggest industry; a film location creates extra jobs funded by tourist money. People love to look at spectacles, from more traditional/untraditionalperformances to basic sightseeing, to rubber- necking accidents and disasters. This human need to share vicariously, is a financial opportunity for others.

Brecht’s 1941 play Mother Courage is about a woman dragging a cart during the 30 Years War across Europe, selling equipment to whichever side she came across, without favour. Oh What A Lovely War, the 1963 polemic against the futility of WW1, referred to arms manufacturers selling to both sides. Catch 22, (1961 novel,1970 film) had a similar premise. So, it’s not new that entrepreneurs grab marketing opportunities on the backs of movies.

London-based Locality agency maintains a directory ‘providing inspirational locations for feature films, television productions, commercials, photographic shoots and events’. On the strength of this corner of the movie business, a strand of the local economy takes advantage of people with peculiar, particular and often expensive demands. This is like shops, cafes, restaurants, hotels, entertainment outlets which exist purely to serve sightseers, families on beaches, campers in the countryside.

Women on the road is an online resource for women who love to travel alone: ‘If you’re a film buff, movie tourism is a great way to see the world – your way’. For a world film tour they suggest Harlem (American Gangster, 2007), across to London (Notting Hill, 1999), then Ireland, Cahir Castle (Braveheart, 1995). The hotels stayed in could themselves be part of the movie tourism circuit.

European Movie Tourism

Then to France, to The Louvre, Paris (Da Vinci Code, 2006); to Venice, Italy (The Talented Mr Ripley, 1999); Vienna, Austria (The Third Man, 1949); Prague, Czech Republic (The Bourne Identity, 2002); Matmata, Tunisia (Star Wars, 1977); Wadi Rum, Jordan (Lawrence of Arabia, 1962); The Nile, Egypt (Death on the Nile, 1978, 2004).

On to Shaba National Park, Kenya (Out of Africa, 1985); over to Russia, Moscow’s Red Square (From Russia With Love, 1963); to India (for almost any Bollywood movie); Tokyo, Japan (Lost in Translation, 2003); Koh Phi Phi, Thailand (The Beach, 2000); Sydney, Australia (Mission Impossible 2, 2000); Mt Egmont, New Zealand (Lord of the Rings, 2001-3); Buenos Aires, Argentina (Evita, 1996), and back to the States via Las Vegas (Oceans Twelve, 2004).

This isn’t exhaustive of movies, but might be of energy. Cities frequently have many movies to their credit. For example, Venice, Italy hosted Orson Welles’ Othello (1952); Senso (1954); Death in Venice (1971); Don’t Look Now (1973); Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You (1996); Blame It On the Bellboy (1995); The Comfort of Strangers (1991); The Story of Us (1999); William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (2004); and The Italian Job (2003). Do tourists visit Venice’s unique culture and history regardless of movie connection?

Locations Exploited by Films

There are companies who operate specialised movie-feature tours, such as Harry Potter Tours in England and Scotland; Star Wars Tour in Tunisia,; Sound of Music Tours in Salzburg, Austria; Sex and the City Tour in New York and James Bond Tours in London.

The Count of Monte Cristo promotes travel & adventure film tourism in Malta. Kindergarten Cop (1990) was shot in Astoria, Oregon, and filmmakers tidied up the school and gave work to locals, teachers and students. So, there was benefit for the inconvenience of being taken over by a film crew. This was an experience partly shared by residents of Kefalonia in Greece, when Captain Correli’s Mandolin was shot in 2001. Those who owned shops and businesses were paid to stay closed and do nothing!

Christopher Campbell, writing in March 2010 on Cinematical sparked debate about film location tourism, asking how many people went to Astoria, Oregon to ‘see the Goonies’s (1985) house or New York Katz’s Deli where Meg Ryan faked it in When Harry Met Sally (1989). How many vacation in New York because of how it looks in the opening montage of Manhattan (1978)?’

He wondered about movies’ potential to function as tourism ads. Do people visit New York thinking it’s a film set because of myriad of films, all or part-shot on its streets? King Kong (1933) tops the list with the world’s then tallest building; Miracle on 34th Street (1947); On the Waterfront (1954); An Affair to Remember (1957) which inspired Sleepless in Seattle (1993); Marilyn Monroe’s skirt-blowing scene in The Seven Year Itch (1955); West Side Story (1961); Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961); Midnight Cowboy (1969); The French Connection (1971); The Godfather (1972); Dog Day Afternoon (1975); Taxi Driver (1976); Saturday Night Fever (1977); Annie Hall (1977); The Wiz (1978); Fame (1980); Escape From New York (1981); The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984); Wall Street (1987); Big (1988) and apocalyptic Independence Day (1996), all place New York as the centre of both film and wider universe. Even Waterworld (1995) has an underwater glimpse.

Are people disappointed when they see the real scene? Are they more impressed by a landmark (like Stonehenge, Eiffel Tower, White House, Ayers’ Rock, the Alps) because it’s featured in a movie than for its own artistic, cultural, historical merits?

Campbell also asked: ‘Inversely, any movies made you NOT want to vacation somewhere? Has City of God (2002) turned you off Rio? Did Robocop (1987) keep you from Detroit? Has every film shot in LA made you avoid the place?’

Of course, it’s unanswerable. While movies are made, they have to shot somewhere. Somebody always benefits financially, and why not?

First published on Suite 101, 10 September 2010.

Photo: New York: Tourist Center or Film Set? – William Warby

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Street Art Either Vandalizes or Livens Up the Locality

October 5th, 2011 | Add a Comment

 

Bob Dylan As Street Art - 33mhz

Guerilla art, graffiti, flash-mobbing, tagging, defacing buildings are judgment terms describing both the phenomena and just how high temperatures can get.

Street art encompasses live, temporary performance theatre at one extreme, and semi-permanent drawings, cartoons, captions, slogans on walls, canal banks, buses and trains, at the other. It may be argued that posters on lampposts and hoardings are equally part of the total urban street environment, the street furniture that makes up what people accept as public streets.

Video installations and laser projections on landmark buildings, such as the Berlin Festival of Lights 2008/2009, can also be part of what is termed contemporary street art. In the main, however, people understand it is the unapproved appearance of something that may be funny, shocking, sarcastic, clever, compelling, ugly or disfiguring, according to viewpoint and taste.

The Philosophy Behind Street Art

Insofar as they speak publicly about their work, most street artists claim not to be changing the definition of artwork; they are simply communicating in an accessible, challenging (with so many CCTV cameras in cities), risky (on moving trains) and establishment-bashing ways. Frequently the works are socially or politically relevant, in the same way as political theatre. Only the genre is different. It is often amusing, satirical, mocking the authority of the locality or political correctness.

American street and multi-media artist John Fekner has almost become part of the establishment of accepted practitioners. He is asked to participate in special projects and site-specific installations. For example, in 1981 he was part of the Washington Project for the Arts, teams working directly in the streets.

His website is called Art of Trespass, and he has created hundreds of environmental, social, political and conceptual works consisting of stenciled words, symbols, dates and icons spray painted outdoors in the US, Sweden, Canada, England and Germany. His definition of street art is ‘any art on the street that’s not graffiti’.

The British street artis, known as ‘Banksy’, whose real identity is not absolutely confirmed, published Wall and Piece in 2006, and in it he, or somebody possibly speaking for him, said: ‘Despite what they say, graffiti is not the lowest form of art. Although you might have to creep about at night and lie to your mum, it’s actually one of the more honest art forms available’. He said there is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on the best walls a town has to offer and everybody can afford to see it. ‘A wall has always been the best place to publish your work’.

Banksy said people who run cities are only interested in things that make profit: ‘they say graffiti frightens people and is symbolic of the decline in society, but it’s only dangerous in the minds of politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers’.

The Subversion of Graffiti

He articulated a view that this art form is monopolised by the young, the frequently rebellious, those happy to emerge at night, hoods up, intent on making a statement on walls, tenements and subways. This interpretation is shared equally about adolescence in film or on stage.

Sometimes, terms like ‘subvertising’ and ‘adbusting’ are used to describe the activism that drives ‘culture jamming’, assumed to motivate street artists. In a sense, this is merely an updating of the counter-culture arts of the 1960s, favoured by today’s critics when they were young.

Many city police forces regard a young, hooded person in possession of aerosol paint cans and on the streets at night, to be doubtless intent on such vandalism. However, the art form utilises other media too. Stencilling is popular, and allows the same message to appear in a number of locations quickly, literally overnight. Stickers can achieve blanket coverage.

It has never been confined to open streets. Toilet walls have long been a repository for common wit, revolutionary comments, racial/sexual observation or meaningless cries for help. In 1967 Robert Reisner was moved to publish Graffiti: Selected Scrawls From Bathroom Walls, quoting Norman Mailer’s Cannibals and Christians as justification: ‘Some of the best prose in America is found on men’s-room walls’. ‘LSD= Love, Sex, Dreams’ is one typical of the period and that made a semi-political statement about drugs and the law.

The New York Police Department, in their August 2010 magazine Police Chief, called graffiti a ‘quality of life crime’ creating conditions that can challenge law enforcement. Besides the economic ramifications associated with removing graffiti, they see ‘an insidious perception of disorder and contempt for law that it leaves behind’. Their seven-step strategy to combat it focuses on enforcement, education and clean-up.

The Acceptance of Urban Street Art

Many urban street artists publish their work in books; Banksy is not alone. Some have achieved national/international recognition (like Jef Aerosol, BLU, Cartrain, Ces53, Dan Witz, D*Face, Swoon, Twist, 108, Ellis Gallagher, Tod Hanson and Neck Face) showing work in museums and galleries others (Richard Hambleton and AVANT, street-as-gallery movement) even developed careers in such institutions. Ash, Ron English, Mr Brainwash and WK Interact, for example, have either worked in graphics for companies or created their own brand merchandising.

David Robinson’s 1990 book Soho Walls: Beyond Graffiti documented how street art shifted from word-based graffiti to wider art forms in streets. 2008’s Street Art Exhibition at the UK’s Tate Modern Gallery was accompanied by Cedar Lewisohn’s book Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution, one of a number of recognized authoritative studies.

Banksy has the last word: ‘Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some become vandals because they want to make the world a better-looking place’. True or not, there is no denying that street art has now become mainstream.

First published on Suite 101, 8 September 2010.

Photo: Bob Dylan As Street Art – 33mhz

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All End of the World Predictions Proved Wrong, So Far

October 3rd, 2011 | Add a Comment

If Water Dries Up, Drought Follows - Tomas Castelazo

Major religions, sects or Hollywood prophesying Armageddon – the fact is that while no doomsday scenarios have been fulfilled yet, they could be in the end.

In the history of mankind, there have been thousands of predictions about the end of the world. Christians are not alone in believing that prophesied events (in Christianity’s case, the second coming of Jesus, the war of Armageddon, the birth of the antichrist, the Tribulation, the Rapture and horrific natural disasters will trigger TEOTWAWKI (‘The End of the World As We Know It’). However, to take just 2006 to demonstrate the point, according to Religious Tolerance, Ontario, there were 15 significant predictions; obviously none materialised.

They ranged from a major earthquake-storm in January, centred on Los Angeles; in May a comet remnant would cause a massive tsunami in the Atlantic; the wiping of Israel off the map on 22 August (a significant date in the Islamic calendar) and nuclear war beginning in September. There was also a feeling in some quarters that the date 06-06-06 would prove to be deeply significant. It didn’t.

Prediction Failure Can Still Mean Success

Often even basic weather forecasts are spectacularly wrong. In October 1987, Michael Fish, a forecaster employed by the UK’s Meteorological Office, presented the weather report on BBC TV, saying: ‘Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way… well, if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t. Within hours the worst storm to hit England since 1703 caused damage estimated at £1 billion and killed 18 people.

Fish was lambasted, and the “Michael Fish Effect” is now the unofficial description of forecasts which always take the worst possible outcome to avoid being caught out by events later. In fact, technically, he was right, according to the BBC later, he was referring to a cyclone in the west Atlantic. The controversy enabled him to earn a decent living in retirement in appearances.

Hollywood has been no slouch at cashing in on apocalyptic stories and ideas, some from real life events, some from the wilder reaches of science-fiction. Disasters, man-made and natural, have made the perfect movie template: ‘a small band of dysfunctional, culturally-diverse, incompatible people including an unlikely hero/heroine who saves the day, survives the initial shock, so they can re-establish life in a new world order’. They also give real scope for experimenting in particularly exciting technology and special effects.

Reality Is More Real Than Hollywood

Disasters that could happen are many, and often one is linked to another in a chain reaction. Drought is a real fear, even without global warming. Famine brought on by drought kills millions in the world already.

Sea level rises, changing weather or tidal flows cause floods with the resultant loss of life, food supplies now and future, power and shelter, which in turn lead to famine, diseases and pressures on non-flooded land and possibly hordes of refugees.

Tsunamis are potentially devastating wave trains caused in water by earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, explosions, and even the impact of cosmic bodies, such as meteorites. Hurricanes and tornadoes regularly unleash terrifying power and create further dangers like fire, flooding, accidents and loss of food/water.

Volcanoes and/or earthquakes, besides triggering tsunamis and seismic earth shifts, are themselves direct bringers of death (and famine; fire; explosions; pollution; illnesses; pressure/conflict on food, water, medicines, shelter; and floods of seas and rivers, again perhaps leading to tsunamis), in a vicious circle.

Global fire and/or increased desertification could follow weather changes, lack of water, agricultural practices, careless human behaviour. Man’s mishaps or even somebody’s crazy attempt to control others, could cause any number of disasters. Chemicals could escape, spreading pollution on a truly catastrophic scale. Bugs and insects, germs and parasites and new diseases could evolve beyond man’s capacity to control them.

It’s possible to imagine disastrous combinations, each compounding the next. Nanobots injected to cure cancers, go crazy. Food experiments, harvesting body parts, technology breaks down to the point of total, absolute gridlock. Cloning gets beyond sensibility; viruses escape; forgotten earth organisms and creatures fight back (rats, ants, termites), food scares/poisoning wipe out millions; wars over food and water break out in a spiral that leads to a nuclear, viral, scorched winter.

Water, Water Everywhere

Most doomsday scenarios are fit for Hollywood, as defined above. However, one truth is that they all can be exacerbated by insufficient drinking water. Water is the essence of life; people can survive longer without food than without water. The notion that it’s more valuable than anything else is well understood.

If people in water-rich lands are asked: ‘For Christmas, would you rather have free tickets to a game/concert by your favourite team/group, or a bottle of clean drinking water?’ they should find it shocking that so many people have no fresh drinking water, literally on tap. So, the lack of potable water across swathes of the globe may be the single biggest danger facing mankind.

Unless it’s terrorism as a threat to global structures, pollution on a scale that defies what is currently predicted, or simply that earth temperature does rise by six degrees and either the earth is submerged in ice-cap annihilation, or methane released from the seabed is ignited by lightning or man-made spark to unleash explosions greater than all the bombs on earth.

All this, without considering possible destruction from beyond earth: asteroids/metereorites or human debris from space, viruses, radiation, alien life forms/other intelligences or the supernatural. Whatever the threat that effectively ends the world, if it comes about, there will be a small band of dysfunctional, culturally-diverse, incompatible people including an unlikely hero/heroine who saves the day, survives the initial shock, so they can re-establish life in a new world order. Or is that just Hollywood?

Is it sensible to make any predictions at all?

First published on Suite 101, 5 September 2010.

Photo: If Water Dries Up, Drought Follows – Tomas Castelazo

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World Tourism and Power: The Paradox of the Biggest Job Creator

October 1st, 2011 | Comments Off on World Tourism and Power: The Paradox of the Biggest Job Creator

 

Tourists/Visitors Bring Jobs But Leave Footprints - Fritz Geller-Grimm
Global tourism employs millions, generates huge revenues, but like many of man’s solutions, including creating power, ends up potentially costing the earth.

According to shift happens, the world’s education systems are training young people for jobs that do not yet exist, to solve problems as yet unrecognised, as technology marches ever onwards, drawing on resources that are at best, finite. However, the world has to go as it is today, preparing for tomorrow as best it can .

Conservationist Mark Duchamp, pointed out that there are over 6 billion consumers currently on the planet, almost all of whom require large and regular supplies of food, water, energy. He believed more funds must switch into a hydrogen economy, more research done on renewable energies, there must be mass harnessing of solar and geo-thermal energies, higher taxes on energy-wasteful practices, more heat-power facilities.

What he believed the world doesn’t need is more nuclear power and more blots on landscapes caused by inefficient, unreliable wind-farms, that require other energies as backup, disfigure on/offshore horizons, endanger bird-life and don’t combat climate change. His view goes against the political consensus in most countries that supports and subsidises wind farming on an increasing scale.

The Tourism Blight

The fact is, that the world is consuming power at an insatiable rate, but the balance between acceptable and efficient, between affordable and environmentally sound is yet to be struck. Ironically, an industry that has grown around letting people rest, recuperate, explore the world and enjoy different climates, spaces and places is becoming part of the energy problem.

David Nicholson-Lord, writing in Resurgence Magazine, June 2002, acknowledges that estimates put tourism as the world’s biggest industry: in 1950 there were around 25 million international tourist visits. By 2020, it will be closer to 1.6 billion. The UN reckons that in 2009, international tourism generated US$852 billion in export earnings, a figure which is set to grow exponentially.

His thesis is that as it has grown, the destructive impact of it has become even greater than anybody could imagine: ‘along with television, tourism is one of the most potent agents of globalization, tourists are the shock troops of Western-style capitalism, distributing social and psychological viruses just as effectively as earlier colonists spread smallpox, measles and TB in their wake’.

The Paradoxes of Tourism

The UN designated 2002 International Year of Eco-Tourism, focussing on small-scale, nature based, environmentally friendly parts of the holiday industry. Nicholson-Lord pointed out in the absence of proper definition of the term, people simply cashed in on ‘green’ issues, such as a casino in Laos described as eco-tourism, because ‘it was sited in untouched countryside’.

Critics argue that eco-toursim as an alternative to mass tourism is not a clean path to development. No factories, but still despoliation to meet what Nicholson-Lord calls the demands of ‘Westernized appetites’. Revenue is not evenly spread in a local community, and while new jobs are created, they replace old ones in traditional industries like farming and fishing. The reach of the corporately-controlled global economy extends to previously undeveloped regions.

Another view of tourism which he believes is a paradox, is that the industry advertises large social benefits on the lines of ‘travel broadens the mind’ and incentives to world peace through different cultures intermingling. However, the reality is often that ‘tourism cruelly exposes the fault lines of economic inequality’, while draining resources, using power, polluting with long distance air travel.

People who seek localised or historical-cultural experiences/events, often turn them into performances. Historical authenticity gives way to homogenization, bite-size packages for the benefit of gaping, spending tourists rather than remaining celebrations of genuine history. At the same time, tourist footstep damage to ancient edifices like Egypt’s pyramids, Rome’s Colliseum or some Buddhist temples in Thailand raise concern about long-term survival of the attractions. Even hill-climbing and mountaineering wears out soil, causes litter pollution. As Nicholson-Lord said, ‘this industry devours its own resources’.

The Opposite View

There is another side to the debate about tourism, for instance, that tourist revenues in places like the Congo or Rwanda help support endangered species in their natural habitats. In the UK, Tourism Concern is a charitable campaigning group set up to ‘fight exploitation in tourism’. They say: ‘tourism generates huge wealth, and can be a force for good for millions living at destinations, but often they receive little’. They campaign to get money put into local pockets and give locals a voice: improving working conditions at holiday destinations, drawing attention to local injustices, like locals pushed off beaches, seas and land to make way for hotels and golf parks, and guaranteeing locals a share of resources like water.

Where these aims are realised and tourism is of a scale sufficient to avoid saturation , yet remain commercially viable, the benefits to local economies are tangible. Many communities across the world acknowledge they thrive on visitors; indeed, that they are communities only because of tourism in some form or another.

The World Travel Organization is a branch agency of the United Nations, serving as a global forum for tourism policy issues. Their aim is to promote development of responsible, sustainable and universally accessible tourism with focus on interests of developing countries.

They have a Global Code of Ethics for Tourism to maximize ‘positive economic, social and cultural effects of tourism and fully reap its benefits, while minimizing its negative social and environmental impacts’. It’s a worthy ambition, but can the whole world accept and implement a code of ethics?

The hard (political, cultural, economic) part is keeping everybody aware of what the biggest industry costs. One person’s vacation is another person’s job may be everybody’s environment, in the end.

First published on Suite 101, 1 September 2010.

Also published at Smart Travel Info, 3 March 2012.

Photo: Tourists/Visitors Bring Jobs But Leave Footprints – Fritz Geller-Grimm

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The Tyranny of Consumerism and Other Modern Ailments

September 29th, 2011 | Add a Comment

'Fashionrexia' is a Tyranny For Many - Alpha du centaure
People’s behaviour has long been conditioned by dictators, time, crowds, addictions. Now fashion, shopping and consumerism join the list of life’s traps.

Dictators have subjected/enslaved others for as long as humans have lived in tribes. The tyranny of crowd behaviour at sports, grabbing the latest must-have (like Cabbage Patch Dolls in 1978) or lynch-mob gladiatorial responses like at executions, is well documented.

The tyranny of the urgent is addressed by ACTS International from a Christian perspective, citing Ecclesiastes 3:1-8: ‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal … a time for war and a time for peace’, as the antidote.

Indeed, a number of spiritual leaders say they welcome economic crisis as an opportunity for people to reappraise the price humanity has paid for living with man-based priorities.

Political Tyrannies

Professor David Pion-Berlin, Professor of Political Science at the University of California Riverside ran a course called ‘Modern Tyrannies’. He said the 20th century was one of ‘political repression’, with more people dying at the hands of their own governments than from all wars in the previous 100 years. Governments that abuse power to inflict such suffering are styled tyrannies.

His course traced development of the nation state, war/nationalism/ideology and tyrannies across the political spectrum. He included Hitler’s Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Pinochet’s Chile, Videla’s Argentina and Duvalier’s Haiti. While barely scratching the surface of tyrannies in the political sense, it’s part of a current reconsideration of personal/individual freedom in a world facing new economic, climate, food, shelter, fuel and ideological meltdown.

Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (1994) by Daniel Chirot, a dictatorship sourcebook, described ideologically-driven tyrannies like those of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu, and tyrannies rooted in corruption, brutality and elite/minority concentration of power, such as Idi Amin’s Uganda, with what Publishers’ Weekly called ‘a volatile mix of angry and resentful nationalisms, economic misery and intellectual extremism: a disquieting and ominous road map of the last century’s political horrors’.

The Library Journal commented that the book discussed the ‘decline of East-West politics which has allowed closer scrutiny of the polities and their leaders who lived and sometimes profited in the shadow of the cold war’. Revisiting relatively recent history is not just an exercise in postmodernism, but is necessary to understand how tyrannies can be survived.

When fear of life of self and/or loved ones is the force, how many people can actually prevent tyranny taking hold? Can the political system devise sufficient safeguards? Democracies would say they do, but, for example, Hitler was elected to office.

The Tyranny of Security

Paul Joseph Watson writing on Prison Planet.com in February 2010 wondered whether much increased security levels in a democracy on ordinary US people didn’t jeopardise the Fourth Amendment. In just one example from Tampa, Florida, he used an ABN News report on how local police and security forces implement random searches at bus depots, as an example of how ‘airport tyranny is being rolled out onto the streets’.

He warned that bomb-sniffing dogs, pat-downs, metal detector wanding, gloved inspections of hand-carried bags are to be part of everyday life, as if almost everyone is a criminal. It’s called VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response), and since 2005 this ‘counter-terror’ surveillance has arrived at many mass transit facilities across the US.

Similar illustrations are appearing around the world. Continuous camera surveillance, recognition systems, internet and phone records, the holding of detailed data and body scanners are becoming everyday elements of living. Watson’s point is that authorities are likely to abuse such power over people, and harassing old people, children, the disabled and anybody who doesn’t ‘conform to the norm’ is getting out of hand. Few people argue against being alert to terrorist attacks on daily life, though.

Fashion, Consumption, Image

Charty Durrant, fashion editor and lecturer, wrote in 2009 in Resurgence Magazine: “adornment and embellishment through our clothes, jewellery and hair are natural and confirm humankind’s creative capacity’. She argued that some social injustices like sweatshops and child labour are still not addressed; the fashion industry personifies half a century of ‘unrestrained greed, a daily diet of advertising and rampant over-consumption’.

She said that people’s looks have never been so important and that human identity is defined by what one owns rather than who one is. People spend most leisure time and resources (even to the point of cultural neurosis) on shopping and reshaping their bodies, images, teeth, hair, faces, breasts. Celebrity-obsession and self-obsession she cited as illustrations of this point.

Miniskirts and psychedelic prints of the 1960s, ‘served as a cultural barometer’ as other styles have done in other periods. She claims that today’s designers look constantly backwards for inspiration and today’s catwalk size zero models reflect ‘the cultural distortion of our times’. Psychologists dealing with low self esteem, eating disorders, self-harm and body dysmorphia have coined the phrase ‘fashionrexic’ to describe heavily addicted style/image obsessives.

Durrant said ‘the consumer is now tyrannised by trends’. Television programmes about house, body and lifestyle improvements dominate schedules. The market is ‘saturated by choice’, yet shopping centres conform the world over; the internet and mass television ensure globalisation and fashion addiction by ever more people. ‘Modern fashion is made from many seemingly incompatible ingredients, but the cornerstones are built-in obsolescence, fear of humiliation, and sexual attraction’.

In his book Affluenza (2007), British psychologist Oliver James put forward the notion of a connection between some people’s increased wealth and others’ poverty; between the inequality of society and the unhappiness of citizens. The growth of high-demand top-end fashion items is testimony to that, and equally the ingenuity of the forgers and fakers who cash in on labels, selling ‘genuine fakes’ cheaply in a market where everyone wants to be unique. Just like everybody else.

First published on Suite 101, 30 August 2010.

Photo: ‘Fashionrexia’ is a Tyranny For Many – Alpha du centaure

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