Monthly Archives: November 2011

Rules of Engagement

11/29/2011 By in Press & Media Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Until quite recently the number of friends you had on Facebook really mattered. Friendship was a numbers game and anything less than a hundred confirmed you were of a lowly social status and resoundingly unpopular. In order to seem normal then tagged pictures of you drinking Mojitos with friends were vitally important. Going to see a band with friends or a house warming party must be a public event or otherwise people will think you’re loser that never goes out. Friends are social points and likewise so are the stock greetings you receive on your birthday, which are especially poignant coming from the friends you unsubscribed from three years ago.

In bars, clubs and parties people exchange Facebook details as a user friendly alternative to calling someone. With a new media landscape comes a new set of rules and social etiquette now involves protecting your internet history. Adding a date on Facebook is a potentially ruinous move. Sexy pictures of former partners, neurotic status updates and flirty comments will be revealed to a virgin pair of eyes. Becoming friends online will inevitably ensure you go too far, too fast and if things do go awry you will be a humiliating click away from the recycle bin. A six month probation period is essential before you can even consider adding a new partner on Facebook.

Since people are growing sick of sharing their most intimate thoughts with idiots they never liked in the first place. Private circles are now becoming increasingly attractive. On realising that you don’t want Jakers, Spanner and the pregnant girl from school following you anymore – social media is gradually becoming more nuanced and exclusive. Rules are therefore required. With Facebook becoming increasingly unpopular, alternative forms of social networking are slowly taking its place. Agenda setting and forming part of the national conversation, Twitter first began as a smug past time for media savvy professionals in London but has now opened up to the public at large.

Dangerously addictive social media has rewired our brains to such an extent that nearly everyone is now prone to shocking displays of mental promiscuity. Books lie unfinished and articles remain half-read, as the mind diverts towards refreshing a laptop instead. However, as our brains are being rewired to suit the net, the rules of engagement are still being defined. Self -publicists on Twitter ‘retweet’ praise about themselves and this involves resending a tweet/update/comment to your own band of followers. This is a massive faux pax in the social media world. Already this type of behaviour is frowned upon in dinner parties and gastro pubs as incredibly annoying. Therefore let others retweet praise about you rather than be defined by slovenly antics.

It is also important to remember that no one outside of your social circle has any interest in what you have to say. Like the gold rush of the Wild West, the people who made the real money were those selling the spades, not the poor souls digging in the wilderness. Twitter has thus become a narcissistic ponzi scheme full of link exchanges and diversions that people rarely (if ever) pay any attention too. Social networking remains an illusionary stage and while it may lack authenticity it certainly has transformed almost every aspect of our daily lives. With old media rendered obsolete, breaking news is no longer announced on the BBC or Sky News but on Twitter instead. Falling behind the curve is particularly embarrassing online – like when people tweeted about the death of Amy Winehouse three hours after it went viral in Uzbekistan.

Again like retweeting praise about yourself, announcing old news as an OMG exclusive is not good practice and with over 300 million users worldwide there are plenty of news channels to choose from. If failing to keep up with a modern news cycle is understandable then tweeting #RIP tributes to dead celebrities is certainly avoidable. Empty tributes to movie stars, actresses, sportsmen you had previously shown no interest in won’t reflect well on your brand.

In future these social media rules will have an impact on our future relationships, friendships, work and one’s personal integrity. A new social contract is slowly being formed and shedding a few dimwits from the friends list and refining your manners will benefit everyone in the future. Our generation’s thoughts and opinions on Facebook and Twitter is a learning process for mankind. Something that will prove essential when the brand building narcissists discover they are nothing but mere noodles on a graph.

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Real Venice

11/16/2011 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him.

Arthur Symons

As beautiful as a thousand suns, the lagoon port of Venice is too romantic to survive. From a distance it is like waiting for your heart to die. How such a place could ever come into being is beyond the imagination of the modern traveller. Once the greatest trading port of the Mediterranean, this extravagant casket of wonders is ravishingly sad, but no longer has an imperative. It merely exists for the eyes of others. There is a melancholy sadness on the fairytale bridges, as the inevitability of the city’s fate has become a metaphor for life itself.

Facing aquatic extinction from rising sea levels and mass tourism, Venice is most definitely in peril. Capturing the magic of the city at Somerset House, the Real Venice exhibition highlights the unique beauty of its walkways and vulgarities of modern tourism. With subsidence rotting the fabric of the city, the La Serenissima faces an irreversible numbers of visitors and slow death of its indigene population. For Venice has no purpose in the modern world. In this city of footsteps, the sadness lies in the visitors, the starling masses who take a million pictures but never open their eyes.

As a contradictory rule of travelling, mass tourism is generally regarded as a crass and vulgar phenomenon. With the world becoming increasingly familiar due to affordable air travel, the paradox of the modern traveller lies in visiting the same places but simultaneously wanting to avoid people just like them. Having previously been a recreational playground for the Victorian upper classes, the city of Venice attracted tourists long before travelling went plastic. Back then, of course, travelling had been the reserve of the rich and famous. In this nostalgic world full of surprises, the fantasy of travelling in another era feels impossibly romantic or to quote Woody Allen a ‘denial of the painful present’.

However, it is now the painful deluge of foreign visitors that spoils it for everyone. Even in a city as beautiful as Venice, there is no escaping the banality of multi-lingual tours, guidebooks, suitcases and universally branded hotels. With progress comes opportunity for all and with progress there will come a price. Venice is suffering from rising house prices and the local Venetian population are slowly being erased from history in favour of foreign tourists. The most romantic city in the world has now become a lavish peacock serving the whims of visitors from overseas. A city submerged not only by rising tides but a lack of opportunities. Nobody lives there, except on holiday. A sad reminder that you are nothing but a passing visitor, and yet that is what we all are really.

Real Venice
Somerset House
Strand
London
WC2R 1LA

Exhibition runs until December 11th 2011.


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Down and Out in Occupy London

11/12/2011 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Dark, brooding and incongruously ugly, the Occupy London’s Tent City offers an apocalyptic vision of a post-recession Britain. A nightmarish vision of austerity, middle-class slum or a utopian commune, it really depends on your point of view. Marxist cuckoos in the Anglican’s nest, the anti-capitalist protesters have turned the public piazza outside St Paul’s Cathedral into a new found democracy. Organised by a hash tag and riddled with contradictions, the Occupy protesters are a malleable bunch. Predominately under the age of thirty, if not younger, the hardcore militants protesting at St Paul’s are invariably white educated liberals or students as they are more commonly known.

Campaigning against banker bonuses, corporate greed and the grotesque spectacle of UK business executives giving themselves a 50% increase in their salaries. Something had to be done. Identifying what is wrong with modern capitalism but thus far offering no concrete solutions, Occupy London has a lot in common with social-democratic politicians like Barack Obama and Ed Miliband. Awaiting genuine leadership, a big bang moment has yet to strike a chime with the protesters at St Paul’s.

With up to 150 tents living cheek by jowl on frozen concrete, the protesters come from different social and economic backgrounds but slumming it is a real leveller. Speaking about his experience mingling with tramps, George Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, “Once you’re in that world and seemingly of it, it hardly matters what you have been in the past. It is a sort of world-within-world where everyone is equal, a small squalid democracy – perhaps the nearest thing to a democracy that exists in England.”

Although unlike the lowly tramps in Orwell’s essay, the anti-capitalist protesters occupying St Paul’s are bound by idealism not poverty. Coming from good homes and largely well-educated, the Occupy camp will have enjoyed wealth, comfort and opportunities for most of their young lives. It is the fear of these privileges being taken away from them that propels them to the streets. Those worst affected by capitalism, the grizzly anonymous men loitering in street corners drinking cider, are nowhere to be seen. Instead a bizarre congregation of misfits preside over a spectacle of awareness against a system that continues to feed them.

As the global economic crisis of 2008 has already shown, ordinary people have become helpless components in a computerised market system, which we are seemingly powerless to challenge or change. And nothing will change as a result of this protest camp. To pretend otherwise is to miss the point entirely. Occupy London is merely a piss stain on the carpet of the establishment. A metaphorical protest that is more likely to be dismantled by dropping temperatures than police bailiffs. However, it offers a fascinating insight into the collective values of middle-class idealism. Those whose essential needs have been satisfied and yet dream of changing the world order for the greater good of society.

With police thermal images showing 90% of tents at St Paul’s are unoccupied in the early hours, the protesters have been accused of hypocrisy and self-indulgence. Returning home to warm bedrooms, eating gourmet sandwiches from a nearby Marks and Spencers and tweeting solidarity on luxury smartphones, there are benefits to capitalism that not even the most militant-protester would want to lose. This fractious community are representative of an increasingly divided country, angry at injustice and corporate greed, but still more likely to pay homage to Steve Jobs than Karl Marx. Unnerving as it might be to suggest, the otherwise noble idealism of the protesters regularly falls short at the first touch of reality. All the while the genuinely impoverished and historical victims of the market system are nowhere to be seen.

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Don’t feed the troll

11/07/2011 By in Press & Media Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

With internet trolls causing a misogyny scandal after female bloggers complained about the abuse they have been receiving. Questions have to be asked why the internet allows horrible, vindictive little men (and it’s always men) to threaten radical female writers with gang rape and murder. Trolls are traditionally perceived as sexually inadequate men living in their mother’s basements. Deeply unhappy they unleash their frustrations out on the anonymous playing fields of the internet, revelling in the attention that otherwise eludes them in real life. Everyone needs feedback after all, especially lonely young men with right-wing prejudices. Feeling that one has an impact on this world is usually enough to make a troll feel really happy when he retires to his Thomas the Tank Engine duvet covers.

However, it is far too easy to blame the rampant levels of misogyny and abuse on marginalised sections of society. As the majority of abusive comments are composed by seemingly upstanding citizens with families, friends and surprisingly well paid jobs. Almost all newspapers are full of deranged comments by readers posting under alpha-numeric pseudonyms. Usually they are one-eyed political nerds parroting their respective party’s views. Unrepresentative of the population at large, they get their voices heard by shouting the loudest. Comments, of course, come from all members of society. In the football sections, especially in the tabloid press, the barely-literate abuse their rival team’s players, blissfully oblivious to the concept of slander.

But like those who enjoy hard drugs and unprotected sex, there is something viscerally thrilling about participating in such terrible behaviour. For people have always derived pleasure from eliciting reactions in others. Getting a rise out of someone is exciting. Classrooms, pubs and workplaces are full of characters that like to goad, provoke and cajole their friends into a reaction. Socially rewarding and always entertaining, the darker side of provocation can be found on the internet. In this anonymous fantasy land the risk of being held to account for your views is virtually eliminated. Stripped of all social responsibility the trolls are able to throw muck at their respective targets without fear of reproach.

Female bloggers are subject to disproportionate levels of abuse for commenting on serious issues like economics and world affairs. Writing in the New Statesman several female writers, of all political persuasions, have highlighted examples of the gender-based hatred they are subjected to on a daily basis. Sex is frequently used by trolls as a means of teaching feminists a lesson. Belittled for being ‘ugly’ and ‘disgusting’, male trolls have threatened to bayonet, torture and rape female writers at bus stops. Exorcising their base lusts and repressed sexual fantasies, anonymous men with laptops and smartphones, instead of engaging fairly with the substance of the argument, subject female bloggers to sordid levels of abuse.

All journalists receive aggressive criticism but radical women in particular are torn to shreds by the lowest-common denominator of humanity. What is perhaps most shocking is the mistaken assumption that society has progressed beyond this type of behaviour. As social media becomes increasingly mainstream and not just the domain of the urban middle-classes, there is a horrifying realisation that beneath the surface of civility, anonymous trolls are shedding a new light on the darker side of human nature. It’s a sad state of affairs that in the twenty-first century, a feminist writer won’t really have ‘made it’ until she is abused by men who probably tortured worms in their childhood.

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