There was a hilarious quote yesterday from Stanley Johnson, the bonkers father of the buffoonish Mayor of London.
"Britain's population should be 10-15 million people. That would do us splendidly. It's a nonsense that we are confronted with 70 million people. But we have been shunted aside by the rise of liberal correctness. You cannot talk about [population] now without being accused of being anti-feminist or a racist. The government has to start taking immigration seriously. If you look at the rise of Britain's population you see a really serious differential in the fertility of the immigrant as opposed to that of the [indigenous] population."
Britain's population was between 10 and 15 million during the first half of the 19th century. It was around 14 million in 1832. I'm assuming this is the sort of halcyon era Stanley is harking back to. That year saw the Great Reform Act, when the vote was extended to 1 in 6 of adult males (5% of the population). Splendid indeed.
I love the suggestion that the growth of the population from 14 to 62 million now (I'm not sure where he has conjured the figure of 70 from) is the result of political correctness. I'd always thought it had something to do with the birth rate and increased longevity. Given that the dread PC (in the sense Stanley uses it) was only invented in the 1990s, this implies a lot of furious population growth in recent years.
Clearly the loon is banging on about immigration. Given that the population was 50 million in 1950, at the start of the period of large-scale immigration, the lion's share of responsibility for the growth beyond his ideal must be taken by the indigenous. Stanley Johnson is the father of six.
I'd hazard a guess that Stanley is not just keen to see the back of our immigrant communities, but also of most of the working class and pretty much everyone in those areas of the country (i.e. outside of London) whose landscapes he would like to enjoy uninterrupted. That would reduce the headcount to between 10 and 15 million. Lovely.
Thursday, 7 June 2012
Wednesday, 6 June 2012
Keith Vaz droning on
Barack Obama's increasing reliance on the use of drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan is raising eyebrows, though it's fair to say that the concern has been relatively muted until recently. Some of this is because there is a cross-party consensus in the US on taking out the bad guys before they become a threat. State-sponsored assassination is, of course, illegal under international law, but clever lawyers (of which Obama is one) are able to sidestep this procedural challenge quite easily.
The political investment in "surgical strike" technology is nothing new. The same claims of effectiveness (we land a knockout blow) and efficiency (without the need for ground troops) have been made since the RAF bombed Iraq in the 1920s (a model that led directly to the Blitz and Dresden, which were somewhat less surgical). Remote killing through precision-bombing and smart missiles has been a growing feature of conflicts since WW2, as boots on the ground have proven ineffective and inefficient in asymmetric conflicts such as Vietnam and Afghanistan. The "clean kill" promise of this technology has sometimes been important in building the justification for conflict, and as the centrepiece of the psychological campaign (e.g. "shock and awe" in Iraq). There are grounds to believe that the apparent low-risk attractions of this strategy are making armed intervention more likely, such as in Libya.
The military-industrial complex has been happy to move from costly contractors in Baghdad to even more costly drones operated out of Nevada, with the market for this technology expected to double over the decade. The claims that drones minimise collateral damage should be treated with scepticism. Not only is it true that all wars are largely a series of murderous accidents, but "intelligence-led" kill-lists are vulnerable to local spotters fingering innocent targets in return for a fat finder's fee. We've added a free market twist to the bureaucratic nightmare of totalitarianism: your name is on the list so you must be guilty.
What we're seeing under Obama may be the evolution of drones from a purely military option to a foreign-policy tool for disciplining recalcitrant countries with whom the US isn't even formally in conflict. Should Pakistan reopen the supply routes to Afghanistan, you can expect drone strikes in Waziristan to drop off.
It seems odd that at such a time Keith Vaz, the Grand Poobah of the Home Affairs Select Committee, is calling for restrictions on "aggressive first-person shooter video games". This follows Anders Breivik's admission that he used Call of Duty as a form of training, which strikes me simply as more evidence that he is a fantasist. Vaz seems less worried about Breivik's obsession with World of Warcraft, perhaps calculating that banning Orcs might be going too far. The case against COD has been reinforced by claims that Mohammed Merah, the self-styled jihadi of Toulouse, was also a heavy user, presumably when he wasn't reading the Koran or watching The Simpsons. Vaz's intervention is typical of the self-publicising nonsense that recently led him to invite Russell Brand to share his wisdom on drugs with the Committee.
The link between Keith Vaz and Barack Obama (not a phrase often employed) concerns desensitisation. Shoot-em-ups do not cause mild-mannered people to turn into murderers, but the method of killing at a remove, mediated by a screen and a joystick, may well make killing easier in real life. Soldiers have to be trained to kill through repetitive drill and the depersonalisation of the enemy because the natural instinct of all of us (bar the small minority of functioning psychopaths) is to shoot in the air or soften the blow. Even the most pacific among us can happily kill countless opponents in COD because we know it isn't real. The question is, how real does it feel for a drone operator?
The ultimate desensitisation occurs when your action is so far removed from its consequences that your intellectual and emotional engagement is limited solely to the dynamics of the action itself. This is one of the fundamental criticisms of the market and the "fiction" of money. Derivatives and futures are extreme examples of this, where the trade is divorced from the notional commodity. I was reminded of this watching Trading Places again recently, where the coup to corner the frozen orange juice market depends on insider information from actual producers. It was barely credible in the 1980s and is amusingly quaint now, like Jamie Lee-Curtis's happy hooker.
There is a strange convergence here. Financial dealers have deserted the whites-of-their-eyes trading floors to sit in front of screens on which stylised indicators plot the movements of abstract entities such as shares and derivatives. Meanwhile the desktop warriors in suburban Virginia work through their to-do lists, zapping the fuzzily rendered vehicles and buildings that constitute the manifestations of the known threat. There'll shortly be an app for that.
The political investment in "surgical strike" technology is nothing new. The same claims of effectiveness (we land a knockout blow) and efficiency (without the need for ground troops) have been made since the RAF bombed Iraq in the 1920s (a model that led directly to the Blitz and Dresden, which were somewhat less surgical). Remote killing through precision-bombing and smart missiles has been a growing feature of conflicts since WW2, as boots on the ground have proven ineffective and inefficient in asymmetric conflicts such as Vietnam and Afghanistan. The "clean kill" promise of this technology has sometimes been important in building the justification for conflict, and as the centrepiece of the psychological campaign (e.g. "shock and awe" in Iraq). There are grounds to believe that the apparent low-risk attractions of this strategy are making armed intervention more likely, such as in Libya.
The military-industrial complex has been happy to move from costly contractors in Baghdad to even more costly drones operated out of Nevada, with the market for this technology expected to double over the decade. The claims that drones minimise collateral damage should be treated with scepticism. Not only is it true that all wars are largely a series of murderous accidents, but "intelligence-led" kill-lists are vulnerable to local spotters fingering innocent targets in return for a fat finder's fee. We've added a free market twist to the bureaucratic nightmare of totalitarianism: your name is on the list so you must be guilty.
What we're seeing under Obama may be the evolution of drones from a purely military option to a foreign-policy tool for disciplining recalcitrant countries with whom the US isn't even formally in conflict. Should Pakistan reopen the supply routes to Afghanistan, you can expect drone strikes in Waziristan to drop off.
It seems odd that at such a time Keith Vaz, the Grand Poobah of the Home Affairs Select Committee, is calling for restrictions on "aggressive first-person shooter video games". This follows Anders Breivik's admission that he used Call of Duty as a form of training, which strikes me simply as more evidence that he is a fantasist. Vaz seems less worried about Breivik's obsession with World of Warcraft, perhaps calculating that banning Orcs might be going too far. The case against COD has been reinforced by claims that Mohammed Merah, the self-styled jihadi of Toulouse, was also a heavy user, presumably when he wasn't reading the Koran or watching The Simpsons. Vaz's intervention is typical of the self-publicising nonsense that recently led him to invite Russell Brand to share his wisdom on drugs with the Committee.
The link between Keith Vaz and Barack Obama (not a phrase often employed) concerns desensitisation. Shoot-em-ups do not cause mild-mannered people to turn into murderers, but the method of killing at a remove, mediated by a screen and a joystick, may well make killing easier in real life. Soldiers have to be trained to kill through repetitive drill and the depersonalisation of the enemy because the natural instinct of all of us (bar the small minority of functioning psychopaths) is to shoot in the air or soften the blow. Even the most pacific among us can happily kill countless opponents in COD because we know it isn't real. The question is, how real does it feel for a drone operator?
The ultimate desensitisation occurs when your action is so far removed from its consequences that your intellectual and emotional engagement is limited solely to the dynamics of the action itself. This is one of the fundamental criticisms of the market and the "fiction" of money. Derivatives and futures are extreme examples of this, where the trade is divorced from the notional commodity. I was reminded of this watching Trading Places again recently, where the coup to corner the frozen orange juice market depends on insider information from actual producers. It was barely credible in the 1980s and is amusingly quaint now, like Jamie Lee-Curtis's happy hooker.
There is a strange convergence here. Financial dealers have deserted the whites-of-their-eyes trading floors to sit in front of screens on which stylised indicators plot the movements of abstract entities such as shares and derivatives. Meanwhile the desktop warriors in suburban Virginia work through their to-do lists, zapping the fuzzily rendered vehicles and buildings that constitute the manifestations of the known threat. There'll shortly be an app for that.
Tuesday, 5 June 2012
The German question
George Soros's recent speech in Italy on the Eurozone crisis has produced a number of eye-catching headlines, notably "Three months to save the Euro". Quite a few people have also picked up on his interpretation of the EU's growth as a form of bubble, and as a "phantastic object" in the sense of something highly desirable and yet ultimately unreal. Soros has also provided a colourful and paradoxical warning about where German caution will lead:
So Germany is likely to do what is necessary to preserve the euro – but nothing more. That would result in a eurozone dominated by Germany in which the divergence between the creditor and debtor countries would continue to widen and the periphery would turn into permanently depressed areas in need of constant transfer of payments. That would turn the European Union into something very different from what it was when it was a “fantastic object” that fired peoples imagination. It would be a German empire with the periphery as the hinterland.
This is entertaining stuff, but it should raise a few questions.
In what sense is the EU a "phantastic object"? In Freudian psychoanalysis, an object is a mental representation. It isn't a real thing, but a symbol of that thing. The "phantasy" implies that this representation relates to unconscious desires that stem from early (i.e. childhood) development. In a looser sense, the object is something whose acquisition we believe will satisfy our profound desires, but which will inevitably disappoint because our expectations will always exceed the real thing that the object represents. A crush, in other words.
I think this is suspect because it implies that the EU project, which has historically often been termed a "dream", has here been turned into a hopeless love, an "infatuation" almost. While there may be some ardent Europhiles for whom the word "love" is appropriate, this hardly describes the hard-nosed, pragmatic view of the mass of Europe's peoples. The EU promised peace and prosperity, which were quite realistic desires. They have also been largely fulfilled. The Euro may prove to have been a mistake (at least as designed), and the resolution of the current crisis may have unintended political consequences, but I don't think this relegates the EU as a whole to the realm of the fantastic.
What is meant by a German empire? In the traditional sense, i.e. late 19th century imperialism, we know that what the Kaiser & co sought was a "place in the sun", in other words colonies around the world. Under the Third Reich, the focus for imperial ambition was the East up to the Urals. The rest of Europe was largely ignored by the Germans, other than when it posed a security threat, and came to be treated primarily as a source of first material and then labour. The New Order was more an enthusiasm of the far right in France and Benelux than the Germans themselves. (Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire provides an excellent history of this).
Clearly, Germany is not about to revive such crude ambitions. Its economy depends on customers in the rest of Europe, not systematic pillage. If by "empire" Soros simply means that Germany will be the dominant nation in Europe, then this has been the case for centuries, even when it was fragmented under the Holy Roman Empire. The immediate post-WW2 period allowed this geopolitical fact to be pushed to the background, and for France to claim equal billing, but since reunification there has been no doubt who the 800-lb gorilla is.
Is the European periphery necessarily a German hinterland? The South of Europe has always been at a disadvantage to the North. For all the benefits that the Mediterranean brings, the coastal lands of the South are too dominated by barren mountains, limiting agriculture and impeding communications. In contrast, the flat alluvial plains of Northern Europe have always been more productive.
Ireland remains an interesting anomaly here. Geographically of the North, yet exhibiting all the features of a Mediterranean economy. It is in fact the most peripheral country in the EU and owed much of its growth since the 80s to parasitical "regulatory arbitrage" (i.e. lower corporation tax to attract foreign companies, particularly US ones, who wanted access to the EU). The UK avoids being peripheral simply because of the dominance of London, another essentially parasitical form. The hinterland starts beyond a line drawn from London, through Paris, Lyon, Bologna, Vienna, Prague and Berlin.
The reality is that the heart of Europe will always be round about Frankfurt. That's a fact of geography rather than a deliberate political choice, just as the heart of Brazil is Sao Paulo rather than Brasilia. The politics of Europe just reflects this material reality. The Eurozone crisis cannot change this, though it may bring that material reality more to the fore. To that extent Soros may be right to suggest that we are losing our fantastical illusions about Europe.
So Germany is likely to do what is necessary to preserve the euro – but nothing more. That would result in a eurozone dominated by Germany in which the divergence between the creditor and debtor countries would continue to widen and the periphery would turn into permanently depressed areas in need of constant transfer of payments. That would turn the European Union into something very different from what it was when it was a “fantastic object” that fired peoples imagination. It would be a German empire with the periphery as the hinterland.
This is entertaining stuff, but it should raise a few questions.
In what sense is the EU a "phantastic object"? In Freudian psychoanalysis, an object is a mental representation. It isn't a real thing, but a symbol of that thing. The "phantasy" implies that this representation relates to unconscious desires that stem from early (i.e. childhood) development. In a looser sense, the object is something whose acquisition we believe will satisfy our profound desires, but which will inevitably disappoint because our expectations will always exceed the real thing that the object represents. A crush, in other words.
I think this is suspect because it implies that the EU project, which has historically often been termed a "dream", has here been turned into a hopeless love, an "infatuation" almost. While there may be some ardent Europhiles for whom the word "love" is appropriate, this hardly describes the hard-nosed, pragmatic view of the mass of Europe's peoples. The EU promised peace and prosperity, which were quite realistic desires. They have also been largely fulfilled. The Euro may prove to have been a mistake (at least as designed), and the resolution of the current crisis may have unintended political consequences, but I don't think this relegates the EU as a whole to the realm of the fantastic.
What is meant by a German empire? In the traditional sense, i.e. late 19th century imperialism, we know that what the Kaiser & co sought was a "place in the sun", in other words colonies around the world. Under the Third Reich, the focus for imperial ambition was the East up to the Urals. The rest of Europe was largely ignored by the Germans, other than when it posed a security threat, and came to be treated primarily as a source of first material and then labour. The New Order was more an enthusiasm of the far right in France and Benelux than the Germans themselves. (Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire provides an excellent history of this).
Clearly, Germany is not about to revive such crude ambitions. Its economy depends on customers in the rest of Europe, not systematic pillage. If by "empire" Soros simply means that Germany will be the dominant nation in Europe, then this has been the case for centuries, even when it was fragmented under the Holy Roman Empire. The immediate post-WW2 period allowed this geopolitical fact to be pushed to the background, and for France to claim equal billing, but since reunification there has been no doubt who the 800-lb gorilla is.
Is the European periphery necessarily a German hinterland? The South of Europe has always been at a disadvantage to the North. For all the benefits that the Mediterranean brings, the coastal lands of the South are too dominated by barren mountains, limiting agriculture and impeding communications. In contrast, the flat alluvial plains of Northern Europe have always been more productive.
Ireland remains an interesting anomaly here. Geographically of the North, yet exhibiting all the features of a Mediterranean economy. It is in fact the most peripheral country in the EU and owed much of its growth since the 80s to parasitical "regulatory arbitrage" (i.e. lower corporation tax to attract foreign companies, particularly US ones, who wanted access to the EU). The UK avoids being peripheral simply because of the dominance of London, another essentially parasitical form. The hinterland starts beyond a line drawn from London, through Paris, Lyon, Bologna, Vienna, Prague and Berlin.
The reality is that the heart of Europe will always be round about Frankfurt. That's a fact of geography rather than a deliberate political choice, just as the heart of Brazil is Sao Paulo rather than Brasilia. The politics of Europe just reflects this material reality. The Eurozone crisis cannot change this, though it may bring that material reality more to the fore. To that extent Soros may be right to suggest that we are losing our fantastical illusions about Europe.
Sunday, 3 June 2012
The woman in the iron mask
As a republican I have no time for the dull cypher that sits on the throne, let alone the gobshite who's next in line, but I do take the monarchy itself seriously, rather than patronising it as an eccentric but lovable remnant.
Coverage of the Jubilee has ranged from the predictably sycophantic to grudging but respectful admiration from self-declared anti-monarchists who seem to be betting on the future accession of Charles finally swinging the public mood. If you're a republican you're against monarchy as an institution, not against particular people, so the case should be made more forcefully now. Equally, those monarchists who hope that a generation will be skipped and William and Kate will ascend after the old queen's death seem to think it's a popularity contest, rather than the lottery of heredity, though to be fair that attitude has been around since the Stuarts.
Constitutional monarchy has always been a nonsense, but a necessary fiction once the divine right of kings was forcefully disproved by Charles I's beheading. If the monarch is not a sacred being then there is no justification for a monarch, in the sense of a single person selected by birth or some unique sign. The executive powers of the monarch are a figment and the ceremonial duties demand no competence beyond keeping awake.
Monarchists have of late taken to the "President Blair" defence, the suggestion being that the appointment of a venal political hack risks saddling us with a liability along the lines of Kurt Waldheim or Christian Wulff, but this misses the point that such embarrassments are fleeting and easily resolved. You just sack them. There's no need for a constitutional crisis, let alone a beheading.
The real assumption behind this argument is that if you don't have a monarch you must have a president. In France and the USA the president is an elected politician. The duties of head of state are just tacked on. In Ireland the president is an elected figurehead, devoid of power, so the presidential election is little more than a popularity contest. In Britain we'd probably elect Stephen Fry, not Tony Blair.
But the argument that we need a national figurehead of any sort is specious. We already have a single office that formally represents the nation independent of the government, namely the Speaker. While Tories would no doubt be apoplectic at the thought of John Bercow hosting state banquets, it's just a job, and not a demanding one at that, and the fella already seems comfortable wearing outlandish headdress.
When talk turns to the more nebulous concept of the monarch embodying the spirit of the nation, then you know you've moved beyond reason. In the patchwork of nations and identities that make up the UK, there is no single spirit, and certainly not one that is especially represented by a fabulously wealthy OAP. A problem of language is that it makes us assume we have more in common with our fellow monoglots, whereas we actually have more in common with others of a similar socio-economic standing in other countries. An English lawyer in London shares more of a culture with a French lawyer in Paris than she does with a labourer in Dundee.
As globalisation makes a mockery of national identity, and as the dominance of London loosens the ties of the United Kingdom, the popularity of the Queen surely reflects a nostalgia for an imagined past when we really were all in it together. She is a blank canvas on which we project a better vision of ourselves. The monarch does nothing, can do nothing. The mystery at the heart of royalty is a vacuum of sense and purpose. The suggestion that the Prince of Wales is impatient to take over strikes me as dubious. A monarch cannot be opinionated, so there will be no tolerance of his chuntering about architecture or alternative medicine. Once the crown descends, intelligent life is extinguished.
Coverage of the Jubilee has ranged from the predictably sycophantic to grudging but respectful admiration from self-declared anti-monarchists who seem to be betting on the future accession of Charles finally swinging the public mood. If you're a republican you're against monarchy as an institution, not against particular people, so the case should be made more forcefully now. Equally, those monarchists who hope that a generation will be skipped and William and Kate will ascend after the old queen's death seem to think it's a popularity contest, rather than the lottery of heredity, though to be fair that attitude has been around since the Stuarts.
Constitutional monarchy has always been a nonsense, but a necessary fiction once the divine right of kings was forcefully disproved by Charles I's beheading. If the monarch is not a sacred being then there is no justification for a monarch, in the sense of a single person selected by birth or some unique sign. The executive powers of the monarch are a figment and the ceremonial duties demand no competence beyond keeping awake.
Monarchists have of late taken to the "President Blair" defence, the suggestion being that the appointment of a venal political hack risks saddling us with a liability along the lines of Kurt Waldheim or Christian Wulff, but this misses the point that such embarrassments are fleeting and easily resolved. You just sack them. There's no need for a constitutional crisis, let alone a beheading.
The real assumption behind this argument is that if you don't have a monarch you must have a president. In France and the USA the president is an elected politician. The duties of head of state are just tacked on. In Ireland the president is an elected figurehead, devoid of power, so the presidential election is little more than a popularity contest. In Britain we'd probably elect Stephen Fry, not Tony Blair.
But the argument that we need a national figurehead of any sort is specious. We already have a single office that formally represents the nation independent of the government, namely the Speaker. While Tories would no doubt be apoplectic at the thought of John Bercow hosting state banquets, it's just a job, and not a demanding one at that, and the fella already seems comfortable wearing outlandish headdress.
When talk turns to the more nebulous concept of the monarch embodying the spirit of the nation, then you know you've moved beyond reason. In the patchwork of nations and identities that make up the UK, there is no single spirit, and certainly not one that is especially represented by a fabulously wealthy OAP. A problem of language is that it makes us assume we have more in common with our fellow monoglots, whereas we actually have more in common with others of a similar socio-economic standing in other countries. An English lawyer in London shares more of a culture with a French lawyer in Paris than she does with a labourer in Dundee.
As globalisation makes a mockery of national identity, and as the dominance of London loosens the ties of the United Kingdom, the popularity of the Queen surely reflects a nostalgia for an imagined past when we really were all in it together. She is a blank canvas on which we project a better vision of ourselves. The monarch does nothing, can do nothing. The mystery at the heart of royalty is a vacuum of sense and purpose. The suggestion that the Prince of Wales is impatient to take over strikes me as dubious. A monarch cannot be opinionated, so there will be no tolerance of his chuntering about architecture or alternative medicine. Once the crown descends, intelligent life is extinguished.
Saturday, 2 June 2012
Please turn off all devices
My thoughts turned over the week to email (sorting out the wife's new laptop) and text-messaging (the collected works of Jeremy Hunt). I was also struck by an article discussing the possible impact of the rumoured Facebook phone.
The Leveson enquiry has highlighted the pervasive use of text-messaging in government and lobbying circles, adding to the revelation last year that government advisers were using Gmail to conduct off-the-record conversations. These technologies compromise the democratic process by allowing politicians to side-step freedom of information obligations and bypass civil servants. The obvious lack of impartiality displayed by Jeremy Hunt would not have been seen in a minuted meeting.
There is unintentional humour in this as well. Not just the lack of familiarity with messaging conventions, such as Cameron's LOL fail, but the evidence that few politicians understand the technology and the vulnerabilities it entails. Stupidity aids accountability (you can bet that Jeremy Hunt won't be casually texting congrats to James Murdoch any time soon). There was also something amusing (in a stomach-turning way) in the chummy, arse-licking style of their messages.
The wider social role of a comms technology is not fully appreciated till it has passed its peak. I was reminded of this during the week by a discussion over why the The postman always rings twice (apparently it's when he needs a signature, such as for a telegram, whereas one ring means there's a letter on the mat) and the appearance of Saving Private Ryan (more telegrams) on TV.
It was only with the coming of the cyclops in the corner that cinema's social function was fully appreciated. During the middle of the 20th century, when most homes had too few rooms, cinema took on the role that cafes and pubs had provided in the 19th century: somewhere warm to go, somewhere to feel part of a group, somewhere to escape the tedium of family life. The raising of the legal age of drinking from 14 to 18 in the UK coincides with the spread of cinema in the 1920s.
It's hardly a novel observation that the selfishness that crept into western society in the 60s occured as the TV set became a common fixture. It wasn't just the advertising and the aspiration, but also the atomisation. This turning-in on oneself in the home was balanced by the role TV acquired as social glue, the "did you see?" conversational gambit. This was in turn undermined by the arrival of time-shifting VCRs and the proliferation of channels in the 80s. Perhaps in compensation, real-time event television seemed to become more important, such as key World Cup games and shared horrors such as 9/11.
The coming of email led to premature laments over the lost art of letter-writing (always a minority pastime), but most of the stylistic conventions of the letter were transferred straight to the new medium. Email killed post, not letters. An important new feature of email was cc and bcc, allowing a narrowcast to be opened up to a select distribution, so personal messages became more like memos and written language veered towards the functional and the abbreviated, IMHO. Inadvertent reply-alls were the chief unintended consequence of this, if you exclude spam. Meanwhile, much of the old impetus for discursive letter writing transferred to blogs.
SMS and the smartphone are now the major challenges to classic letter-writing as email and text gradually blend into a single medium delivered via an always-on device. Email on a PC will probably look quaint in 5 years time, like a dialup modem now. The use of a handheld encourages frequent short messages over anything more considered, preferably broadcasts. Both Twitter and Facebook want you to communicate with the widest possible group. With this polarisation between broadcast blogs and broadcast short messages, it looks like email will decline.
Perhaps the thing we'll miss most about email is the discrimination provided by the separation of to, cc and bcc. The problem with the future envisaged by Facebook and others is that the strength of a personalised online space is also a limitation. The provider has an interest in you congregating everyone you know in the one place, so maximising advertising/referral coverage. They don't want you creating multiple spaces to reflect your different interests. You are actively encouraged not to compartmentalise your online life. Also, your own virtual club, where you control the door policy, is nothing if not congenial, but this means you are not exposed to the wider world except insofar as it is mediated by your online friends. You lack the breadth of random stimuli and chance meetings that you get in "meatspace".
Paradoxically, many pubs and cafes now seek to attract custom by providing an environment in which you can create your own private bubble. Wi-fi is probably a good thing for a public space where you don't want to interact with others, such as the Tube, but it looks increasingly counter-productive in pubs. The coincidence of the banning of smoking with the arrival of free wi-fi swapped one anti-social activity for another.
The Leveson enquiry has highlighted the pervasive use of text-messaging in government and lobbying circles, adding to the revelation last year that government advisers were using Gmail to conduct off-the-record conversations. These technologies compromise the democratic process by allowing politicians to side-step freedom of information obligations and bypass civil servants. The obvious lack of impartiality displayed by Jeremy Hunt would not have been seen in a minuted meeting.
There is unintentional humour in this as well. Not just the lack of familiarity with messaging conventions, such as Cameron's LOL fail, but the evidence that few politicians understand the technology and the vulnerabilities it entails. Stupidity aids accountability (you can bet that Jeremy Hunt won't be casually texting congrats to James Murdoch any time soon). There was also something amusing (in a stomach-turning way) in the chummy, arse-licking style of their messages.
The wider social role of a comms technology is not fully appreciated till it has passed its peak. I was reminded of this during the week by a discussion over why the The postman always rings twice (apparently it's when he needs a signature, such as for a telegram, whereas one ring means there's a letter on the mat) and the appearance of Saving Private Ryan (more telegrams) on TV.
It was only with the coming of the cyclops in the corner that cinema's social function was fully appreciated. During the middle of the 20th century, when most homes had too few rooms, cinema took on the role that cafes and pubs had provided in the 19th century: somewhere warm to go, somewhere to feel part of a group, somewhere to escape the tedium of family life. The raising of the legal age of drinking from 14 to 18 in the UK coincides with the spread of cinema in the 1920s.
It's hardly a novel observation that the selfishness that crept into western society in the 60s occured as the TV set became a common fixture. It wasn't just the advertising and the aspiration, but also the atomisation. This turning-in on oneself in the home was balanced by the role TV acquired as social glue, the "did you see?" conversational gambit. This was in turn undermined by the arrival of time-shifting VCRs and the proliferation of channels in the 80s. Perhaps in compensation, real-time event television seemed to become more important, such as key World Cup games and shared horrors such as 9/11.
The coming of email led to premature laments over the lost art of letter-writing (always a minority pastime), but most of the stylistic conventions of the letter were transferred straight to the new medium. Email killed post, not letters. An important new feature of email was cc and bcc, allowing a narrowcast to be opened up to a select distribution, so personal messages became more like memos and written language veered towards the functional and the abbreviated, IMHO. Inadvertent reply-alls were the chief unintended consequence of this, if you exclude spam. Meanwhile, much of the old impetus for discursive letter writing transferred to blogs.
SMS and the smartphone are now the major challenges to classic letter-writing as email and text gradually blend into a single medium delivered via an always-on device. Email on a PC will probably look quaint in 5 years time, like a dialup modem now. The use of a handheld encourages frequent short messages over anything more considered, preferably broadcasts. Both Twitter and Facebook want you to communicate with the widest possible group. With this polarisation between broadcast blogs and broadcast short messages, it looks like email will decline.
Perhaps the thing we'll miss most about email is the discrimination provided by the separation of to, cc and bcc. The problem with the future envisaged by Facebook and others is that the strength of a personalised online space is also a limitation. The provider has an interest in you congregating everyone you know in the one place, so maximising advertising/referral coverage. They don't want you creating multiple spaces to reflect your different interests. You are actively encouraged not to compartmentalise your online life. Also, your own virtual club, where you control the door policy, is nothing if not congenial, but this means you are not exposed to the wider world except insofar as it is mediated by your online friends. You lack the breadth of random stimuli and chance meetings that you get in "meatspace".
Paradoxically, many pubs and cafes now seek to attract custom by providing an environment in which you can create your own private bubble. Wi-fi is probably a good thing for a public space where you don't want to interact with others, such as the Tube, but it looks increasingly counter-productive in pubs. The coincidence of the banning of smoking with the arrival of free wi-fi swapped one anti-social activity for another.
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