There are three programmes on TV worth watching. The World Cup (that’s the soccer world cup, my Antipodean chums), the UEFA Cup, and the Eurovision Song Contest.
If you have neither the time nor the interest to worry about the love lives of vampires, the inane ramblings of a house full of twentysomething media tarts, or which B list celeb has twisted their ankle dancing, these programmes are events worth tuning in for.
Eurovision is the television event to end television events. Every year. Unlike the football counterparts, Eurovision manages the razzmatazz and the ratings annually. Each May an estimated 100 million people watch pop stars in sparkly suits sing something that the majority find incomprehensible in Serbo-Croat or Hebrew. Countries can put aside their human rights records and forget their crumbling economies and dance it up. Eurovision is splendid, over the top, and completely and utter pointless. It is, in short, perfect television.
And this year it’s in Russia! Who would have thought twenty years ago that this could happen? Now, instead of those grim-faced generals saluting their nuclear missiles at the May Day parade, they’re up on stage singing their hearts out. Bless them. And backing those post-punk gone-to-seedy boppers Tatu too. Good grief. It left me speechless, as every good Eurovision should do. Having most of the Red Army on stage was a reminder to all that Russia is still far from cute and cuddly, and that their military might is still something to beware of, particularly if you’re in a satellite state where the good natured breeze from a song contest might fan the sparks of self determination. At the side of the stage was a MiG fighter jet. Well, what else would you put in an international song competition when you have an unlimited budget? The cameras kept skirting it, but it was there… is this the first example of high tech weaponry as part of a Eurovision stage show? As Boney M once said, "oh, those Russians".
What does all this have to do with the environment? Where’s the message? Well, only this: If we are all to act to make some changes to the way we live, then we can most effectively do this by collective, not individual, action. Eurovision is a reminder that there are still things that are fun, ridiculous and utterly pointless that can galvanise us into some sort of shared experience. It serves as a reminder that having our preferences catered for in ever-increasing detail isolates us from our fellows. So, while many individuals will be curled up alone with the latest DVD of Twilight or Madmen on Saturday night, don’t forget that 100 million of us will be partying together. Go find a friend who's watching it and join in!
Friday, May 15, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Bring Back Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Hogan
On the Gruen Transfer (an Australian TV show dedicated to television advertising) last night the panel bemoaned the fact that Australian tourism would never come up with another ad as successful as the ones featuring Paul Hogan in the early eighties. They were described as having a charm and a lack of self-consciousness that we could never manage nowadays.
The blokey, sexist, knockabout "charm" was enough to give most of us a cultural cringe, but what the panel didn’t go on to talk about (and fair enough, because it was a programme about advertising, not society) was that the Australia of Paul Hogan has largely disappeared. Not long after those commercials were made Australians finally caved in to global pressure to accept that being wealthy was more fun than being happy. Since then we have become just another western capitalist state, albeit with earth a shade redder than parts of the US, and some interesting marsupials. With the recent Wall Street inspired financial meltdown we’ve seen precious little of the “no worries mate” attitude that Australia traded on during those halcyon Hogan days, and plenty of worried wannabes eyeing their stock portfolios and BMW repayment schedules with dismay. Plenty worries… and they’re no longer your mate unless you’re a potential customer.
But let’s not despair, for despair is the weapon of the state and the lifeblood of the media. There are still pockets of resistance to the idea that wealth and happiness are the same thing, and these pockets are getting fuller. One day they will burst open and the social experiment that was Global Capitalism will join its nerdy older brother Communism on history’s scrap heap. When enough of us decide that we’d prefer to be governed by accountable, democratically elected representatives that have our interests at heart rather than the apparatchiks of free market dogma, then things will change, just as they changed in the Soviet Union.
The blokey, sexist, knockabout "charm" was enough to give most of us a cultural cringe, but what the panel didn’t go on to talk about (and fair enough, because it was a programme about advertising, not society) was that the Australia of Paul Hogan has largely disappeared. Not long after those commercials were made Australians finally caved in to global pressure to accept that being wealthy was more fun than being happy. Since then we have become just another western capitalist state, albeit with earth a shade redder than parts of the US, and some interesting marsupials. With the recent Wall Street inspired financial meltdown we’ve seen precious little of the “no worries mate” attitude that Australia traded on during those halcyon Hogan days, and plenty of worried wannabes eyeing their stock portfolios and BMW repayment schedules with dismay. Plenty worries… and they’re no longer your mate unless you’re a potential customer.
But let’s not despair, for despair is the weapon of the state and the lifeblood of the media. There are still pockets of resistance to the idea that wealth and happiness are the same thing, and these pockets are getting fuller. One day they will burst open and the social experiment that was Global Capitalism will join its nerdy older brother Communism on history’s scrap heap. When enough of us decide that we’d prefer to be governed by accountable, democratically elected representatives that have our interests at heart rather than the apparatchiks of free market dogma, then things will change, just as they changed in the Soviet Union.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
The 75kg Mobile Phone
What does your mobile phone say about you? Is it the stylish, hot, latest touch-screen PDA model or do you cringe with embarrassment when forced to answer in public your three year old brick that’s held together with parcel tape and still plays that factory ringtone because you never figured out how to change it? Or do you not cringe with embarrassment? Do you wear your parcel tape and tinkly ring tone with pride, a sign that you are apart from the herd; that you know that all phones are, at bottom, just phones.
Mobile phones are slimmer and lighter than ever before, and yet every mobile phone weighs a whopping 75kg. That’s 165lbs in Roman numerals. How can we possibly carry this sort of burden around with us every day?Every product we buy has what is known in the naturally lit corridors of eco-world as an "ecological rucksack", the amount of waste generated in producing one unit of a product. According to the guide The Management of WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) the manufacture of a computer uses up nearly 1,500 kg of resources, a laptop 400 kg, and a mobile phone 75 kg. Add together all the mobile phones you've ever owned for an even more impressive figure!
That chic new upgrade has just used up 75kg of resources; some of them rare, some hazardous, and many extracted in countries where labour conditions are suspect and environmental degradation unpoliced. Did we really need that new phone, or did we just want it... really, really badly? Maybe the upgrade was just part of the contract and our provider was almost threatening to take us to court if we didn’t upgrade (know the feeling)? This is why, up against global marketing and the need of business to keep selling us stuff, knitting our own shopping bags doesn’t even begin to cut it when it comes to making a difference to our environment. One decision to NOT upgrade our mobile phone and we have, at a stroke, performed the equivalent of a year’s domestic recycling, a lifetime’s reusable bag carrying or probably a thousand years’ worth of “not printing out this blog”.
This is the nub of the Envirobitch argument. The global capitalist system works by selling us stuff. In order to sustain itself it must sell us more the following year, and the year after that. The mobile phone market is an obvious example of how we are sold and sold again more or less the same product. There have been useful developments such as SMS, but many other extras are more about creating the want than fulfilling any real need. I know… I’m back to wants and needs again, but if we’re really serious about tackling climate change, helping the environment or whatever we want to call it, we could do worse than look at our purchasing decisions. Not the “shall I stump up the extra for the conscience-salving so-called-green version” buying decision, but the “do I really need that” non-buying decision. To buy nothing is also a choice.
Sure, we can recycle our “old” mobile phone, and that’ll go a small way to offsetting the impact of our decision, but it won’t stop the demand that encourages the manufacture of more phones. And hey, if we hadn't ordered the new phone in the first place, there'd be no impact to offset. Come to that we can recycle the box it comes in too… but we’d be fooling ourselves if we thought that compensates in any way for our decision to buy.
So, before we “upgrade” our perfectly functional phone (to one with more stuff we’ll use approximately once, and a shorter battery life) we should consider just why we reckon we need it. Remember, even if your phone is old, even if it's not one of a range of fashion colours, even if the ring tone is something by 50 Cent that your teenage son installed and you've no idea how to remove it, we still love you, okay?
A few folks need the functionality of a Blackberry in order to do their jobs (although how their job has been shaped by this technology in the first place is worthy of another post at some point), but most of us don't, even if we're pretending to ourselves that we do so that we can feel like a captain of industry with all that control at our fingertips. If you want a new phone because you have a lurking desire to place it conspicuously on the table in the pub next to your BMW key ring; if you think the polyphonic ringtone’s a conversation starter; or that folks on the tram will be envious or impressed, you need to ask yourself some serious questions, and they’re not environmental ones.
--
If you suffer from insomnia, or you're an enviro-nerd have a browse through The Management of WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) for more information.
Friday, February 27, 2009
The Third Place
There’s a commercial on at the moment advertising a coffee machine. Not that it’s called a coffee machine. No no. This is a “hot beverage system” and appears to be styled on the inside of an Audi TT. Although it could be said that the inside of an Audi TT already looks like an expensive coffee machine. Whatever the case, the machine is being sold on the strength that the group of twenty-something women featured in the commercial will no longer have to make the laborious trek to Antonio’s coffee bar and suffer his suggestive inanities as they can now get proper coffee in their own homes! Hooray for progress!
Now, where am I going to start with this? I’ll set aside the fact that the commercial is a product of the Soho advertising machine, a place alive with coffee bars which I’m willing to bet are stuffed to the gunwales with “creative” [sic] media types. I'll also leave the unsustainable packaging aside. No, the thing that riles me most is that this is another example of big business trying to muscle in on our Third Places.
We all need a Third Place. A place like the mythical Antonio's that isn’t work and isn’t home. A place where we have a set of social contacts who are more than strangers but not quite friends. A place where we can just be ourselves – read a book, drink a coffee, chat, play chess, watch people or what ever.
The recipe for successful Third Places continually evades replication by multinationals. Third Places grow organically where people need them. Cafés and pubs, garden centres and community centres, parks and allotments. They defy multinational copycats largely because their profits and turnover are too low or non-existent. They simply don’t make enough money. Many third places are cafés, but the cafés owned by multinationals are rarely third places, no matter how much they wish they were or tell us they are.
Despite aggressive marketing and land-grab tactics, the greatest threat to third places comes not from the chains of pseudo-cafés but from our own homes. They’re more comfortable and, if you have enough mains sockets in your living room, entertaining than they have ever been before. There was an advertising campaign a few years ago for a video game console with the hook line “welcome to the Third Place”. It’s a moot point whether many of the target market understood what the Third Place was, but the message was familiar enough. Why get rained on, mugged or have a pint of Irish cider (with ice) spilled down your back when you can get movies on demand, get better views at the football match, race cars and shoot aliens, have dinner delivered and make a hot beverage at the flick of a stylishly curved aluminium switch?
Two words: cabin fever. We all need to go out. Spending too much time indoors can lead to feelings of loneliness, anxiety, depression and a disconnection from society. Home cinemas and coffee machines give a glossy veneer to the experience but they are little compensation for a loss of real contact with people and with the natural world. The non-profit that I work for, the Sensory Trust, spends a considerable amount of effort making it possible for people who have difficulty going out to do so. And while we’re doing this multinationals are spending the equivalent of decades (perhaps centuries) of Sensory Trust budget advertising products that will keep more of us stuck in our homes for longer.
The fact is that we rarely go to Antonio’s coffee bar just for the coffee. In fact there are third places where the awfulness of the coffee is something that unites everyone who goes there. We go to see other people, to step out of our home or work lives and remember who we are when we’re just being ourselves.
The television commercial tells us not only that we should buy the hot beverage system but that we should rejoice that Antonio’s will be empty and be forced to close, presumably so that it can be replaced by a multinational franchise who is also a client of the advertising company. Then of course we can look forward to spending more time in our homes, watching television commercials… It's not only Antonio that suffers: public space budgets are the first in the firing line when no one goes to the park.
With any luck this won’t be yet another kick in the teeth for Third Places. The hot beverage system will join the toastie maker on eBay before the year is out. Hopefully Antonio will still be there when it does.
See also:
Now, where am I going to start with this? I’ll set aside the fact that the commercial is a product of the Soho advertising machine, a place alive with coffee bars which I’m willing to bet are stuffed to the gunwales with “creative” [sic] media types. I'll also leave the unsustainable packaging aside. No, the thing that riles me most is that this is another example of big business trying to muscle in on our Third Places.
We all need a Third Place. A place like the mythical Antonio's that isn’t work and isn’t home. A place where we have a set of social contacts who are more than strangers but not quite friends. A place where we can just be ourselves – read a book, drink a coffee, chat, play chess, watch people or what ever.
The recipe for successful Third Places continually evades replication by multinationals. Third Places grow organically where people need them. Cafés and pubs, garden centres and community centres, parks and allotments. They defy multinational copycats largely because their profits and turnover are too low or non-existent. They simply don’t make enough money. Many third places are cafés, but the cafés owned by multinationals are rarely third places, no matter how much they wish they were or tell us they are.
Despite aggressive marketing and land-grab tactics, the greatest threat to third places comes not from the chains of pseudo-cafés but from our own homes. They’re more comfortable and, if you have enough mains sockets in your living room, entertaining than they have ever been before. There was an advertising campaign a few years ago for a video game console with the hook line “welcome to the Third Place”. It’s a moot point whether many of the target market understood what the Third Place was, but the message was familiar enough. Why get rained on, mugged or have a pint of Irish cider (with ice) spilled down your back when you can get movies on demand, get better views at the football match, race cars and shoot aliens, have dinner delivered and make a hot beverage at the flick of a stylishly curved aluminium switch?
Two words: cabin fever. We all need to go out. Spending too much time indoors can lead to feelings of loneliness, anxiety, depression and a disconnection from society. Home cinemas and coffee machines give a glossy veneer to the experience but they are little compensation for a loss of real contact with people and with the natural world. The non-profit that I work for, the Sensory Trust, spends a considerable amount of effort making it possible for people who have difficulty going out to do so. And while we’re doing this multinationals are spending the equivalent of decades (perhaps centuries) of Sensory Trust budget advertising products that will keep more of us stuck in our homes for longer.
The fact is that we rarely go to Antonio’s coffee bar just for the coffee. In fact there are third places where the awfulness of the coffee is something that unites everyone who goes there. We go to see other people, to step out of our home or work lives and remember who we are when we’re just being ourselves.
The television commercial tells us not only that we should buy the hot beverage system but that we should rejoice that Antonio’s will be empty and be forced to close, presumably so that it can be replaced by a multinational franchise who is also a client of the advertising company. Then of course we can look forward to spending more time in our homes, watching television commercials… It's not only Antonio that suffers: public space budgets are the first in the firing line when no one goes to the park.
With any luck this won’t be yet another kick in the teeth for Third Places. The hot beverage system will join the toastie maker on eBay before the year is out. Hopefully Antonio will still be there when it does.
See also:
The Astronaut's Guide to Interpretation
How do you feel about water? There was a time not so long ago when water was just something that came out of our taps, that we were more or less grateful for depending on our mindfulness of people for whom clean water is a rarity. Water was something we drank because we were thirsty. We boiled vegetables in it, made soup and tea, and sometimes used it to wash the car, the floor and the dog.
H2O hasn’t changed, but our perceptions of it have. Water is now something that is privately owned, talked about in headlines either because there’s not enough of it, or too much of it, or it’s in the wrong place such as your living room in Gloucestershire. Despite its best attempts, petrol is still cheaper than water on UK forecourts. We pay a premium for water that comes with a message on the bottle. This is not just water, this is water with marketing: it’ll make us perform like top athletes, or even a volcano. Stand back!
It’s nonsense of course, and most of us know it’s nonsense, yet we are so used to everything being packaged, rebranded and marketed to us that we take the marketing of water in our collective stride. Since the 1940’s industry has changed from manufacturing articles that fulfilled genuine needs to creating, then catering for, an expanding range of confected wants. These wants are created by a marketing industry specifically designed to make us feel dissatisfied with what we have. A satisfied customer, contrary to popular myth, is no use at all to the capitalist system. Western countries now spend trillions of dollars a year delivering increasingly sophisticated and pervasive messages through channels that invade every aspect of our waking lives.
“The average American adult is exposed to over 600 advertising messages in a single 24-hour period.” -- Managing Business to Business Marketing Communications, De Bonis and Peterson.”
Perhaps we have become inured to marketing messages. We no longer think about them, but are we resistant to them, or do we simply absorb them without thinking in the doctor’s surgery, the bus stop, our kitchen... everywhere?
It seems almost as though any item, water for example, no longer has a value unless it is marketed at us. The innate meaning of things has been subverted by marketing hype which has no other meaning than to make you want them. Water which, if you live in a fortunate part of the world falls freely from the sky, which once meant life, growth, survival, now means, amongst other things, health (drink two litres per day!), status (“The official water of Wimbledon”) or nothing at all (“Gives you Volcanicity!”). With this white noise of pseudo-meaning obfuscating the real meaning of something as fundamental as water, it’s not hard to imagine that perhaps this happens with other things that we might have expected to be free of marketing messages. If something doesn’t have a label that tells us it’ll make us healthier, sexier or free then it seems we are thought to be unable to judge its value for ourselves.
That’s where interpretation comes in. Interpretation is the natural and heritage world’s marketing hype. It seems we cannot be trusted to appreciate a woodland, a meadow or a piece of coastline on our own terms. We must be told why it matters, we must have the “brand relevance” forced down our throats for fear that we might miss the significance of what we are experiencing. To walk through a flower-filled meadow on a sunny early summer day means nothing unless you are aware that three hundred years ago women from the village used to bleach linen here and it is now home to a rare form of slime mould. And of course you should also know who owns, manages and protects it.
Fifty years ago it might have been enough to fall in love with a place because of the light through the trees, the sound of the river, or the laugh of the person you were with. Nowadays your stroll needs “added value” to compete in an aggressive marketplace desperate to sell you experiences.
The motivations of much interpretation are worthy. We can all benefit from a bit of extra connection with our environment and our history. Often, however, the proliferation of interpretation panels sets up a barrier to any real connection. In the same way as many gallery goers spend more time reading the labels than looking at the Monets, interpretation sets up a layer of experience between us and the direct experience of the environment. As soon as it’s interpreted, it’s packaged.
Interpretation hopes to explain the meaning of a place, but this meaning is someone else’s no matter how artfully constructed. Is laughing with your lover in a sunny field full of poppies wrong? Chances are it will feel, if not wrong then inappropriate, if you come to an interpretation panel that tells you of the bloody carnage that once occurred where you now stand. Your personal story has no chance against a pitched battle. The more interpretation that is present, the less space we have to imbue a place with our own meanings as individuals and as communities. New meanings, personal meanings, meanings relevant to now and to the future. And if we are prevented from creating our own meanings, we will never feel ownership of a place. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe an interpretation panel in a meadow is like the US flag on the moon, it’s more about who owns it than anything else.
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