Spending time snowboarding in Verbier, time seems to pass very quickly (nothing to do with the pace I set on the slopes, which is still decidedly escargoutesque), so it seems that I neglected to post a ‘diary’ entry for last week. Oh, and the week before. So here is a ramble on things I have done or stories that have caught my eye in the past 14/21 days (or so). Problem is, when spending the day snowboarding, and the night researching travelling on the web, there aren’t ten things to talk about. Maybe I will think of some more over the next few days and just add them in…
Lazy Sunday Afternoon’s, supping on a pint, face glued to a 13 inch screen
Global multi-media conglomerate monster News International have announced that they will start to charge for access to their websites for The Times and The Sunday Times from June. This is a major step in a new business model, which is looking to address the fall of newspaper sales over the past decade or so, but I wonder how successful it will be.
This is one of those cases which makes me question whether I am truly part of the ‘ipod’ generation or a Luddite who would not really have been bothered if technology hadn’t moved past the items on which I first consumed film and music – video and tape cassettes. Yes I own an ipod, (well actually three of them, although I should mention that one was a corporate gift from the launch of Trump Tower which I worked on), a Mac, a Play Station 3 enabling me to watch films on Blu-Ray, a projector and several other such hi-tech pieces of apparatus. But it’s very rare that I am ‘an early adopter’. I didn’t use the internet until I was 18 (in 1999, a good three years after usage had become widespread and commonplace); I didn’t get an email account until I went to University later that same year; I (foolishly) boycotted the ipod when it first came out opting instead for the iriver because the Daily Mail scaremongered me into thinking that the ipod’s white headphones would make me more susceptible to being mugged; I was very late in signing up to Facebook and I still do not have the foggiest how to use Twitter and can confidently proclaim that I will never use it. But then, I said the same about getting an Ipod, a Mac and Facebook so who knows when I may stop writing such long-winded bumph and start writing in 140 characters or less? Last week, Apple (a company which I am now, against my will, a disciple of – Steve Jobs being the technology equipment of Willy Wonka) launched its latest best-new-thing, the ipad. A convert to Apple I may be, but I do not see myself buying an ipad. I just do not see the benefit of an oversized ipod that doesn’t do all the things I need it to do. On the other hand, as history has (allegedly) shown, an apple can tempt the best of men so let’s give it 6 months and see if I bite.
When reading the news about having to pay for access to the Times website, my immediate thought was that this will not catch on. When I say that, I do not mean that people will not pay for the access, but rather that it will not replace buying a newspaper. Is there any better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than in a pub garden reading 5 kilogrammes of rainforest? Part of the reading experience is the texture of the paper, the smudges of black ink on the thumb, flicking through pages until a story or a picture catches the attention and you delve deeper. Reading news online is just not the same experience. And a newspaper has a structure that we have become used to – we know how to consume it. A quick look at the front page for the main story of the day then it’s a jump to the sport at the back for an in-depth browse before returning to the front of the paper to see the key stories (depending on what newspaper it is, this may be via a saucy glance at Zoe, 23, from Brighton), and then a very brief look at the business news, before checking that a sports page has not been missed. This can never be replicated online.
Nevertheless, there is no denying that the newspaper industry is in dire straits and perhaps this is the step forward that the industry needed. It took too many years for the record industry to recognise the need to adapt and it seems that the only answer that the film industry has to minimise piracy is to bring in 3D (works for Avatar but can you honestly say that The Godfather would be better if they retrofit it to make bullets fly at you during Sonny’s death). The instant access to the latest news that online gives us has transformed the way we gather knowledge but will we pay for the privilege? Only if all sites are accessible by giving over your credit card details, which is some way off, if at all. Of course, News International will be relying on the fact that readers are loyal and will not swap to a competitor’s free product and they have stated that they will be adding extra content to their sites to ensure that the £1 a day is worth it. But I would rather spend that money on a physical paper and then use other online news providers for my instant hit.
Of course, when I read the news, I was browsing BBC Online and not reading it in print, so maybe I will be proven wrong.
May 6th looms – but does everybody know?
Sitting on the terrace of a bar/café here in Verbier, I overheard the following conversation between three English guys who we shall call John, Jack and Ignorant Dave (who had revealed in an earlier conversation that they were 29 years old):
John: So Dave, are you going to vote?
Ignorant Dave: What for?
John: Brilliant! In the election
Ignorant Dave: Is there an election? What in England?
John: Yes Dave
Ignorant Dave: I didn’t realise.
John: How could you not?
Jack: Be fair John, he’s been in Verbier for the past few months
Ignorant Dave: Yeah. Maybe I will vote
John: Who for?
Ignorant Dave: Probably not. Can’t be bothered. They’re all tossers anyway
This delightful scene played out in full glorious technicolour before me, raised two questions. 1) How the Gordon Brown could he not know there was an election? and 2) Will I be voting?
Yes, our ignorant Dave may have been in Verbier for the past few months but surely SURELY he would still become aware of an election taking place in his own country? Okay, it was only announced a few weeks ago, but its not like it hasn’t been on the cards for months. All of which must mean he does not look at nor listen to any form of news outlet, be it television, radio, newspaper or online news page. Fair enough, he may not be able to watch British television or listen to British radio (although I imagine that Swiss television news will have made at least a passing reference to the UK election) but as a 29 year old Brit living in Verbier, there is a fair chance that he has both the wherewithal and the ability to access the internet (in reference to this week’s first top story above, being able to access UK news when you live overseas is one big advantage of online news sites). How could he NOT have read about it? Does this mean that in all his time in Verbier he has not once looked at the UK news, or come to think of it, any news? Is it just me, or is that ridiculous? How could you not want to know what is going on in this world? I don’t mean to sound judgmental here: I just find it baffling that someone of my age, someone who is almost certainly from a fairly well off background in the UK (how do I make this leap of assumption you ask? He is living in Verbier for at least a few months a place where it costs £7 for a pint of beer) and therefore someone who has almost certainly been given the opportunity of a reasonable education, someone therefore like me, has not any ANY!! interest in what is happening outside of the admittedly pleasant mountainous walls of this little part of Switzerland.
Sadly, even though he now knows that there is an election to decide on who will run his country for the next five or so years, Ignorant Dave will not be voting, partly because “they’re all tossers”. Tossers they may be my vacant friend, but they are the only tossers we have so we better make sure that the best tosser gets the job. And at least we have a choice of which tosser will rule our green and pleasant land. And isn’t this the point? It is a well-worn one, but people around the world even in this ‘modern age’ are still putting themselves and their family in physical danger just to cast a ballot , whilst millions of others don’t even get the chance to do this. One of the responsibilities of living in a democracy is surely to use the privilage that we have been given and to get out of bed, get down to the voting booth and place our cross in one of the boxes on offer. The fact that Dave’s view is one held by a fair amount of Brits at the moment, largely due to the constant desire that our MPs seem to have to see their faces on the front page of the tabloids in some scandal or other, is not the point. Is the Australia system, where it is a legal obligation for everyone to vote and if you do not, you are subject to a fine, a better one? I am not sure, but at least it would mean that more people would vote for our next Prime Minister than who is going to be Andrew Lloyd Webber’s next Dorothy.
So who will I be voting for? I really don’t know. And to be honest, right now, I am not that much ‘better’ than Dave, as I don’t actually know how I can vote. Having lived out of the country for five years, I am not sure that I am on the electoral register. Add to that the fact that I will likely be in some far flung darkest corner of Bolivia on May 6th, and it all does seem a bit of a bother. But I can’t have the reaction that I found myself having to the overheard conversation above, and then not cast my own vote. So that is my first step.
Thankfully there is not a wine list to look at
Imagine going into a beautiful restaurant and being presented with the menu, glancing over the first page and finding that everything causes your mouth to salivate thus causing an impossible dilemma over what to choose. Then you turn the page and find another 20 equally compelling items. Turn the page again and the same. And again. And again. Then you realise that the menu is 100,000 pages long and the waiter tells you this is only the first ‘chapter’ and there is a store room the size of Wales bursting at the walls with the other chapters. For me, seeing as I struggle with a menu of three choices, and always have to know what everyone I am dining with is ordering before I place my request, this is the ultimate nightmare.
But this is what it has felt like over the past few weeks when I have been looking on the web for where to visit in South America – my next continent of choice when we leave Verbier. It used to be that when picking a holiday, you would go into the high street travel agent, pick up a few brochures on your chosen destination, spend some time with the agent and leave an hour later knowing what you would be doing each day of your holiday. Now, with the internet, the choices are almost literally endless. And it is addictive. When you find something you like, you can’t stop thinking that if you just look for 30 more minutes, you will find something a little bit better. Of course, the majority of travel sites are promotional so it is hard to get a balanced view and means you end up thinking every place is amazing.
Knowing very little about South and Central America makes it even tougher – I don’t even know which country to visit and yes, the internet makes each seem like they would be the amazing experience that I am looking for. Do I go for Argentina, Peru, Chile or Bolivia? And how about Brazil? Or do I go to Central America, and if so, should it be Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico or salsa and mojitos in Cuba? Do I spend loads of time in one place, trying to get under the skin of it, or cram in loads of countries so I don’t miss out? Can I really go to South America and not go to Machu Pichu? What about the alliterative wonder of Lake Titicaca? Add to the bottomless well of the internet the recommendations of friends – all of whom say “you must” go to this place, but all contradicting the others - and there is just way too much choice.
With only a few weeks to go, I am very torn on what to do. I have applied to volunteer in an orphanage in the rainforests in north-east Bolivia but following sending in the application forms, have not heard from them for 10 days. I know that they have to drive quite a long way to get internet access and rarely check it, but it is proving a little frustrating, as all other plans are on hold until I hear back from them. Following three or four weeks there, I plan to fly up to Mexico to meet with Becs as it seems this is the only place where both I and her can get to (she coming from New York and on her way to Australia). After that I will travel for three to four weeks but don’t know whether to stay in Central America (perhaps Costa Rica) or head back to the Chile/Peru/Bolivia area.
Here’s hoping that when I do finally make my choice, I don’t find myself in a sweltering latino café with a 20 page menu to choose from. I’ll be happy with a chicken fajita and a mojito. Or should I have a beer? Or maybe a Rum. Is the Rum good here?
The global village – but is it social?
Another internet related story here – last month for the first time Facebook overtook Google as the most visited website in the US. So people spend more time (or is it that more people spend time?) using the internet for social networking than in the pursuit of knowledge (or searching for porn?). Perhaps this means that we would rather connect with friends then look at naked women, men, or whatever else takes people’s fancy in their darkened, blue lit, me time? If so, that is arguably a good thing.
Facebook has been one of the true internet successes and has many positives. But even though it may mean we spend more time communicating with friends and acquaintances, has the quality of communication decreased? Here in Verbier I have spent a fair amount of time on the internet, and a good proportion of that on Facebook. The normal order of events when I wake is 1) get out of bed, 2) turn the computer on, 3) turn the kettle on, 4) return to computer and log into hotmail, 5) log into Facebook, 6) log into bbc.co.uk/news, 7) make a cup of tea, 8) browse the three sites listed above. I would say I spend 15 minutes a day on Facebook, which increases if I have received emails on it. A lot of my emails to and from friends now take place over Facebook rather than via hotmail, and I enjoy seeing what my friends have been up to. Often I will also talk to a friend via Facebook messenger (which seems to have replaced Windows messenger in popularity). But communicating this way is not as good as a phone call (or obviously a face-to-face chat). The conversations, by the nature of the medium, are stilted, and I often flit between a conversation with one person and one with another, looking at a web page, or maybe looking at the television (and I am pretty sure the person I am ‘talking’ to, is doing the same). Written conversation is far less fluid than verbal conversation. There is a flexible beauty to verbal conversation, which tends to flit between subjects, often coming back to an earlier subject far later in the chat, with many ‘topics’ not coming to a clear conclusion – it is a shared construct between two or more people where we are the artists, improvising a piece of intangible and transient art. We pick up different meanings in the intonation, non-verbal clues such as laughs, snorts, the volume of different words, stresses on phrases. A verbal conversation has far more warmth, depth and emotion to it. I say all of this because I sense that we are having less verbal conversations due to the advent of social networking, emails and text messages, and I think that we are losing something because of it. People seem to prefer to text or email rather than to pick up the phone, and so a two-way conversation becomes a one-way communication, a statement rather than a fluid exchange of ideas and thoughts.
Further, do Facebook and other social networking sites fool us into believing that we have more friends than we really do? A study by Professor Robin Dunbar found that there is a finite number of people that we can maintain stable relationships with (ie you know who they are and how they fit into your social world and vice versa), and that number is 150. The study came about when Professor Dunbar found during his studies on apes and primates that an ape’s society numbered no more than 150. Dunbar wondered if this applied to humans and found that the villages listed in the Doomsday Book were all of a size of about 150, and that the sizes of villages in the 18th century were of the same size. Dunbar believes that this is historically (ie in the long, distant evolutionary past) to do with the pressures to have cohesive communities and also that the limit is due to the size of our brain – we can not handle more relationships than 150. He took this further by looking at social networking sites, predominantly Facebook, and found that the average amount of friends we have on such sites is between 100-150. Further, Dunbar believes that those who have more than 150 friends on Facebook are not actively engaged to that amount of people.
I have 275 friends on Facebook but would estimate that half of them I have never written to and not spoken to for at least more than a year (some for more than 10 years). What if Facebook asked us to classify our ‘Friends’ into three categories?:
1) Friends,
2) Acquaintances,
3) Past Acquaintances.
How many would we have in each category?
Or how about four categories based on how you will feel when you are told that they have died:
1) ‘I will go to his/her funeral and almost certainly cry’,
2) ‘I will go to his/her funeral because it feels like I should’,
3) ‘I will not go to his/her funeral but do feel a pang of sadness
4) Who?
From a quick look at my friends list on Facebook, I would estimate that there are about 45 in the first category, 50 in the last, and the rest in the middle two. There are at least eight ‘friends’ who I have absolutely no idea who they are.
So, not counting the 50 in the last category, I do have over 150 ‘friends’, but have I really ‘socialised’ with them in the past year, five years or even ten years? And if I have done (and I include in this the act of sending a simple message), what was the quality of the interaction?
Ben Fisher, a friend who I first met in Birmingham and then moved to Dubai with, used to joke that he had a list of 100 friends and each time he formed a new friendship, he had to delete one of the 100. This is actually not a bad idea. Why don’t we treat ‘friends’ like we are supposed to treat clothes – if we haven’t seen/worn them for a period of time, discard them? I think the answer is two fold – firstly, we all like to think that we have a large number of friends, and secondly because we hold on to some friendships due to nostalgia. Who doesn’t think fondly of the friends that they had when they were 10? Who doesn’t remember the friend that they first got drunk or high with? And who doesn’t want to hold on to the university years. But in reality, it is a melancholic part of life that some friendships do, for what ever reason, fade into the ether, becoming just that – an element of nostalgia that reminds us of past times. And rather than pour energies into trying to keep these flickering flames alight by once every four years sending that friend a one line message on Facebook, are we not better to invest our time and energy into the 10, 25 or 100 people closest to us? Because its likely in this Facebook world that we now live that if we don’t, then they won’t, and all we will be left with is 150 people, represented by a small photo on a computer screen, sending us an occasional one line message.
Wouldn’t they have to be smarter than the average bear?
The US Defense department recently revealed some of the suggestions which members of the public have submitted to it, via its website. These include:
- using trained sniffer-bears to hunt down and bring Osama bin Laden to justice because “bears have scent detection that is far superior to bloodhounds. Trained bears with GPS and day/night cameras around their necks might be able to hunt down the scent of bin Laden”. And how should the trained bears get into Afghanistan (forgetting the fact noone knows whether bin Laden is actually in Afghanistan)? “Overnight parachute some bears into areas he may be”
and
- a new theory about 9/11: “Has anyone at the Department of Defense noticed that the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11, and that when you dial emergency services in the US you dial 911? Is so, is this merely a coincidence?”
I read about this in The Guardian, but what the Guardian writer didn’t point out was that some equally bizarre methods and theories have been put into action. Some of these are discussed in ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’ a book by Jon Ronson, that was recently made into a film. I haven’t actually seen the film nor read the book but did hear a few interviews with the writer. The book examines connections between paranormal military programs and psychological techniques being used for interrogation in the War on Terror. Such methods have, in the past, included:
- using the theme tune of Barney & Friends as a torture device
- a military uniform that includes loudspeakers that would emit ‘indigenous music and words of peace’
- and (hence the title), trying to create a ‘super soldier’ who can stop a goat’s heart simply by giving it an intense gaze. Such ‘super soldiers’ refer to themselves as Jedi Warriors, because the thinking about their occult superpowers dates back to early Star Wars days, when post-Vietnam, the military would try anything to find a new source of power
Is the Pope Catholic? Yes. But he isn’t exactly PR savvy
Somehow managing to out goof Tiger Woods in the PR savvy stakes this past few weeks has been the Pope. Or rather the Vatican Church. I am not going to write too much about this as I can’t pretend to have read up on the subject to any deep level, and I feel such a subject deserves that before I pass comment, but in brief… the Catholic Church has made a number of blunders recently in the (just) furore surrounding the unbelievable level of child abuse that has taken place by priests in the past few decades. The latest came straight from the at best naïve, at worst bigoted, but certainly poorly judged mouth of the Vatican’s Secretary of State who blamed homosexuality for the abuse of minors and not the Church’s celibacy.
I have some pretty strong views on this whole matter and also have some unanswered moral questions but I want to wait until I can give the matter more thinking time before I comment on it here. In the meantime, lets hope someone with a little bit of PR savvyness speaks to the Pope and the other Vatican hierarchy and suggests they consider where they put the blame for these horrendous sins – at least in public.
This week’s cultural delights
Book: ‘This Bleeding City’ by Alex Preston
Films: The Hangover
TV: Masterchef, Entourage 3, Over the Rainbow (shit, I had to include that as I am trying to keep this diary honest), Curb Your Enthusiasm 7
Music: Snowboard Playlist including Artic Monkeys, Arcade Fire, Ben Folds, The Bravery, Coldplay, Counting Crows. Doves, Editors, Empire of the Sun, Faker, Fratellis. Groove Armada, Hard-Fi. Jason Mraz, Kaiser Chiefs, Kasabian, Killers, Kings of Leon, Kooks, Libertines. Modest Mouse, Morrissey, Mr Hudson and Library, Paulo Nutini
