It’s old news now, but Prime Minister David Cameron was asked on a late night US tv show if he knew what Magna Carta meant in English. He didn’t and had to bluff (Guardian). An acquaintance told me about an overseas visitor who thought that Magna Carter was the lady in the green dress in…More
Interpretive communities
It’s so easy now to disseminate ideas on the Internet, and to broadcast your own particular claim to being the originator of an idea. On the other hand, the sheer scale of online textual and pictorial profligacy diminishes the authority of claims to originality. Digital social networks amplify the difficulty we have in identifying the…More
Making friends
People don’t attract enemies. Nor do they collect them. They make enemies. Enemies aren’t out there, pre-existing, like wasps or storm clouds. Enemies are manufactured by our actions and circumstances. It takes a concerted effort to surround yourself with enemies. Enemies are like friends in this respect. We make friends. We would probably not ask,…More
Bodies in motion
After two weeks of warm up, followed by seventeen days of recovery, came the real olympics, where applause and cheers were offered up for personal life triumphs, rather than for just winning on the track. The ordinary Olympics prepared the way, and put people in the mood for the Power-olympics. The other mood clinchers for…More
Audience disengagement
How to alienate an audience: forget the name of your host, be indiscrete, criticise the Olympics. These were Mitt Romney’s gaffs on his visit to the UK in July (Guardian), and reported as a “gift” to Barack Obama, who claimed in his speech on Thursday that his rival “might not be ready for diplomacy with…More
Spem in Alium
Thanks to Kindles and e-readers you can read anything at home, at work, on the train, or the bus without embarrassment. No one need ever see the book’s cover. Paper books can be left lying around the house for others to pick up. Not so with electronic books. Reading really has become a private affair.…More
Situationist International and the mood of the times
In an articulate concluding statement at Pussy Riot’s trial in Moscow this week, one of their members Maria Alyokhina invoked Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Guy Debord (1931-1994). The reference to show trials, menace and bureaucracy out-of-control in Kafka’s The Trial is obvious. Debord’s writing seems to be available more freely online than that of other…More
We are all entertainers
Entertainment is everywhere, especially in Edinburgh during Festival season, when the streets are peppered with performers, handbill distributors, costumed actors scuttling from A to B, and late-running Royal Scots Dragoon guards. In an interesting essay of 2002 on entertainment and the Internet, film theorist Richard Dyer noted how entertainment was even then fusing with everyday…More
How the Internet kills curiosity
NASA successfully landed its latest robotic vehicle on Mars 6 August, 2012, which is also the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I found that fact while browsing the Internet on the theme of curiosity. The coincidence works best if you go with Greenwich Mean Time rather than Pacific Daylight Time … another Internet-discovered factlet.…More
Melancholy and media
In an intellectually astute observation about his own Olympic success, cyclist Bradley Wiggins said, “There is almost slight melancholy. I realised on the podium that that is it for me. I don’t think anything is going to top that. To win the tour and then win Olympic gold in London at 32. I’ll look back in…More