December 2004 Archives

Little Miss Matched

My five-month old daughter has just been given a great pair of Lamaze Foot Finder socks. As well as being very colourful, the two insects on the tips of the toes contain rattles. They're supposed to stimulate development, and they were an immediate success with our little girl.

I wonder if this is a sign of things to come, however? Little Miss Matched is apparently a big hit with 8 to 12 year olds in the US!

The best book review that I read this year was published in the London Review of Books. In Mao meets Oakeshott, John Lanchester reviewed Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain by Ferdinand Mount.

Here's the blurb:

In this provocative and ruthlessly frank book, Ferdinand Mount argues that there is a new class divide in Britain which is just as vicious and hard to get rid of as the old one. Through acute observation - drawing on every aspect of life from soap operas, speech patterns and gardening to education and the distribution of wealth - he demolishes the illusion that we live in a classless society and shows how the worst-off in Britain today are more culturally deprived than their parents or grandparents.

I have to admit straight away that I haven't read Mind the Gap, but I found Lanchester's review so interesting that I've read it more than once.

There are just so many observations in it that ring true to me, beginning with these two sentences from the first paragraph:

Britain produces an extraordinary amount of commentary, in print, on television and on radio; so much that the production of opinion can seem to be our dominant industry, the thing we are best at and most take to.

The problem with our public culture is not that it is low-grade: it is that it is fluent, clear, coherent, often vividly expressed, and more or less entirely free of fresh intellectual content. You can go whole weeks reading the broadsheet press without encountering a new idea; you can listen to hundreds of hours of broadcast debate and encounter nothing but received wisdoms.

And then there's The crisis is related to the fact that our culture now values only two things, money and celebrity, and the poor by definition don't have either.

It's a great review of what sounds like a really interesting, if depressing, book. When I re-read it recently, however, one section in particular stood out:

Our Downers - to use Mount's preferred term for the losers in the British class system - are, by world standards, culturally impoverished. It is difficult to be precise and non-subjective about this, but there seems to be a genre of working-class life in England which has no equivalent in the rest of the developed world. The deprivation in question is not material: we're not talking about child labour, or anything which by global standards - the standards of the four billion people who live on less than $4 a day - is considered absolute poverty. It is difficult to quantify this deprivation, though Mount does have one or two good examples, such as the fact that 42 per cent of all burglaries happen to 1 per cent of all homes, principally those belonging to the poor and/or single parents: so the less you have, the more likely you are to have it stolen.

That last statement is in direct contrast to the reporting of recent events here in London. As this month's Economist London Briefing pointed out:

The murder of a respected City financier in late November shocked Londoners. John Monckton, a 49-year-old fund manager, was stabbed to death by two burglars who forced their way into his £3m home in Chelsea, a smart neighbourhood. His wife, Homeyra, was severely injured. Police arrested two men in connection with the killing on December 14th. A third suspect was arrested and bailed last month.

This was the latest in a string of violent assaults on householders in London's richer parts. In October, Robert Symons, a 45-year-old-teacher, died in similar circumstances in his home in Chiswick. And in September, a retired paediatrician and his wife were stabbed to death in a gated estate in Highgate Hill. Violent crime is worsening across the capital, particularly knife-crime in some boroughs, according to crime statistics.

So what's the lesson in all this? The less you have, the more likely you are to have it stolen; but the more you had, the more likely it'll appear in the press.

Here's an interesting story: Bloug Entry (Dec 02, 2004: Using Search Log Analysis to Predict the Future).

It seems the Financial Times analyses it web site search statistics to identify unpublished stories that interest its readers, and the editorial staff then consider running stories on those subjects.

This approach to news-making obviously has significant implications for the traditional definition of "news worthy", and gives new meaning to the suggestion that the media simply "give people what they want to hear".

Well, I thought it was interesting!

News of the Caribbean island of Dominica has been like waiting for a bus. Nothing for years, and then three items come along all in a row.

The first reference to the nature island of the Caribbean was on television a few of weeks ago. BBC2 included footage of the island in its documentary series on family history, Who do you think you are?, when featuring the news presenter Moira Stuart. Some of Ms Stuart's maternal ancestors came from Dominica.

Then on Wednesday BBC Radio 4's programme Woman's Hour reported on the Dominican author and politician Phyllis Shand Allfrey. It seems some of her short stories have been republished.

Finally on Friday Woman's Hour interviewed Baroness Scotland of Asthal QC, who's been declared Parliamentarian of the Year. Not only does she have family history in Dominica, but she's also a member of the Bar of Antigua and the Commonwealth of Dominica.

With all that out of the way, it's probably safe to assume that we won't hear anything more about Dominica for the rest of the decade.

The Londonist, a "website about London", believes that:

You don't have to live in London long before you get offered a pair of bargain "high spec" speakers out of the back of a white van. It's like a coming-of-age ritual...once you've been offered some dodgy stereo equipment you can truly call yourself A Londoner.

Well, that's exactly what happened to me once while I was walking along Holland Park Avenue. I'd no idea it was a scam, let alone such a common one! Of course, I'm far too straight-laced to even consider such an offer, but I also had two pairs of stereo speakers that I wasn't using, so no harm was done.

Guess I'm a Londoner now though!

This week's Economist magazine contains an interesting article (subscription required) on the survival of high street bookshops despite the increasing success of their online rivals.

It seems bookshops were expected to disappear once we'd all switched to Amazon:

"Everyone got the internet wrong when they assumed it would replace retail," says James Heneage, the boss of Ottakar's. "It's simply a new channel." That may be a comforting thought for other [high street] retailers as Christmas approaches.

Of course, Marshall McLuhan wouldn't have been surprised. In 1964 he wrote:

"...it is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium. It is only today that industries have become aware of the various kinds of business in which they are engaged. When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with clear vision. The General Electric Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric light bulbs and lighting systems. It has not yet discovered that, quite as much as AT&T, it is in the business of moving information."

From Understanding media: the extensions of man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.)

From Fast Company | The 6 Myths Of Creativity:

5. Competition Beats Collaboration

There's a widespread belief, particularly in the finance and high-tech industries, that internal competition fosters innovation. In our surveys, we found that creativity takes a hit when people in a work group compete instead of collaborate. The most creative teams are those that have the confidence to share and debate ideas. But when people compete for recognition, they stop sharing information. And that's destructive because nobody in an organization has all of the information required to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.

I knew it all along.