Robert Sharp

A colleague of mine had a leaving party last weekend, so we all went out and got drunk. I spent most of Saturday in bed, and for the rest of the bank-holiday weekend I felt bad that I had squandered a day of my precious, finite life.

I was drinking cocktails and lager, but it is Magnus Linklater’s history lesson about Gin Lane that provides an excuse for me to link to Clay Shirky’s excellent speech on Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. Shirky’s thesis is that television did for the late 20th Century what gin did for the 18th Century - it masked the sudden and inconvenient “social surplus” that new technologies had brought:

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation… And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today… It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom.

It is an important essay that is already being discussed online, so please do go and read the whole thing. Shirky goes onto describe how we actually have a vast amount of “cognitive surplus” - that is, spare thinking time - that is currently wasted watching TV sitcoms and adverts. He rails against those who ask “where do they find the time?” innorder to mock gamers and bloggers. Shirky points out that the whole Wikipedia project took about 100 million man hours to complete. Yet the USA watches 100 million man hours of advertisements, every weekend.

So perhaps society is behaving a bit like I was over the bank-holiday. Wasting time, horizontal, unwashed, in our pajamas, watching TV… when we should be doing something more creative. New technologies are slowly allowing us to unlock our potential.

Spam-mail celebrates its 30th Anniversary this week. The first piece of mass junk e-mail was sent three decades ago, to the 393 users of the Arapnet system, by a marketeer named Gary Thuerk.

On a related note, it is more than a decade since I personally introduced the concept of spam e-mailing to the innocent readers of The Times:

Tackling Junk Mail - 28th July 1997

From Mr Robert Sharp

Dear Sir, Sir Edward Peck complains of junk mail via his fax (letter, July 19).

I believe the newest form of junk mail is that received by e-mail. I have been “on line” for a matter of days, yet I have already recieved 11 unsolicited e-mails.

While this type of intrusion is perhaps the easiest to dispose of, my hopes are dashed when I find that the eagerly awaited “new mail” is only junk mail from the United States, advertising, for example, sunglasses.

Yours etc

Robert Sharp
July 19

Re-reading that letter, I see no mention of any formula to “make her faint when she sees your enormous schlong,” so I suppose I must have been fairly innocent too.

A portrait by friend and collaborator CJ Clarke. Magic Party Place is his ongoing project on contemporary Britain.

Loving it:

The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.

But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper.

Which is odd, because it means that footage of the Free Tibet Olympic torch harassing in London, Paris or San Francisco must have squeezed past Chinese censors.

The Obama Campaign has an online map, where campaigners can track the wins and losses of the marathon primary season. Andrew Sullivan replicates it approvingly on the Daily Dish, I assume to demonstrate the popularity of the Illinois senator, who he supports.

But this is childsplay - first, because the states vary in population density, so a large swathe of one colour may be less significant than smaller pockets of another. Second, since the Democratic Primary process is no longer modelled on the winner-takes-all system for delegates, the colour of the state is less relevant. I would like to see a county-by-county map.

Many Democrats and even more internationalists will recall the dismay of seeing the electoral map turn bright red in the 2004 Presidential Election, as George W Bush crawled to re-election. I am reminded of a couple of articles I saw around that time: First, the concept of Purple States reminds us just how diverse public opinion can be, even in ’safe’ Republican States. Related to that is The Stranger’s editorial on the Urban Archipeligo, which shows how political preferences relate to the town-country divide, and shows a county-by-county breakdown of how people voted in 2004. Its the map I show British people when they enmbark on a lazy whine about “stupid Americans“.

What all these maps highlight is the divisiveness of American politics. How the the country is essentially embroiled in a bitter cultural war which began in the 1960s. That’s fine, and probably an accurate portrayal of the political landscape. However, Barack Obama’s campaign is based on the promise of reconciling the “two Americas” in a post-Bush consensus. So its odd that he, of all people, is dealing in this kind of deceptive mappery.

In the Guardian, Lyn Gardner discusses multimedia in theatre, with some kind words for my friend and collaborator Judith Adams, and for Fifty Nine Productions (of which I am a proud, if non-executive, director):

with the technology at their fingertips, answers and images can be conjured by theatre makers immediately during the rehearsal or devising process, sound can be fed directly into the ears of the audiences in pieces such as Small Metal Objects or Judith Adams’ Ghost or Clickwind

Speed and immediacy is one of the key benefits of digital technology. New ideas can be tried out immediately, and discarded or incorporated into the thing being created. The speed at which one can do this means that the train of thought is not interupted, the creative process can continue.

Earlier this year Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer of Fifty Nine Productions - who have contributed brilliant work to Katie Mitchell’s Waves and Attempts on her Life and the projection design for Warhorse - were made the National Theatre’s youngest ever associates. … From what I’ve seen of it so far, Fifty Nine’s contributions to the productions on which they collaborate, whether it is in Black Watch or the adaptation of the cartoon Alex, are integral to the production and always in service of it. But I keep seeing productions in which it appears as if playing with the technologies is the prime interest of the theatre-makers, rather than the show itself. [My links].

Previously, ideas for video and multimedia had to be planned in advance, and video artists would return days or weeks later with the ideas discussed… by which time, the creative process had moved one. Being able to quickly realize a complex idea on screen is probably also part of Fifty Nine’s success. You need quick technology, but you also need a quick mind to grasp what the director wants to see, and why. This, as much as the state-of-the-art technology, is why Leo and Mark were appointed associates at the National Theatre, earlier this year.

As the farcical torch relay reaches India, and Western political leaders fret over whether to boycott the Beijing Games, Adrian Hamilton has a cheeky route out of the impasse:

I have a suggestion for breaking out of the impasse over the issue of Tibet and the Olympics. It is for the West to make the Dalai Lama the arbiter of whether we should attend the opening ceremonies or not.

Did I mention I’d met the Dalai Lama. I did? Oh, well, sorry to have troubled you.

I saw this aged notice tatooed onto a wall in Westminster, just off Smith Square. That’s the nice thing about living in old cities - there’s a piece of history on every corner.

I wonder if the vaults are still there, or whether they have been turned into luxury, windowless apartments for rich agraphobics.

“Did you inhale?” A cliché of modern politics. Ever since Bill Clinton’s bizarre admission of not-quite-drug-use, that question has become a staple of sniggering journalists everywhere. Meanwhile, “Yes I have and yes I did” has become the boilerplate response for those politicians eager to demonstrate their flawed, human side.

Such admissions are possible because currently, the morality of such individual choices barely gets discussed. “It’s a choice I made when I was young” is the limit of the debate. The transgression is framed as a purely internal, moral choice of the individual. In a liberal, tolerant society, this is not matter for public discussion. (If it were, then another example of tweaking your reality, drinking alcohol, would be dragged into the debate too, and no one wants that). Instead, cannabis use becomes a simple public health issue. The recent furore, in March, was concerned with whether cannabis use can induce psychological problems, and therefore whether class B or C is an appropriate designation.

But there is another argument against cannabis use: It is part of a highly unpleasant and criminal supply chain. For every eighth of hash or bag of weed you buy and smoke, there is a chance that you are lining the pockets of some gangster. Sure, your local dealer is probably a gentle sort, but there is no guarantee that somewhere along the line there is not a more dangerous character who is trafficking in other things too. Heroin. People. It is noteworthy that when a politician is asked about his or her past drug-use, the question is the anodyne “did you inhale?” when it should be “did you know where it came from?” Few of them would know the answer, and “I knowingly contributed to the problem of organized crime and the exploitation of the vulnerable” is a very different mea culpa compared to the usual “I did things when I was young which I now regret.”
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I am finding the coverage of the recent gap-year crash in Ecuador rather uncomfortable. No less a broadcaster than the BBC could be found broadcasting the collapse of two grieving parents.

What is so cruel about this kind of coverage is the way in which the bereaved feel somehow obliged to co-operate with the media. The poor couple, Mr and Mrs Swann, looked like rabbits caught in headlights. But to refuse to go on TV to “pay tribute” to their daughter Indira Swann would now be seen as somehow dishonouring her memory.

All the crucial details of the incident are known. There is no wider political or social side to a tragic accident. That the roads in Ecuador are clearly very bad is undoubtedly a development issue. But the only thing that makes this a “second-day” story is the participation of the parents.

What are the chances that a news columnist will become indignant over the symbolism of this? “We are only interested in the story because they are good looking”, “gap years are the finishing school for the middle-class” etcetera. Or a mile-by-mile account of the survivors’ repatriation. Anything to print the photos of those five pretty women again.