I had meant to write a post about the Olympics opening ceremony, and what it says about Britain. That was two weeks ago. During which time, we have had pretty much the entire Olympics, and seen some fantastic performances from British athletes. There has been a predictable debate all over the media, blogs, and Twitter, about the nature of Britishness and multiculturalism. Although such subjects are a staple of this blog, I do rather feel as if most of the things I believe have been said by others elsewhere! I consider this to be a good thing – it means there is a growing consensus in favour of the kind of diversity I believe in.
There is still work to be done however. In particular, I am not sure how in-depth the conversation about to Multiculturalism has been. On super Saturday, when Jessica Ennis, Greg Rutherford and Mo Farah all won gold medals, there was a lot of *literally* skin-deep chat. “Ennis is mixed race. Rutherford is ginger. Farah is black. Look at our diversity! Up yours, BNP!” This feels shallow. What I did not see much of, was a discussion of how their diverse backgrounds had contributed to the success of the athletes. At its best, celebrating multiculturalism is not just about identifying difference. It is about showing how those different traits, faiths, and cultural practices, all contribute to ‘make the man’ (or woman). It is not enough to simply point out that Farah is a Muslim; one has to ask whether his faith has contributed to his astonishing success. And if it has – how? Likewise with Greg Rutherford’s upbringing, or Jessica Ennis experience.
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Category: Diary (Page 113 of 301)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
It’s Wednesday evening and we’re on the Victoria Line. A young man strums a guitar and sings while his friend harmonises. Their refrain is “You mean the world to me” and I don’t know whether that’s a popular song in the charts that I have never heard, or of it is their own composition. I hope the latter.
The train pulls into Stockwell Station, where Jean Charles De Menezes was shot dead by CO5 officers. It is also the interchange with the Northern Line, so we get up to leave.
In quick succession, two images drift into my eye-line and draw my attention for the same reason. First, there is a photograph in the Evening Standard of an athlete in Team GB colours, her surname pinned to her chest. It is Lynsey Sharp, the Scot who has qualified for the final of the 800 metres.
Lynsey Sharp at Loindon 2012, after qualifying for the 800 metre final.
Then, as I step off the train and walk towards the tunnel to the other platforms, I double-take at a crude A4 photocopy taped to the tiles. It announces the disappearance of 12 year old Tia Sharp. She is a Londoner and has been missing for six days, but these facts have not penetrated my consciousness until now.
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I’ve uploaded a few images to Flickr of the Basketball arena and the Olympic Park locale. All fairly generic – I am sure millions of other people have taken exactly the same images.
I think the strangest example of compulsive documentation is the bizarre need we feel to photograph events that are definitely going to be documented anyway. The athletes filming the Opening Ceremony from within the parade last week is a great example of this. I was very taken with this at the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Games and took a really bad photo of the athletes filming the crowd during that ceremony.
And I’ve noted this oddness before, when thousands took photos of the 2008 Presidential inauguration, Malia Obama among them. In these actions, (entirely superfluous in the age of the mass media), we see the audience authenticating their own experience. “I was there and I took my own pictures to prove it.”. It’s the digital equivalent of picking a pebble off a beach – banal in itself, but imbued with meaning and sentiment for the one who took it. Continue reading
https://twitter.com/lukewaterfield/status/231319214496043008
I was at the Olympic Park earlier this week, and for technical reasons I was unable to share this fact via my social networks. As Luke says above, this absence of the need to login and share is indeed ‘freedom’, but nevertheless the unease took a few minutes to wear off.
This feeling should not be written off as mere addiction. The desire to tweet and share and document is not always a sign that we are slaves to technology. As well as being a means to share, these technologies are also simple aide memoirs, reminding us where we read something, or when we went somewhere and who we spent time with. The value of such archives depends, to a large extent, on their completeness (this is also true for a lot of digital art like timelapse montages, which are another type of archive). In my senile years I anticipate being grateful that I compiled a comprehensive diary of my activities.
https://twitter.com/dance4joseph/status/231323499057266688
For me, the main unease generated by my missing smart phone was not that I could no longer (over)share, but that I would not be able to fill the regular moments of downtime that city living always presents. The time spent waiting for a bus or on a platform is no bother when you have a near-infintie supply of quick and quirky messages to read. Kipling’s penultimate stanza “If you can fill an unforgiving minute / With sixty second’s worth of distance run” sticks in my head. Does the tweeting count as a useful way to spend that “unforgiving minute”?