The print and TV news media is full of the highly visual tragedy of the Costa Concordia, run aground and capsized in the Mediterranean.
Describing the chaos of the evacuation, survivors have likened their experience to the film Titanic.
You get this a lot with disasters, accidents and traumatic experiences. “It was like a movie” say those who were there.
It is a description that grates, however, because those movies in question are attempting to depict a real life incident. So of course any given real-life carnage is going to be “like a movie” because those movies are trying to be likereal-life accidents!
A less traumatic example might be when a model or movie star is described as being ‘sculptural’ or ‘like a sculpture’. Well, of course they are, because the sculptor models his artwork on precisely those people! Its a back-to-front metaphor. Taken to the extreme, one might describe Harrison Ford by saying “he looks like Indiana Jones” or “he looks like Han Solo.”
Yes, yes, I know we describe things via metaphor, and movies are metaphors. But to my mind “it was like a movie” still feels inadequate description of a real-life scene.
Category: Diary (Page 125 of 300)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
In a paywalled Times article this time last week, Hugo Rifkind highlighted our loss of the communal Christmas TV moment. EastEnders can never achieve the dizzy ratings heights of the 1980s, Eric and Ernie are dead, and even the numbers for Her Majesty The Queen’s Christmas message are in decline. Rifkind blames the spread of new viewing technologies as the cause of this: A plethora of channels; asynchronous viewing options like Sky+, TiVo, and iPlayer; and the alternatives presented by DVDs and YouTube.
It is interesting that despite this decline, new technology can provide a facsimile of the old, communal TV viewing experience. Instead of discussing an episode over the water-cooler or at the school gates the following morning, we all have a ‘second screen’ and discuss it in real time over Twitter. This is not a particularly original observation, but I mention it because it is Twitter that tells me just how universally popular is Sherlock, the second series of which began last weekend, with Episode 2 to be aired later this evening.
Hilariously, given the above paragraph, I did not actually watch the first episode ‘live’ – instead I caught up later in the week via iPlayer. That doesn’t detract from how popular the show seems to be, at least among the connected Twitterati.
There are plenty of explanations for the success. The writing is excellent and funny. Actor Benedict Cumberbatch exudes an autistic confidence that is true to Conan Doyle’s original character. Mysteries and puzzles are always the most popular stories (c.f. the perennial dominance of detective stories over Lit Fic) and the Sherlock series adheres to the rules of a good detective story, presenting all the clues to the audience as they are presented to the sleuth himself.
However, I think it is the representation of technology, and the visual choices inspired by technology, which make the thing feel so contemporary. Holmes receives text messages and interacts with Lestrade on a mobile phone. Dr Watson has a blog, and the villainess of Series 2, Ep. 1 had her own Twitter account (both of which, as is obligatory these days, also exist in the real world and keep up the conceit). However, it is not just that the characters use technology that makes the show interesting, but how the director integrates that into the visual style. Sherlock employs the popular technique of overlaying motion graphics onto the action. It is method made easy by new digital editing tools (see the opening scene of Stranger Than Fiction with Will Ferrell for an ostentatious example of the genre, as is Fifty Nine Productions’ work in Two Boys at the ENO). In Sherlock, the subtle use of this style makes the technology seem fully integrated into the way the characters view the world. The text messages flow past and through Sherlock, he barely has to look at his handset. I think it mirrors the way most of us live, with our eyes flitting between the screen and reality so quickly that it is sometimes difficult to remember how exactly a particular piece of information came to us. It certainly represents the way a large audience segment are experiencing the show. Are they watching Sherlock, or are they watching #Sherlock? Both.
Labour MP Diane Abbott is in hot water, after some remarks on twitter that some have characterised as racist:
White people love their divide and rule. We should not play their game. #tacticasoldascolonialism
This has prompted a predictable backlash, with Tory and Lib Dem MPs demanding she resign from Labour’s front bench, and Ed Miliband ensuring she make a swift apology.
I find myself having mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it can be read as straight prejudice. Swap ‘white’ for ‘black’ or ‘Muslim’ and the tweet would certainly appear classically racist.
However, I think there is an element of context that is missing here. When I read that later Abbott posted a clarification, claiming she was referring to colonialism, I was not surprised (her original tweet had a hashtag about colonialism, a fact not reported in the mainstream media). When she said ‘white people’ in the original tweet, I read it in precisely those terms. In the context of race relations and Black History I can see how ‘white people’ could (and should) be read as meaning The Established Elite. As such, when I read the tweet, I did not consider it directed at or referring to an avowed white person such as myself. Thinking about it now, Abbott could actually have written ‘men’ instead of ‘white people’ and I would have been similarly ambivalent, despite my also being a confirmed man, too.
In my head, I know that Abbott is being racist, because sweeping over-generalisations are the definition of racism. But in my heart, I am simply not offended. This might be purely because I am a particularly self-centred and over-confident individual, but I don’t think so. Instead, I think the answer lies somewhere in the fact that white people (or men, or tall people, or heterosexuals, or English people, or middle-class people, or Southerners, or any of the other politically favourable groups to which I am lucky enough to belong) are simply not used to being discriminated against in this manner.
The confidence that comes from being politically ‘privileged’ in this way, the confidence that comes from having pretty much every part of your identity affirmed and protected by the culture and the system, affords a certain immunity, on two fronts.
First, an immunity to actually being offended. A mental block prevents the tall white middle-class heterosexual English man from considering the possibility that someone might be disparaging about him. “Surely there must be some mistake?” not “There they go again.”
Second – and this is the crux of the matter – there is a confidence that such sweeping generalisations will not actually harm me in any way. Being in part of the, shall we say, “preferred group” (which is not always a demographic majority), I know that the culture and the political system will ensure such ad hominems do not adversely affect my life, short term or long term.
This is therefore a difference between black-on-white racism and the more traditional white-on-black racism, or modern equivalents like, say, tabloid-on-Muslim racism. In the former case, the prejudicial statements simply aren’t as harmful. In the latter cases, they do much more damage because the society and the culture is not orientated to defend the subject of the abuse. Likewise with sexism, where the culture reinforces the narrative of male superiority. In this context, the ‘chav’ prejudice, so wonderfully described by Owen Jones, is extremely interesting. The targets of the racism are white, but it does have long term negative effects on the targets. Likewise with disparaging remarks about the Irish in decades past.
But I cannot ascribe a comparable vulnerability to the targets of Abbott’s ire, who are quite obviously elite. This is why I cannot bring myself, as a white person, to be offended. I cannot look into the souls of other men, but I suspect that many of the critics of Diane Abbott are actually less offended than they appear. The outrage feels distinctly faux to me, an opportunity for political point-scoring rather than a genuine defence of a vulnerable group. Do we really think that people will read Abbott’s tweet, and start treating white people badly? I would like to see a rebuttal to this from a disadvantaged white person who feels Abbott is harming them. So far, most of the outrage seems to be from distinctly elite MPs…
The driverless cars developed by Stanford University are an innovation to behold:
It is easy to understand how driverless cars would be safer. Maintaining a constant speed on the motorways will reduce chaotic braking, and the small variations in spaces and speed that create phantom traffic jams will be eliminated. And with a little bit of linking technology between a group of driverless cars, hazards in one place can be communicated to the other cars on the road much quicker than human drivers with their relatively poor reaction times.
Koushik Dutta runs through some of the implications of a driverless car:
The operating percent of a car will go from 4% to that 96%. But back to my leading statement: there are unintended consequences. Parked cars will be a relic from the past. What happens to car insurance prices if a driver is no longer part of the equation? And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold. This is the kind of disruptive change that can reshape the automotive industry. The recent GM/Chrysler bailout may have been for naught. … Of course, car companies realize this. And I can guarantee you, they will lobby against driverless cars.
Despite the clear benefits of such driverless technology, one can also see how winning changes in legislation to operate driverless cars may lag far behind the technology. Aside from the active lobbying against such schemes from car companies (and haulage unions, taxi drivers, &ct) I imagine people and legislators would be slightly squeamish about letting automated cars out onto the road. Even though we know that auto-pilots do most of the commercial airline flying, there is something reassuring about the fact that the pilot is on board, sharing the ‘danger’ of flying with you. Presumably, a passenger in a driverless car would be able to take control of the vehicle if they needed to… but the real benefit of such a car is precisely that it can drive itself home (or, come and pick you up), making a portion of the journey with no-one in the vehicle.
There is also the problem of mixing human driven cars, with driverless cars. The safety benefit of the new technology is surely at its greatest when everyone is using the driverless technology. All vehicles can travel at a constant speed and there would not be any crashes. But in order to introduce such technology, and to get it widely adopted, you have to go through an intermediate stage where early adopters have to share the roads with the human muggles who still insist on actually driving their cars. Perhaps legislators will demand that the driverless vehicles are specially painted, or have flashing lights on them, to warn other drivers that their is something on the road that will not behave in the way you might expect, much like ‘Long Vehicle’ and ‘Wide Load’ livery on haulage vehicles.
A related problem is that when there is no actual person in the vehicles we share the road with, the moral duty we feel we owe to other drivers to stay safe will dissipate. Driverless vehicles will not be given right of way, and human drivers will cut in front of driverless cars more frequently. Young joyriders on bikes or in cars could start ‘teasing’ the driverless vehicles, deliberately driving erratically to test the avoidance capabilities of the software.
There is also a civil liberties concern, in that driverless cars will presumably log every journey they make somewhere, for diagnostic and ‘learning’ purposes, but this information could be exploited by the state, companies or anyone else who wants to invade your privacy. Governments or commercial interests could programme cars to refuse to take you to certain locations, or to drive you via advertising hoardings. This would be undesirable… but appropriate technological checks could easily guard against such abuse.
The way to introduce such technology is in a closed system, where the entire road infrastructure can be controlled. The DLR operates without drivers, and a new pod system has been introduced at Heathrow Airport, where driverless pods operate on dedicated lanes. Perhaps Heathrow or another airport, one out of the city centre and with a spur road serving it, could invest in dedicated driverless lanes, plus detailed road mapping, and some sort of API for their traffic lights? This would allow driverless cars to operate efficiently to-and-from the airport, and provide a ‘proof of concept’ to legislators and regulators.
Finally, there will be car enthusiasts who insist that driving a car is one of the joys of life. Why surrender it to a machine? Well, yes, but even though horse riding was made obsolete as a system of mass transit when engines (steam, internal combustion) were invented, enthusiasts can still do it for fun. But for those who only drive out of necessity, driverless cars offer a tantalising glimpse of a congestion free future.
I have been meaning to visit the Occupy London protest camp at St Paul’s Cathedral since it appeared in October. Yesterday morning I went via St Paul’s on my way to work and shot a few slices of video of the camp, while its denizens were still sleeping. Its a snapshot of the eclectic mix of ideas being discussed at the camp.