I’m going to try to refrain from complaining about David Cameron in this post and be optimistic. Whilst there’s not much you can do about the coalition for a few years, austerity, at least in some circles, could be a good thing.
A lot has been said about the negative impact of the ‘austerity’ measures – The Guardian has a good blog dedicated to it. However not much has been said about the positives. How resourceful and creative will people become solving everyday problems? What kind of new counter-culture will bubble to the surface? How many new businesses and business models might be created that go on to really change industries?
Here’s one small example, but I love it. In a small village in Somerset, both the mobile library service and the phone box was about to be taken away due to cuts. So what do they do? Turn the phone box into a book exchange. Simple but genius.
Mark Hudson, in this Telegraph article, discusses whether hard times actually better inspire the arts and goes on to say: “The coming hard times, it is widely believed, will separate the wheat from the chaff, winnowing the work that has real purpose and need to exist – which will, it is said, always surface no matter how steep the odds – from a kind of ponderous, puffy official art that has thrived over the prosperity of the last two decades, created by people whose talents are for form-filling rather than self-expression, work whose disappearance few will miss, let alone lament”.
I haven’t blogged for a few days as 1) I was at the Isle of Wight Festival and 2) I needed time to recover and catch up with work. I had an awesome time. Highlights for me were obviously the Stones, but Kasabian rocked. Snow Patrol, Keane, Groove Armada and The Thirst also put in great performances. The Isle of Wight Festival has such a different atmosphere to the likes of Reading and Glastonbury. It’s definitely more family orientated and generally more laid back. However there were still plenty of people passed out around me through out the entire Stones set. You could smell weed pretty much everywhere you went and there is absolutely no chance of getting more than a couple of hours sleep and a clean toilet, so it certainly isn’t a picnic in the park.
On top of being jealous of the children who probably don’t realise how lucky they are yet, after all these are about as far as I got for a weekend during term time. It was great to see families doing something different together. Something that many parents probably consider to be unsafe or unacceptable to take young children to.
In The Telegraph last week, David Willetts the Conservative Shadow Education Secretary suggested that the reason Children in the UK have such poor basic skills in Mathematics and English isn’t necessarily due to an inadequate education system, but because our culture is too protective of our children. Willets stated that: “Children are so cocooned by their parents that they rarely venture far from home and have little concept of space, volume and how the world actually works”. Coining the term ‘nature deficit disorder’ the article cites research that alarmingly says the area in which children are allowed to play in by their parents is a ninth of what it was a generation ago.
Willets continued: “It is very hard to make sense of geometry if you haven’t thrown a ball around or make sense of volume if you haven’t messed about with water and sand or do arithmetic if you haven’t collected things and arranged them.” I don’t often agree with much of what the Conservatives have to say, but on this I do. You can read the full article here.
My last post got me thinking again about the old ‘we’re all individuals’ rhetoric. This is something that probably the bitter part of me associates with the thing that got on my wick when I was looking for my first job in planning. I appreciate agencies want a diverse group of interesting individuals and I myself enjoy working with them, but I think it has gone a bit too far – it all feels a bit elitist and a touch on the tedious side at times. Richard Huntingdon posted this over at Adliterate a while ago which pretty much covers some of this debate. First of all I don’t believe groups of people, who in actual fact have very similar backgrounds are as interesting as they could be if you mixed them up with people who have different backgrounds and experiences.
Looking back at my life at a ‘new’ University, my housemates, who are still some of my closest friends had such different backgrounds – it certainly made life there much more interesting both academically and socially. Living with the son of a working class builder who supported QPR, a public school boy who kind of followed Aston Villa (probably because of Prince William) but was more of an egg chaser and finally another public school boy, who as well as being an annoying Gooner, was Jewish and the son of a London cabbie. I’m pretty much a middle class (Brighton fan) with my Dad being a hardworking sales manager for a greetings card company and my step mum a nurse. That may all seem pretty average and stereotypical but when you put them all together that is where you find the conflicts, the enemies and the enthusiasm that many people such as John Grant and Russel Davies often talk about.
My second and final point relates to some peoples attitudes towards ‘uninteresting’ people and why they shouldn’t work in the indusutry even though they slogged their guts out from the age of 18, got in thousands of pounds worth of debt only to discover that their careers advisor should have told them to do Zoology if they wanted to work in advertising. To give you an example this is the sort of small minded opinion that makes me ashamed of the industry at times. Taken from a coment on Richard’s post, Asi says: “I’ve never met anyone with a ‘degree’ in marketing or advertising who was remotely interesting”. This is all he had to say, very interesting really isn’t it? It’s is a very old fashioned and archaic attitude that really is an attempt to make themselves feel better.
For some reason people think that if you do a degree and yes it is a degree, you aren’t interested in anything else. I have always believed in John Locke’s theory on ideas. Locke states that ideas come from both knowledge and experience. The point is that people’s knowledge and experiences are different, therefore shouldn’t the industry do its best to find a a good mix rather than finding ‘individuals’ that aren’t actually that individual. When we recruit people we don’t have any guidlines such as how interesting is this person, or how nice, our aim is to recruit a mix of people from a variety of backgrounds and so far it has served us well. It doesn’t have to be so black and white all the time. The interesting part is the grey bit in the middle.
I’m off to see Shane Meadows’ latest film, This is England, at the weekend. If you are unfamiliar with the writer and directors previous work he’s responsible for Dead Man’s Shoes, Once upon a time in the Midlands and 24/7. This is England is a movie about the British skinhead movement in the 80s. Loosely auto biographical, the movie is based on the life of a troubled, working class boy from the Midlands who seeks refuge with a group of ‘Skins’.
The movie touches on a number of interesting areas such as youth culture, Ska, social marginalisation, identity, racism and politics. Now I was born in 1980, so I don’t really recall much of this movement, apart from the occasional menacing looking types, a couple of which happened to be my babysitter and her boyfriend. However, only since the movie has come out have I bothered to look into it in more detail – I like The Specials and a bit of Madness but that’s it really. I’m fascinated with how it all started and evolved over time but I’ve mostly been surprised with how my original, mostly negative perceptions have been formed by the minority that turned it into the racist movement that my generation at least see it as.
Newsnight recently discussed this film and Mark Kermode made a cracking point when debating with Sunday Times columnist Peter Whittle. In response to the pompous and out of touch, Whittle, Kermode stated that people always tend to look at cultures from the outside and fail to truly understand them. As much as we hate to admit it, I think the majority of us working in communications continue to do this, merely scratching the surface of what’s out there. Even those of us in research do it with tired methodologies . I think this is why I’m becoming more and more interested in ethnography. It might not go down well with a positivist but I think I’m finding my work more interesting.
I’ve been working on a few campaigns over the last year aimed at what I’ll call young working class people, who like a good time, but they’re often referred to as chavs as soon as the brief comes through the door. I’m sure that’s the same in many agencies full of proper folk. Now I love this post about liking your audience. I think it’s too easy to be cynical. We’re quick to make assumptions about people and the first thing we naturally do is to look at the bad side of people rather than the good side.
As a single parent bringing up two boys, if my Dad wanted a couple of pints down the local after football, he didn’t have much choice other than to take my brother and me with him. I remember nearly every Saturday afternoon being dragged down the pub, until I, well, wanted to go myself. This was a great experience, although I remember finding it boring at the time (my hair being ruffled was also quite annoying). And the reason being is you see the fun, jovial, good spirited side of a diverse group of people. The rough diamonds if you like. From now on if the cynic in me raises its ugly head I’ll be sure to remember the good old days.
It was my boss’s stag do at the weekend, so 15 of us trotted off to Jongleurs for a night of stand up comedy. Apparently it must have been a gay stag do. According to the hilarious Aussie Jim Jefferies we should have been in Prague watching Donkeys shitting on Cats – after all that’s what real men like him do! For some strange reason I think he may have actually done this.
Jim is very crass and extremely un-pc, I’m not sure you will ever see him on ITV1 on a Saturday evening before You’ve been framed. This guy was seriously funny, but there were times when you had to ask whether you should really be laughing at some of his gags. There was lots of sucking through your teeth and looking at the person next to you to see if what was OK to laugh? And sure enough 9 times out of 10 it was.
I think people found it surprisingly liberating. It was certainly eye opening to see people laughing at the very things society tells us we shouldn’t laugh at. I’d recommend going to a comedy night just get you out of the politically correct mindset that we all fall into, even just for a few hours. It certainly brings you down to earth and back in touch with what people do actually find funny when they are in a different environment. I’m sure if you took the same people and cracked a few of his jokes in a meeting you wouldn’t get the same response.
Out all three acts Jim was the only one whose name I could remember and he certainly got the most laughs. Whilst I’m not suggesting that brands make fun of people in such a manner, it is apparent that in a world when brands need to be more transparent and more human like, society is trying to make us become less human. Or the ideal human, if one exists. I think things like blogging, Youtube and Myspace are a result of people being able to express themselves in a more accurate way. It is the real them that perhaps can’t get out because society says that’s not funny.
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