The Sunday Post – Biblical Floods, 'Dumbing Down', A Country Jaunt

Reading the Weather

It always amuses me when people claim they can interpret themorality of the weather, but I know it should not amuse me because it is not funny. There is a type of person who thinks they be able to commune with the Almighty in a way the rest of us cannot, reading the signs around us for clues about His will and finding out that – what luck! – the Almighty agreed with them all along! But this is no mere ‘evidence bias’ to which we are accustomed in politics or the media. The UKIP councilor who blamed gays for the fact that we have Winter this year evidently believes he be privy to some knowledge or wisdom that is denied to the rest of us, and which enables him to read clouds. That is rather tragic.

Reading the Media

Not long ago, someone said to me that they thought the reason the media has a problem with teachers is that teachers teach pupils to distrust the media. I dismissed the idea at the time but now I begin to wonder.

All week I have been sifting through material taken from newspapers’ online editions and demonstrating to pupils how vacuous, tendentious and artless is the bulk of media copy. Vacuity and tendentiousness are already well covered in the GCSE so there is little additional work for me to do on that front. However, the question of art matters to me very deeply. A large proportion of media copy is written in appalling style and frequently resorts to cliché and hyperbole, possibly because facts require drama before they can be sold, possibly because hacks need to fill the column inches if they want to get paid. However, besides the morbid pleasure I gain from deconstructing journalese for my pupils, it rouses a genuine anger in me: how often do unlettered hacks attack teachers for ‘dumbing down’?

I tend to be suspicious of the more apocalyptic warnings that literacy is terminally ill. However, it is always appropriate to be vigilant about standards so I take the issue seriously. Rarely (for obvious reasons) does the media turn its focus back upon itself and ask the question: what kind of writing do we think is most readily available and easily accessible to young people these days? It is common enough to complain because children are reading Twilight and not David Copperfield (which is ipso facto the fault of teachers), and it is certainly true that unchallenging literature will do less for a child’s literacy than literature that is challenging. However, do we really believe they read more Twilight than the free content on the web? Novels cost time and money. Comment is Free, Right Minds and Indy Voices cost no money, little time and even less effort to consume (or, to use journalese a moment, it’s ‘dumb’). The greatest exposure to letters that my pupils get is to the same media that has the face to preach to the rest of us about standards.

A Country Jaunt

The weather was good today so I took Fleance* for a spin in the country. I went to see the Cerne Abbas Giant:

There he is, in all his glory:

Nearby was a delightful village called Minterne Magna.

Andrew Marr recently wrote in the Spectator that London was being ‘hollowed out’ by exponential price and rent rises and the accumulation of property by foreign speculators. Sebastian Faulks made a similar point in the same magazine, describing the desecration of Notting Hill, with new developments vanquishing the old neighbourhood, paid for with new money. I cannot help but think that if London price out its own, including its nurses, merchants, artists, and young people, there’s an entire England that awaits them, which they could even afford.

*Fleance is the name I give my car.

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Amy Winehouse and Performing grief

I must first state for the record two things: the death of Amy Winehouse is tragic. She burnt herself out, as the brightest flames often do, and although I bought none of her records, yet I well remember how she provided the soundtrack to life, everywhere I went in bars, clubs and living rooms, for many years.

The second thing I need to say is that 'performative' emotion is not really my field, so my views may seem underdeveloped, obvious and lacking maturity. Thus, I need to explain myself. The reason I am writing is because I found something today which really irritated me, on the BBC website:

'Close friend Kelly Osbourne paid tribute to Winehouse via micro-blogging site Twitter. "Cant even breath right my now im crying so hard I just lost 1 of my best friends. I love you forever Amy & will never forget the real you," she said.'

I don't wish to question that Miss Osborne feels grief, but I want to know how this 'tweet' is a 'tribute' to '1 of [her] best friends'? As far as I can tell, this 'tweet' is an advert for Miss Osborne: how close she was to this fallen star, so close that only she will 'never forget the real' Amy; how violently the news has affected her, to the point where she 'can't even breath' through her tears; and how, even having lost Amy in the undiscovered country, their bond endures into the next life, addressing her directly 'I love you forever Amy'.

No tribute to her talents, no thoughts for her parents and family, no mention of Amy's character, flaws and perfections - no, this is all Kelly Osborne, laying it on thick.

I take her as the example of the moment, but in this regard she is hardly extraordinary. I doubt, even, that it is a phenomenon unique to our age, the tendency to hijack other's tragedies for self publication. It is undeniably much easier to do and to spot now, for the social media has brought private thoughts and feelings into the public domain; this blog is a case in point. The difference now is not so much the medium as the audience: views are now news.

The first time I noticed this was with the recent attacks in Norway: I spotted the BBC had trawled the Internet for reaction tweets. Every news item can be 'shared' across the social networks. Every news item has a comments box; I can understand the comments facility on the editors' blogs, where opinion may meet with opinion, but why an item of news requires it is less apparent. Either way, news is now not news until it has been visibly discussed.

In this regard, it is hardly surprising that 'tweets', the immediate reactions on the ground, now form part of the story. To make a Day Today formula: events + reaction = news (which means fact into doubt now goes very well indeed). The discussion of news is nothing new, of course, and has always been the essential means of a story's dissemination and survival.

The effect, however, of so directly involving reactions, of consciously embedding into the very fabric of the delivered news the commentary of the people, is that there ensues a kind of anarchy: too many voices competing for your ears. How many hundreds of thousands of tweets are yet to tweet upon poor Amy? How few will be noticed? Here's the rub: people don't comment or tweet to be ignored, they wish to be heard. In order to be heard in such a noisy place, you have to scream.

The effect is, I believe, a certain presumption: of course people want to hear what I have to say! To return a moment to Miss Osborne, before the days of Twitter, she would have had to wait for the television crew to arrive at her house, or have had audaciously to make her way to the studio, in order to display to the world just how unique was her bond with poor Amy. It would have been worth the wait, too, for the cameras and sound equipment would have done the work for her, recording her struggling for breath through her tears. The problem is that that relies on others' consent: for example, the editor might not want Kelly's histrionics, he might want instead to feature Victoria Beckham paying tribute to a fellow artist. The tweet, however, is Miss Osborne giving us her grief sans invitation. It assumes that the audience is there, that the audience is waiting for her , that it will listen when she speaks and respond thereto. At no point was she asked, and at no point does that matter.

The problem that arises from this is, I think, really quite serious. Rather than waiting for someone to ask, 'what do you think?' Kelly started with 'here is what I think'. When that becomes the common starting point, the result is that conversation ceases, and the noise of the tweets, that white noise of cyberscreams, is really people talking past each other rather than to each other, not hearing yet expecting to be heard. Miss Osborne's misnominated 'tribute' is her screaming, and its republication on the BBC is her being heard, but only in the capacity of news - there is one speaker, and one listener, there is no interaction between two people, two ideas or two camps. As her strong hints of closed intimacy suggest, the voices of others will hardly matter to her. She isn't listening.

Well, we needn't follow her example, for we can help to break this spell by listening, even when we dislike what she says.