Disclaimer to my future self

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a couple of conversations with friends about the pros and cons of committing ideas to screen and public on this bog.

“Isn’t it a hostage to fortune? What if you change your mind? What if someone – now, or in the future – reads some thoughts that you’d rather not have shared with them?”

At the same time I’ve been doing a bit a pre-MA background reading. Inevitably this has the somewhat disconcerting effect of highlighting the shallow narrowness of ones knowledge. (Of course, alongside the intellectual excitement that comes from discovering new ideas, fields of inquiry and ways of structuring and reconceptualising the world).

It can all get a bit paralysing for actually coming to share some thoughts with friends – the original object of this blog.

But hang on a minute – why should I be making any claims to consistency, rigorousness or even accuracy here? What do I lose, and what do I gain if I constantly try and anticipate how my present actions will be interpreted in the future by people perhaps quite unknown to me?

(There is a technological issue: I would have preferred this blog to be private to friends and family, perhaps for some latent feeling for some of these observations.. But it appears there is no way to do this without putting up a barrier (registration) that makes it much less likely that it will be read be friends – defeating the object).

Perhaps one would write nothing if concern about how it might be interpreted in the future was the prevalent feeling. That would be a loss. And in the process of forcing thoughts into written form they take structure – they are subject at least to the initial semblance of analysis and rigor. And they are available for latter reflection – this blog, like, and supplemental to a diary notebook, becomes a repository of ideas that might otherwise have become lost. These are some of the gains – that’s why I started this.

In looking back over previous postings I can see seeds of ideas begin to germinate, link up, and maybe in the future cross-pollinate. As a container for reflection it holds value.

But why not just stick to a diary notebook?

While this blog has not (yet) become a repository for many conversations – there seems to be a feeling of intimidation to posting public responses, perhaps along some of the lines written about in this posting – many off-blog (real world) conversations, and some email exchanges, have been prompted by the postings here. And so it is partly fulfilling the function of developing an extended conversation with friends that would perhaps not have otherwise happened in the normal ebb and flow of pub or dinner and chat.

For that, at the moment, it feels worthwhile risking that my present self and thoughts will become a source of shame or embarrassment to whoever I might become.

What do you think ?

TV versus reading as self-imaginative activity. Is TV a ‘bad’ ?

So do you think that watching TV or reading is a better activity?

[being the type of blog posting where the author tries to work out his thoughts through writing things down. Apologies for the poorly structured 'argument' !]

An interesting context to this question comes from Robert Putnam’s ‘Bowling Alone’, which I’ve been reading recently. He talks about a decline of ’social capital’ in the USA since the 60s due to a decline in many ’social’ activities. He defines social capital in terms of:

• political engagement (e.g. at minimum, voting; having some knowledge of and interest in public affairs)
• civic engagement (being a member of a formal organisation whether PTA or Greenpeace)
• religious participation
• involvement in work-related organisations (e.g. unions, professional societies such as IEEE)
• informal social connections (going to the pub with friends, having people over for dinner)
• involvement in altruistic/philanthropic/voluntary work
• small group activities (e.g. reading groups), the Internet (e.g. Facebook).

There are a number of reasons why he thinks declining social capital a bad thing (he claims communities with higher social capital are amongst other things healthier, richer, safer. i.e. social capital is a ‘good’). But what is relevant here – what struck me- is that one of the major causes he attributes to a decline in people’s social activity is increased time spent watching TV. i.e., very crudely characterizing his argument, more time spent watching TV tends to correlate with less time engaged in social activities, which tends to go along with communities and societies being less healthy, less safe and less well-off. So (getting even cruder) TV is a ‘bad’.

(Interestingly in Richard Layard’s ‘Happiness: Lessons from a New Science’ book a similar TV = bad equation is made. TV being bad because it makes you less happy with your own life – you feel you and your friends/partner are less attractive with less interesting lives than you did before you watched glamorous actors doing their thang and you wish you had more money to buy the things you see depicted as necessary for the type of lifestyle you are being enculturated into believing you want).

But how does TV compare with reading? At one level, obviously, there is no direct visual or auditory element to reading. But beyond that, what are the differences?

• reading requires more effort (i.e. requires you be more active) than TV [true? so what?]
• reading time is more disrupted (you don’t tend to read a novel in one sitting) than TV (you do tend to watch a movie in one sitting) [is that a good thing or a bad thing?]
• both TV and radio stimulate imaginative and possibly identification activity (you encounter types of people, ways of being, activities that you perhaps wouldn’t in your everyday life) [so both are good things, right?]

You can encounter characters in books, just as much as in TV, that live glamorous lifestyles way beyond your means or station (Jane Austen to Clive Cussler). So we conclude – if we chuck out TV then books then have to follow: to take away one cause of us feeling bad about not being the people we’re not; to stop us feeling dissatisfied with who we are take away the energy that drives us, helps us imagine other ways of being.

I guess, of course, there is less advertising in books. But I don’t know if anyone has ever shown that watching BBC rather than commercial TV has a less deletricious effect on one’s sense of well-being. And there’s plenty of product placement in contemporary novels (e.g. Bret Easton Ellis, Perec) – though obviously this ignores the influence of TV on authors and the novels they write.

So is TV a bad?

I’m mixing things up here: TV may be a bad in terms of declining social capital and consequent effects. But this is only tangentially related to whether books might be as bad if people spent equivalent times reading them. And after all books tend to be much more solitary than TV – which is often watched with other people and discussed as a communal (or at least familial) activity.

So we’re left with: TV is much more appealing than reading (because lower effort, stimulating more senses?) and, apparently, more appealing than other types of social activity. So since TV has become available people have done much more of it and done less social activity. But possibly not less reading. The reading thing is a red herring. Putnam would, presumably, argue that instead of watching so much TV we should be doing more social activity. Not reading more books.

Chilling out versus being in flow

I was thinking earlier this evening how listening to a really good bit of music is a bit like becoming instantly intoxicated. One moment you’re distracted by all your thoughts about this and that and the other thing; then suddenly you are utterly in the moment, on a journey, absorbed, in flow.

This weekend was a little like this: the ‘Brighton Beyond’ frisbee tournament in Lewes. For two days pretty much nothing else was on my mind (when we were playing our games) beyond concentrating on catching and throwing the disc, faking out my marker, working out what the opposition was doing, correspondingly thinking about how to change our team tactics, trying to be aware of whether everyone else on the team was having a good time. And there was just no space, or point at which I could begin to feel sad, moody or disconnected, or whatever.

I guess there are a whole bunch of activities – reading novels, dancing, cooking, playing a musical instrument – which have this characteristic of complete absorption and corresponding fundamental contentedness, joy, happiness

Or perhaps it’s not the activity so much as a an optimal way to be – absorbed, engaged.

This feels odd though – it seems to imply that not doing, reflecting, drifting aimless in ones own thoughts will lead to being less happy. But we need this aimless reflective time I think. I do anyway.

Or maybe there is some truth that being ‘in flow’ is optimal, but we need those melancholic reflective moments to provide the ground to the moments of transcendence. The flowers blooming out of the dirt.

Spring has arrived !

Clissold park in early Feb and yesterday. Everything is beginning to burst with colour. Doesn’t it feel good?

Trafalgar Square at dusk

During the day office buildings have a squat, oppressive presence as they loom ominously over the swarm in the streets below – seemingly forbidding any attempt to penetrate their interior or purpose.

However, as evening falls, those in the street gain a quieter, more dispersed anonymity and the buildings start to shimmer with diaphanous vulnerability.

Flats at the Barbican Centre – Panoptican or ampitheatre?

Foucault describes, in Discipline and Punish, Bentham’s vision of the ‘Panopticon’ – a type of prison where all prisoners may be seen at all times by one guard observing from a watchtower in the middle:

“… the peripheric building is divided into cells… in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemmned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible”

These photos are of a block of residential flats in the Barbican Centre in London. From the middle of this space the interior of every flat would be perfectly visible – but for the seemingly permanent shutters over the windors.

With the shutters down the dynamic is altered as any lone photographer wandering into this ampitheatre finds him or herself inadvertently performing to a multitude of hidden, observing eyes.