I am used to advertising coming at me absolutely every way it possibly can. Of course there are the old fashioned methods such as posters, newspaper and magazine advertisements, radio and television commercials that have been around for decades and longer. I would imagine that more content on the internet and certainly the bulk of email traffic is actually trying to sell you something quite often spurious products connected to sexual performance that the vast bulk of users do not even want advertised to them let alone to buy. It almost seems that advertising has become a kind of end in itself rather than a way to increase sales of a company's particular product. The fact that there are awards for television commercials and I assume hidden within the industries themselves for all other kinds of advertising suggests that they have gone beyond simply being a tool to having become a form of art.
Keen-eyed readers or those listening very astutely to their screen reader will notice I have, as yet, not mentioned telephone advertising. Of course, you can now sign up to a service that removes you from the lists of permissible numbers to call. This saved us a lot of time and effort in our house, not only from calls from people but also from calls from machinery. It seemed particularly invidious that the company could not even bother to employ a person to bother us and left it to a machine; even the ten-year old boy who lives in my house, younger then, knew immediately when he answered the phone if it was about to play out some recorded message and would slam the receiver down with a curse. He was well trained in this as some scammers played on children answering phones to get them to call back premium lines. Perhaps a child should not answer a telephone but given he moved much faster than the other residents of the house and could get down the stairs fast enough to reach the phone before it rang off and without injuring himself as I tended to do, it was often down to him to answer it, especially as the answering service supposedly provided by BT proved so unreliable.
On mobile phones it is even worse because phones have two ways of getting messages to you, either by calling you up or texting you. I have owned a mobile phone since 1999 when one I was incredibly lucky to have one given to me as a present as I was living at the time in a house without a landline. It cost the phenomenal sum of £199 (equivalent to about £296 at today's values). I have only owned three handsets. One I left in a taxi and one broke down. From the initial gift I have stayed with O2 (or BT Wireless as it was up until 2001) and so have simply had the handset replaced. Currently I do not have a smartphone so I imagine I am missing out on third and fourth ways to advertise to me through my phone, i.e. by sending me the equivalent of television and internet advertisements to me over it. If I want to take photographs I use a camera; if I want to surf the internet, I use a computer. I have no desire to use a second rate device as phones tend to still be in these respects to do those activities. I realise that makes me an eccentric. Typically I immediately delete any advertising texts but one company I cannot stop advertising to me directly is O2 itself. I suppose as my long-time provider they have a right to contact me. However, what alarms me about their advertising, as the title of this posting suggests, is not that they try to sell me things but they go further and try to tell me how to live my life.
It is a recognised advertising technique that you encourage potential customers to feel they are buying into a certain lifestyle or even into a kind of elite through purchasing their products. Companies develop sub-brands to appeal to different sectors of their customer base separating them out by age or income, always by gender and sometimes by location. Advertising often sells a story, that if you have the item somehow you will be a different person. This is semi-spoofed/semi-replicated in the long-running campaign for Lynx deodorant and shower gel (interestingly the product is called Axe in continental Europe) which suggests one spray or dollop will make a man irresistable to women. In fact, buying a handbag will not make you any more popular or beautiful or successful, despite the advertising. It may signal to other people that you are of a certain wealth or taste and that may, in some rare circumstances, open up some social contact that you might not have previous garnered. The main benefit is that it makes you feel a part of a set of people that you want to associate with, even if the feeling is not mutual or at least to show you share common taste/attitudes/aspirations with those people.
Some advertising goes beyond the change being brought about by purchasing the product to saying that some people do not deserve the product unless they already lead a certain lifestyle. There are a couple of memorable ones of this style. One was the 2009 campaign from Phones 4 U which only offered particular deals to people who had 50 friends or more, see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jul/11/phones4u-advertisement There was another one which I think was for Audi cars, but I might be mistaken as this was probably a decade ago. It showed a flash, brash stock broker type taking a test drive and then turning down the car saying it was not the car for him and the salesman agreeing, implying it was for customers with far greater taste. I feel I am facing the same kind of pressure from O2.
Just after Christmas I was telephoned by O2 to ask if I was happy with the service they provided. I said I was. However, that was not enough for them. They asked me why I was not using my phone more than I did. The man on the other end of the line said 'I can't believe you're not using the 10% discounts' and then asked me why I did not want additional texts or calls or a whole string of offers that they regularly text and also email me about. I then had to spend five minutes telling him that generally my phone is either switched off or without charge in it. I probably receive one to two calls per month on it and make even fewer. I probably send one text per month to my mother, one to the woman who lives in my house and one to my landlord generally when he has offered to cook me a curry. Thus, if I was suddenly offered 100 free texts it would most likely take me until 2015 to use them all. A lot of the calls and texts I receive are advertising. I do not have an active social life and have lost contact with almost all of the friends I had ten years ago. The ones I have prefer to email or even send postcards. I had to keep repeatedly saying that my mobile phone was far more a safety device for when my car breaks down or to confirm with my mother or my co-resident that I have arrived safely. Last time my car broke down the charge in my mobile was exhausted and I was compelled to use a phone box, something I have not done in probably a decade and was alarmed to find how much it cost.
What irritated me was that not only did I have to keep repeating myself, even though O2 knows how much I use my telephone from how much credit I put into it around £30 every 4-5 months. I was resentful that they were trying to get me to live some kind of different life in which I have many more friends and I call them regularly rather than struggling home exhausted to spend the weekend on domestic chores and sleeping. I half expected the caller to say I no longer deserved the phone I had because I was not living the appropriate life that their customers are supposed to have. I felt that I had to fight for the right to live the dull life that I have been dealt. Imagine the impact of such targeted advertising on someone like a teenager far less confident of their lifestyle or unable to see that actually in the UK in 2012 we have very little control over our lives. The woman who lives in my house who lives pretty much the same sort of life as me though she runs a company and has local friends, was similarly called by her provider and questioned about using her phone more. I guess the fact as an entrepreneur and yet has little need of the phone in this age of email and Skype, in order to do business may suggest why the companies are so tenacious and have no embarrassment in trying to press us to live what they feel is an expected lifestyle.
I am reminded a little of an episode of 'Doctor Who' in an alternate version of 2000s Britain in which everyone wears blue tooth kinds of ear pieces and consequently become programmed to behave in much the same way as their fellow citizens and are steadily being turned into cyber(wo)men. A mobile phone is useful, but I feel no compunction to live the way the company that provides it expects. I could not do so without a sudden injection of lots of friends. I do feel that I should not be rung up at regular intervals and have to defend my lifestyle choices so vigorously. I guess this is another element of the shift in service provision that I have noticed. It is no longer the case that 'the customer is always right' now it is clearly, 'the company is always right' in how they take and hold your money and how they tell you that you should be living your life. Hands off my personality!
Showing posts with label mobile phones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mobile phones. Show all posts
Wednesday, 11 January 2012
Monday, 7 November 2011
We Walk Straight So ...
When I was a boy at primary school, one of the activities that we would do in the playground was stand side-by-side with a friend, always another boy and cross over our arms so that we were locked together. We would then march around the playground saying loudly in unison ‘we walk straight so you’d better get out the way’ (enunciated so it sounded like ‘we want straitsa you’d bettah get out tha-way!). Generally we did not actually walk straight we would simply march into other boys who would often pair up just like us so they could march into us and the whole thing would descend into what was then termed ‘a bundle’. Where this ‘game’ originated from I do not know, presumably from the place most physical games did especially for children for whom kicking a ball around was forbidden as none of the playgrounds that I used while at primary school had less than one side which was a row of windows and in some cases three sides were windows. Why I was suddenly reminded of this game which I cannot have witnessed in over thirty years was as a result of trying to walk down a street in London.
I heard on BBC radio that officially Britain has become more polite than in recent decades, but as yet I have to see any evidence of this and one case in point is how difficult it is to move around as a pedestrian. Places like Oxford Circus and Leicester Square in central London have always been difficult not only from the numbers of people but the fact that many people on the street have no idea where they are going and/or have their attention distracted by everything that is going on around them. However, even in suburban areas of London, places like Ealing or Harrow or Richmond, you find it difficult. This is because on the pavement, as on the roads, no-one seems willing to yield even a few centimetres nor to wait even a matter of seconds to allow someone else to pass. I suppose if I see people in cars forcing their way out of side roads into the main flow of traffic and bullying people out of lanes, I should not be surprised that I see the equivalent of such behaviour on the pavement, especially as unlike car drivers, many pedestrians are young people. A television advertisement for an insurance company shows pedestrians behaving like cars and says we would not behave like drivers when walking. However, they are in fact wrong and most people do behave precisely like that replicating the scenes they show in their advertisement.
I am not going to go on demonising children and teenagers. However, it is probably unsurprising that witnessing what their parents and other adults do it should seem to them to be ‘weak’ to move even a fraction of a step. It is exacerbated by the fact that unlike older people, children and teenagers often travel in groups, and all want to walk side-by-side. Going along the pavement, even walking through pedestrian areas I find myself being pushed to the sides, hard up against buildings. No matter how large the space is, groups of pedestrians spread to fill it. Where I live during the week has broad pedestrianised areas but I find myself dodging between four or five family members or students strung out for a couple of metres across the space.
When I have run out of space and am squeezed against a shop window, even this does not seem enough and I get a tut or a sigh as if I have done something wrong as one person for a matter of seconds has to expend the effort to step around me. My journeys are lengthened by this constantly being squeezed to the side, having to pull my jacket or shoulder bag in, even having to turn side-on so the people can get by without having to adjust how they are walking. Often rather than be pushed into the wall, I am compelled to step into the road with all the risk that that entails. The difficulty is not only that the people I encounter have an utter unwillingness to move even a little, but they seemed exasperated that anyone should be walking in the opposite direction to them; they also tire of people moving too slowly in their direction too as she witness from the complaints about the elderly and disabled or parents with the off-road pushchairs if they are not proceeding fast enough for the bulk of pedestrians.
It often not the case that the people who are unwilling to move are aware that you are liable to collide with them. I have written before about how people are cut off from the world by their mp3 player and their mobile phone: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/08/mind-out-that-child-might-be-wearing.html
Ever since mobile phones were invented no-one has seemed able to stand still while using them, I guess hence the name, it is not the phone but the user who is in fact mobile. The thing is now, with smartphones that there is so much to look at on the screen that using them takes the full extent of the owner’s vision. Yet, they do not stop, they keep ploughing on, gazing intently and fingering the screen of their phone, assuming that everyone will navigate around them. These people can be slow moving, giving you time to get out of their way. However, to me it rather seems an insult to the blind that people with sight do not use the faculty they have been blessed with. Maybe in the future mobile phones will be constructed with white sticks extending from them. Certainly someone needs to invent facilities that alert the user to other bodies within a certain proximity or even to allow the user to see in front of them as they are looking down at the screen, through having a camera in the top of the phone rather than on the back.
Despite all my ailments I can move freely and sufficiently speedily to avoid colliding with the ‘we walk straight’ pedestrians. However, this is not the case for all pavement users. The elderly, disabled people, people with small children or pets, are a lot less manoeuvrable and it appears that the message to them is simply that they should not be out walking at the times when ‘normal people’ wanting to walking in strict lines to get places. The issue of the we-walk-straighters is that they are symptomatic of a broader problem, the manifestation of the Thatcherite belief that there is no society just individuals and families (or their equivalent on the street, gangs of friends). Why it is so difficult to move around a British town on foot or by car is because so few people these days understand that to travel in an urban area is to become part of a machine or even an organism, one that has different components moving at different speeds.
I once saw an art installation which consisted of a video the artist had shot at a junction in Vietnam where five roads met. The range of traffic was incredibly diverse and included pedestrians, cyclists, mopeds, rickshaws, motorbikes, cars, vans and lorries all on the road rather than the pavement. The video was shot from an apartment overlooking the junction. What was startling was how soothing it was to watch. This is because despite all the variety of the traffic the different elements flowed so that no-one collided and no-one even held up someone else. To me it looked rather like blood flowing around the body. I am sure there are accidents and arguments in that city as anywhere but it is apparent that the Vietnamese in cities often far more crowded than London, had the necessary attributes to make such incidents rare rather than happening almost every minute.
To march through as a pedestrian is to disrupt the traffic ‘machinery’ to the extent that it causes jolts to the system, tensions and upsets. Things move far more smoothly when people look ahead, have patience and work in co-ordination with others. However, none of those attributes are now valued in British society so as a consequence we have all the huffing and puffing and the arguments, the need to squeeze against a wall to avoid a confrontation and the stresses that all this brings.
I heard on BBC radio that officially Britain has become more polite than in recent decades, but as yet I have to see any evidence of this and one case in point is how difficult it is to move around as a pedestrian. Places like Oxford Circus and Leicester Square in central London have always been difficult not only from the numbers of people but the fact that many people on the street have no idea where they are going and/or have their attention distracted by everything that is going on around them. However, even in suburban areas of London, places like Ealing or Harrow or Richmond, you find it difficult. This is because on the pavement, as on the roads, no-one seems willing to yield even a few centimetres nor to wait even a matter of seconds to allow someone else to pass. I suppose if I see people in cars forcing their way out of side roads into the main flow of traffic and bullying people out of lanes, I should not be surprised that I see the equivalent of such behaviour on the pavement, especially as unlike car drivers, many pedestrians are young people. A television advertisement for an insurance company shows pedestrians behaving like cars and says we would not behave like drivers when walking. However, they are in fact wrong and most people do behave precisely like that replicating the scenes they show in their advertisement.
I am not going to go on demonising children and teenagers. However, it is probably unsurprising that witnessing what their parents and other adults do it should seem to them to be ‘weak’ to move even a fraction of a step. It is exacerbated by the fact that unlike older people, children and teenagers often travel in groups, and all want to walk side-by-side. Going along the pavement, even walking through pedestrian areas I find myself being pushed to the sides, hard up against buildings. No matter how large the space is, groups of pedestrians spread to fill it. Where I live during the week has broad pedestrianised areas but I find myself dodging between four or five family members or students strung out for a couple of metres across the space.
When I have run out of space and am squeezed against a shop window, even this does not seem enough and I get a tut or a sigh as if I have done something wrong as one person for a matter of seconds has to expend the effort to step around me. My journeys are lengthened by this constantly being squeezed to the side, having to pull my jacket or shoulder bag in, even having to turn side-on so the people can get by without having to adjust how they are walking. Often rather than be pushed into the wall, I am compelled to step into the road with all the risk that that entails. The difficulty is not only that the people I encounter have an utter unwillingness to move even a little, but they seemed exasperated that anyone should be walking in the opposite direction to them; they also tire of people moving too slowly in their direction too as she witness from the complaints about the elderly and disabled or parents with the off-road pushchairs if they are not proceeding fast enough for the bulk of pedestrians.
It often not the case that the people who are unwilling to move are aware that you are liable to collide with them. I have written before about how people are cut off from the world by their mp3 player and their mobile phone: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/08/mind-out-that-child-might-be-wearing.html
Ever since mobile phones were invented no-one has seemed able to stand still while using them, I guess hence the name, it is not the phone but the user who is in fact mobile. The thing is now, with smartphones that there is so much to look at on the screen that using them takes the full extent of the owner’s vision. Yet, they do not stop, they keep ploughing on, gazing intently and fingering the screen of their phone, assuming that everyone will navigate around them. These people can be slow moving, giving you time to get out of their way. However, to me it rather seems an insult to the blind that people with sight do not use the faculty they have been blessed with. Maybe in the future mobile phones will be constructed with white sticks extending from them. Certainly someone needs to invent facilities that alert the user to other bodies within a certain proximity or even to allow the user to see in front of them as they are looking down at the screen, through having a camera in the top of the phone rather than on the back.
Despite all my ailments I can move freely and sufficiently speedily to avoid colliding with the ‘we walk straight’ pedestrians. However, this is not the case for all pavement users. The elderly, disabled people, people with small children or pets, are a lot less manoeuvrable and it appears that the message to them is simply that they should not be out walking at the times when ‘normal people’ wanting to walking in strict lines to get places. The issue of the we-walk-straighters is that they are symptomatic of a broader problem, the manifestation of the Thatcherite belief that there is no society just individuals and families (or their equivalent on the street, gangs of friends). Why it is so difficult to move around a British town on foot or by car is because so few people these days understand that to travel in an urban area is to become part of a machine or even an organism, one that has different components moving at different speeds.
I once saw an art installation which consisted of a video the artist had shot at a junction in Vietnam where five roads met. The range of traffic was incredibly diverse and included pedestrians, cyclists, mopeds, rickshaws, motorbikes, cars, vans and lorries all on the road rather than the pavement. The video was shot from an apartment overlooking the junction. What was startling was how soothing it was to watch. This is because despite all the variety of the traffic the different elements flowed so that no-one collided and no-one even held up someone else. To me it looked rather like blood flowing around the body. I am sure there are accidents and arguments in that city as anywhere but it is apparent that the Vietnamese in cities often far more crowded than London, had the necessary attributes to make such incidents rare rather than happening almost every minute.
To march through as a pedestrian is to disrupt the traffic ‘machinery’ to the extent that it causes jolts to the system, tensions and upsets. Things move far more smoothly when people look ahead, have patience and work in co-ordination with others. However, none of those attributes are now valued in British society so as a consequence we have all the huffing and puffing and the arguments, the need to squeeze against a wall to avoid a confrontation and the stresses that all this brings.
Saturday, 1 May 2010
Is R.S.V.P. Dead?
The fact that historically people have written 'R.S.V.P.' (standing for the French phrase Répondez S'il Vous Plait, i.e., Respond, Please) on the bottom of invitations suggests that even in the past, ages which we think had greater manners, people could be neglectful of telling their host if they were coming to an event or not. However, certainly in my life of forty years, I have seen a decline in this basic courtesy. It seems to occur at all levels. In the workplace the advent of electronic systems has actually reversed this tendency a little. Send an electronic invitation to a meeting and the recipient is often compelled to click if they will attend or not. If you do not use such a system, though, then people sending apologies, or probably more accurately, Apologies, has declined severely even in the period that I have been in full-time work since the early 1990s. I suppose there are things like emails and even online conferencing to fill the gaps, but it is not only an issue of knowing who has been involved in a debate at a meeting and who has had their voice heard, but simple professional courtesy. I suppose such 'non-productive' activity has been frowned upon since the era of 'lunch is for wimps' that came in during the 1980s, in fact to make under-staffed offices seem dynamic.
Of course, companies not contacting you after you have attended an interview to tell you that you have not got the job has been going on for many years now. It leaves you hanging in doubt for a number of days, hoping that you will get a call. How hard is it, as with my last interview, when there have only been four candidates, to telephone and thank you for attending but saying you have not got the job. They do not have to telephone, they could send an email, putting you out of your misery far quicker. No-one seems to spare a thought for the fact that applying and being interviewed for jobs is tough enough and the lingering hope that you might have got it, just makes it feel even more bitter. Clearly I cannot comprehend that for companies recruiting, a quick phonecall is something that they have no time for or no willingness to do. Perhaps they do not even give it that much thought, once the candidate is out the room they give no consideration to the fate of the people who did not get the job. In this, however, they do not realise that they might be dissuading someone they thought was good enough to interview from ever applying again and also might be attracting unnecessary bad publicity from someone working in their sector.
I suppose the fact that I cannot understand this off-hand behaviour shows how out-of-step I am with current business culture, which, certainly where I am now working, seems to have gone back to the 1980s. I get accused of being 'unprofessional' because I keep my workforce informed about developments, rather than concealing what I know. The attitude of my superiors is often incredibly patronising, they seem to believe that the average office worker has no idea about the broader business and lacks the intelligence to guess about it. They also seem to assume that people are only concerned about having a job or being unemployed, that they are not interested in the own job, its quality and how it fits into the broader scope of the company's activity.
Another criticism I have levelled at me, is that I 'waste' too much time on niceties. I guess perhaps living in Britain with culture so influenced by the USA I am in a society far removed from what I see as courteous. When I faced frustration from colleagues that meetings did not start the moment everyone was seated, I began to characterise the introductory conversation as the 'Bedouin tent coffee conversations', i.e that before you start business you show interest in the people you are meeting with, as humans. Having worked in Germany and especially in Spain and Portugal, I know business people there put a lot of store by such interaction. It was incredibly embarrassing to be at a series of meetings across a number of days in Portugal involving representatives from France, Germany, Hungary, Spain and Portugal, to find we had to turn down the events we had been invited to because my company had booked us to fly out two hours after the last meeting was scheduled to finish. The company seemed to have no idea how rude that seemed to our hosts and the fact that we missed out on the informal networking. I know that people on expenses and 'junkets' earn a bad name, but in British business culture we seem to have gone too far the other way and now seem terse and cold towards international business partners.
Such terse verging on rude behaviour is not confined to the business world, it is now embedded in our social contacts as well. It seems ironic that people feel that if they cannot raise you on your mobile phone that something is wrong. Using Twitter and Facebook people update their acquaintances and even complete strangers to their state of mind, even their whereabouts. However, send out an invitation, electronically, or particularly on paper and you receive a completely different attitude. Of course, two hours before any event you are hosting you receive a flurry of people pulling out. This is the stage when they realise that if they actually are going to attend they need to stop what they are doing and begin getting ready and setting off. This is pretty rude especially for events that need catering, but these days I am glad for even this last minute courtesy. What is more common is people simply not turning up and not informing you of that fact. Given the range of communication devices we have these days there is no excuse. You can text or call from a traffic jam, you can send an email or a tweet from the railway station where you are stuck or even from the wireless laptop you have with you on the train. You can telephone. Even if your mobile phone has been stolen or run out of charge you can still use the remaining telephone boxes. If I am not able to answer, then simply leave a message. None of this is difficult. For those people who have decided not to come long before the actual day, it is even easier. However, these days it is rare to receive any communication that the people are not coming.
It seems ironic given how much 'rage' we have in public life that people actually find it difficult to engage with people, even their friends, over 'challenging' or 'difficult' issues. They are quite happy to bellow or hoot someone or swear vigorously at them as that is all one-way communication, they have no real emotional engagement with it and can stomp or drive away if they do not like the response. People cannot deal with 'I am sorry, I cannot come to your party' and the 'That's a shame I was really looking forward to you being there'. That is too much of a burden for so many adults these days. They would rather be rude and saying nothing at all. This unwillingness to even face a slightly discomforting conversation feeds back into business and I have a manager who complains 'I don't want to know that' when people make even constructive criticism about the company and tries to have every meeting artificially jolly even when people are at loggerheads. Part of the reason is that too many people in work cannot process the concept that others see their company and people's behaviour within it as different from how they see it themselves. Often these days I hear people say that it is a 'lie' when people express a differing opinion. This tunnel vision allows people who do not respond either way to an invite, to see themselves as being polite and in the right.
It is not that I accept that my event may not be the most important thing on a person's agenda, I am quite happy for them to say 'no, I cannot come', whatever their reason. What is more difficult is hearing nothing at all, especially when buying food and drink is an issue. It is infinitely worse when the event is not an adult one but a child's. This is the situation in which rudeness begins to result not just in too much food being bought or people sitting around waiting for someone to turn up who never comes, in such circumstances it is far more unpleasant. For the past five years I have been involved each year indirectly in a child's birthday party. Given that with funds tight, children these days are usually limited to the number of people they can invite, they carefully select who will receive an invitation. The day of the party comes and you have heard nothing back from half of the parents even though you have left reminder messages on their answerphone and sent texts. You dare not tell the child that half of their friends may not come, just in case, as often happens, some of them actually turn up, even though they have given you no indication that they are attending.
Another percentage will show up at the wrong time. Two of the families this year, despite saying their child was attending had gone shopping, one lot to London and then only realised they were supposed to be coming to the party. One showed up near the end and one never came at all. I feel discouraged when people do that to me as an adult, but to a child with all the issues about having their friends around and the presents they will receive it easily turns what is supposed to be a happy day into a stressful one as they cling on hoping a particular friend will show and the adults are no better informed than them.
Are our lives so busy; do we and the children around us have so much going on that we simply forget all invitations? In fact, those families who fill their children's weekends with sports and music activities are often the ones best at responding to invitiations even if it is with a constant 'no'. If we lived in primative times when communication was difficult there might be an excuse, but these days when we walk around with communication devices that can send a movie to the other side of the world in seconds, why is it so difficult to use such tools? I am probably coming at this from the wrong end. How did it become acceptable to not respond to an invitation at all, and yet see no difficulty in speaking to the people you have so snubbed, again? How is it acceptable to ignore an invitation and then turn round and invite the people you have just snubbed to some event? I suppose it is this breakage in people's minds between their actions and the consequences of those actions. I suppose when people see nothing wrong in speeding then I should not be surprised that they see nothing wrong in ignoring an invitation and expecting you to be happy about it. We have become so utterly selfish that other people's feelings count for nothing compared to our desires and our apathy. Have we so lost empathy that we cannot see that if we treat someone else's child in such an off hand way someone will treat our child just the same? It seems so.
One reason why I like Goths is that all, I think without exception among those I have met, have 'old fashioned' manners. If they cannot attend they phone or text or email me and say 'sorry, I can't come, maybe next time'. This is a rarity in modern UK society where people think it is acceptable simply to ignore an invitation whether they want to attend or not. People wonder why our society is so fragmented and it is because despite all the technology that allows us to do it, we have developed an antipathy (maybe simply an apathy) to simply communicating with people.
Of course, companies not contacting you after you have attended an interview to tell you that you have not got the job has been going on for many years now. It leaves you hanging in doubt for a number of days, hoping that you will get a call. How hard is it, as with my last interview, when there have only been four candidates, to telephone and thank you for attending but saying you have not got the job. They do not have to telephone, they could send an email, putting you out of your misery far quicker. No-one seems to spare a thought for the fact that applying and being interviewed for jobs is tough enough and the lingering hope that you might have got it, just makes it feel even more bitter. Clearly I cannot comprehend that for companies recruiting, a quick phonecall is something that they have no time for or no willingness to do. Perhaps they do not even give it that much thought, once the candidate is out the room they give no consideration to the fate of the people who did not get the job. In this, however, they do not realise that they might be dissuading someone they thought was good enough to interview from ever applying again and also might be attracting unnecessary bad publicity from someone working in their sector.
I suppose the fact that I cannot understand this off-hand behaviour shows how out-of-step I am with current business culture, which, certainly where I am now working, seems to have gone back to the 1980s. I get accused of being 'unprofessional' because I keep my workforce informed about developments, rather than concealing what I know. The attitude of my superiors is often incredibly patronising, they seem to believe that the average office worker has no idea about the broader business and lacks the intelligence to guess about it. They also seem to assume that people are only concerned about having a job or being unemployed, that they are not interested in the own job, its quality and how it fits into the broader scope of the company's activity.
Another criticism I have levelled at me, is that I 'waste' too much time on niceties. I guess perhaps living in Britain with culture so influenced by the USA I am in a society far removed from what I see as courteous. When I faced frustration from colleagues that meetings did not start the moment everyone was seated, I began to characterise the introductory conversation as the 'Bedouin tent coffee conversations', i.e that before you start business you show interest in the people you are meeting with, as humans. Having worked in Germany and especially in Spain and Portugal, I know business people there put a lot of store by such interaction. It was incredibly embarrassing to be at a series of meetings across a number of days in Portugal involving representatives from France, Germany, Hungary, Spain and Portugal, to find we had to turn down the events we had been invited to because my company had booked us to fly out two hours after the last meeting was scheduled to finish. The company seemed to have no idea how rude that seemed to our hosts and the fact that we missed out on the informal networking. I know that people on expenses and 'junkets' earn a bad name, but in British business culture we seem to have gone too far the other way and now seem terse and cold towards international business partners.
Such terse verging on rude behaviour is not confined to the business world, it is now embedded in our social contacts as well. It seems ironic that people feel that if they cannot raise you on your mobile phone that something is wrong. Using Twitter and Facebook people update their acquaintances and even complete strangers to their state of mind, even their whereabouts. However, send out an invitation, electronically, or particularly on paper and you receive a completely different attitude. Of course, two hours before any event you are hosting you receive a flurry of people pulling out. This is the stage when they realise that if they actually are going to attend they need to stop what they are doing and begin getting ready and setting off. This is pretty rude especially for events that need catering, but these days I am glad for even this last minute courtesy. What is more common is people simply not turning up and not informing you of that fact. Given the range of communication devices we have these days there is no excuse. You can text or call from a traffic jam, you can send an email or a tweet from the railway station where you are stuck or even from the wireless laptop you have with you on the train. You can telephone. Even if your mobile phone has been stolen or run out of charge you can still use the remaining telephone boxes. If I am not able to answer, then simply leave a message. None of this is difficult. For those people who have decided not to come long before the actual day, it is even easier. However, these days it is rare to receive any communication that the people are not coming.
It seems ironic given how much 'rage' we have in public life that people actually find it difficult to engage with people, even their friends, over 'challenging' or 'difficult' issues. They are quite happy to bellow or hoot someone or swear vigorously at them as that is all one-way communication, they have no real emotional engagement with it and can stomp or drive away if they do not like the response. People cannot deal with 'I am sorry, I cannot come to your party' and the 'That's a shame I was really looking forward to you being there'. That is too much of a burden for so many adults these days. They would rather be rude and saying nothing at all. This unwillingness to even face a slightly discomforting conversation feeds back into business and I have a manager who complains 'I don't want to know that' when people make even constructive criticism about the company and tries to have every meeting artificially jolly even when people are at loggerheads. Part of the reason is that too many people in work cannot process the concept that others see their company and people's behaviour within it as different from how they see it themselves. Often these days I hear people say that it is a 'lie' when people express a differing opinion. This tunnel vision allows people who do not respond either way to an invite, to see themselves as being polite and in the right.
It is not that I accept that my event may not be the most important thing on a person's agenda, I am quite happy for them to say 'no, I cannot come', whatever their reason. What is more difficult is hearing nothing at all, especially when buying food and drink is an issue. It is infinitely worse when the event is not an adult one but a child's. This is the situation in which rudeness begins to result not just in too much food being bought or people sitting around waiting for someone to turn up who never comes, in such circumstances it is far more unpleasant. For the past five years I have been involved each year indirectly in a child's birthday party. Given that with funds tight, children these days are usually limited to the number of people they can invite, they carefully select who will receive an invitation. The day of the party comes and you have heard nothing back from half of the parents even though you have left reminder messages on their answerphone and sent texts. You dare not tell the child that half of their friends may not come, just in case, as often happens, some of them actually turn up, even though they have given you no indication that they are attending.
Another percentage will show up at the wrong time. Two of the families this year, despite saying their child was attending had gone shopping, one lot to London and then only realised they were supposed to be coming to the party. One showed up near the end and one never came at all. I feel discouraged when people do that to me as an adult, but to a child with all the issues about having their friends around and the presents they will receive it easily turns what is supposed to be a happy day into a stressful one as they cling on hoping a particular friend will show and the adults are no better informed than them.
Are our lives so busy; do we and the children around us have so much going on that we simply forget all invitations? In fact, those families who fill their children's weekends with sports and music activities are often the ones best at responding to invitiations even if it is with a constant 'no'. If we lived in primative times when communication was difficult there might be an excuse, but these days when we walk around with communication devices that can send a movie to the other side of the world in seconds, why is it so difficult to use such tools? I am probably coming at this from the wrong end. How did it become acceptable to not respond to an invitation at all, and yet see no difficulty in speaking to the people you have so snubbed, again? How is it acceptable to ignore an invitation and then turn round and invite the people you have just snubbed to some event? I suppose it is this breakage in people's minds between their actions and the consequences of those actions. I suppose when people see nothing wrong in speeding then I should not be surprised that they see nothing wrong in ignoring an invitation and expecting you to be happy about it. We have become so utterly selfish that other people's feelings count for nothing compared to our desires and our apathy. Have we so lost empathy that we cannot see that if we treat someone else's child in such an off hand way someone will treat our child just the same? It seems so.
One reason why I like Goths is that all, I think without exception among those I have met, have 'old fashioned' manners. If they cannot attend they phone or text or email me and say 'sorry, I can't come, maybe next time'. This is a rarity in modern UK society where people think it is acceptable simply to ignore an invitation whether they want to attend or not. People wonder why our society is so fragmented and it is because despite all the technology that allows us to do it, we have developed an antipathy (maybe simply an apathy) to simply communicating with people.
Sunday, 17 August 2008
Mind Out! That Child Might Be Wearing An Ipod
When I was growing up there used to be a sign on the back of ice cream vans with a hand held up saying 'Mind Out! That Child May Be Deaf'. The implication was for speeding motorists that a child coming away from an ice cream van might not hear their engine and so be hit by them. In fact I do not think the child needed to be deaf to be put into this kind of risk. Generally too many people speed in residential areas and also children who have just got a treat are usually so focused on it that a meteorite could be crashing on to their school and they would not notice. There was a very good radio advertisement a couple of years back which outlined this principle. It played the sounds heard by a young child, an elderly person and then a teenager approaching a road. Of course those who you might think most at risk, the child and senior citizen were aware of the traffic, the teenager on their mobile phone walked right into it. This is why, if I could have found the basis for it I would have done one warning about the use of ipods and other MP3 players.
I know this problem has been around ever since they invented the personal stereo, as far back as the Walkman in 1980. People being cut off from the outside world (though often the people around them were very aware of what they were listening to) was a problem then. However, I think the reason why it has got worse is because the ear pieces now disappear entirely into the ear (rather than sit on the outside bedded on a piece of foam) and also that the person's sight is also occupied. With an ipod the user constantly seems to be tweaking with the settings or reading the tiny text on the screen and if they actually put their ipod away they pick up their mobile phone and start texting someone or flicking through photos on it. What you end up with is someone who is in a bubble in which their two main senses: sight and hearing are detached from everything around them. They are more cut off, I believe, than a deaf or blind person ever was.
I have encountered personal problems with this. My mother is going deaf, which is unsurprising, given that she is 70, but she has hearing aids and we make sure we speak slowly and clearly and look at her when we speak. For herself she takes care when she is out and about, knowing that she might get caught out by something approaching out of her line of sight that these days she might not hear. So, there is a working relationship between the (partially) deaf person, those around her and the environment through which she moves. Contrast this with the woman in my house who now seems to be plugged into her ipod from the moment she awakes. I can appreciate that rather than trying to interact with the world she might want to cut herself off from it. I have no problem with people disappearing into their music. This has been common even before music was recorded and grew in the 1970s when home hi-fis reached good quality and people would lounge back and wear those huge headphones. However, they were tied to a location and if they wanted anything they got up and found you. With the mobile technology, there is no indication if the person is plugged in or not. Unless they are listening to it so loud that you can hear it too, you have no indication of what volume they have it at. Consequently the woman in my house, who is in her mid-30s, bellows through the house like an elderly person would have done thirty years ago. You have to go up to her and tap her to get her attention as you would with a deaf person you wanted to have a sign language conversation with. In addition, being cut off so much makes her highly impatient. When she shouts out a request she cannot hear the response such as 'Coming', 'Just a moment' or 'I'm in the toilet' or whatever so she assumes no-one is responding to her request at all and just shouts more. Unlike with deafness she can switch this thing off so if a few minutes later you go to her and speak loudly, she goes 'No need to shout', again raising tensions in a house.
I am sure this is replicated across the world. I suppose it is more challenging dealing with a mature person as you somehow expect a teenager not to respond or not to hear you. With someone older you tend to think, that if they want to interract with you then they will make the effort to equip themselves to do that. We end up with one-sided conversations in which she asks me something and then does not hear or mis-hears the response. At best I can get her to remove one ear piece, but I find that incredibly rude because then I feel only part of her attention is on what I am saying, especially galling as it is generally when she is asking me to do something. The ipods are almost welded to people, and as with mobile phones, to suggest they might put them down or take them off or even turn them off seems like a personal offence as if you asked them to remove their underpants or bra. The 'other' world provided by these devices is clearly more vital than the current one they are physically in (and do not get me started on people receiving text messages or phone calls during meals).
Even more hazardous is when these people go out on the streets. In contrast to real deaf people, they seem to make no effort to compensate for their impaired senses by being more attentive to what is going on around them. I drive through a number of towns that have universities, some of them have two and if I spot any students on the pavement I slow up as they are likely to simply wander out, especially at traffic lights or crossings, assuming that everyone else is going to stop to let them pass like some sacred animal. I turned into a side road leading to a car park the other day and an ipod wearing student using their mobile was walking in the middle of this side road and was totally oblivious to me being behind them. I had to proceed at their slow walking pace until we reached the broader area of the car park (and where has this fashion for walking on the road rather than the pavement suddenly come from? Is it due to fear of being mugged on the pavement; ironically cyclists of all ages seem habitually to go on the pavement, as noted in 'The Guardian' a couple of weeks ago a woman was aghast at the suggestion she cycle on the road; how topsy-turvy is this country becoming). Even coming out of shops, you often find your way blocked by someone just standing there oblivious to anyone around them. If you dare touch them to ask them to move, well of course that brings down a wall of invective on you, so in the UK we hover in that ineffective hesitant way until the chance comes up and the person moves on. How can city centres function with this sort of behaviour.
As you know, I am the first to complain about bad driving. However, safe driving can only work if all users of the road and pavement do their best to be alert of what is going on around them. Many pedestrians are deliberately detaching themselves from the real world for one more removed. However important the next track on your playlist is or responding to that text, it is less important than preventing yourself becoming another road casualty. We will not even get on to the issues of politeness and not being an obstacle when around town, just think about keeping yourself and others alive.
I know this problem has been around ever since they invented the personal stereo, as far back as the Walkman in 1980. People being cut off from the outside world (though often the people around them were very aware of what they were listening to) was a problem then. However, I think the reason why it has got worse is because the ear pieces now disappear entirely into the ear (rather than sit on the outside bedded on a piece of foam) and also that the person's sight is also occupied. With an ipod the user constantly seems to be tweaking with the settings or reading the tiny text on the screen and if they actually put their ipod away they pick up their mobile phone and start texting someone or flicking through photos on it. What you end up with is someone who is in a bubble in which their two main senses: sight and hearing are detached from everything around them. They are more cut off, I believe, than a deaf or blind person ever was.
I have encountered personal problems with this. My mother is going deaf, which is unsurprising, given that she is 70, but she has hearing aids and we make sure we speak slowly and clearly and look at her when we speak. For herself she takes care when she is out and about, knowing that she might get caught out by something approaching out of her line of sight that these days she might not hear. So, there is a working relationship between the (partially) deaf person, those around her and the environment through which she moves. Contrast this with the woman in my house who now seems to be plugged into her ipod from the moment she awakes. I can appreciate that rather than trying to interact with the world she might want to cut herself off from it. I have no problem with people disappearing into their music. This has been common even before music was recorded and grew in the 1970s when home hi-fis reached good quality and people would lounge back and wear those huge headphones. However, they were tied to a location and if they wanted anything they got up and found you. With the mobile technology, there is no indication if the person is plugged in or not. Unless they are listening to it so loud that you can hear it too, you have no indication of what volume they have it at. Consequently the woman in my house, who is in her mid-30s, bellows through the house like an elderly person would have done thirty years ago. You have to go up to her and tap her to get her attention as you would with a deaf person you wanted to have a sign language conversation with. In addition, being cut off so much makes her highly impatient. When she shouts out a request she cannot hear the response such as 'Coming', 'Just a moment' or 'I'm in the toilet' or whatever so she assumes no-one is responding to her request at all and just shouts more. Unlike with deafness she can switch this thing off so if a few minutes later you go to her and speak loudly, she goes 'No need to shout', again raising tensions in a house.
I am sure this is replicated across the world. I suppose it is more challenging dealing with a mature person as you somehow expect a teenager not to respond or not to hear you. With someone older you tend to think, that if they want to interract with you then they will make the effort to equip themselves to do that. We end up with one-sided conversations in which she asks me something and then does not hear or mis-hears the response. At best I can get her to remove one ear piece, but I find that incredibly rude because then I feel only part of her attention is on what I am saying, especially galling as it is generally when she is asking me to do something. The ipods are almost welded to people, and as with mobile phones, to suggest they might put them down or take them off or even turn them off seems like a personal offence as if you asked them to remove their underpants or bra. The 'other' world provided by these devices is clearly more vital than the current one they are physically in (and do not get me started on people receiving text messages or phone calls during meals).
Even more hazardous is when these people go out on the streets. In contrast to real deaf people, they seem to make no effort to compensate for their impaired senses by being more attentive to what is going on around them. I drive through a number of towns that have universities, some of them have two and if I spot any students on the pavement I slow up as they are likely to simply wander out, especially at traffic lights or crossings, assuming that everyone else is going to stop to let them pass like some sacred animal. I turned into a side road leading to a car park the other day and an ipod wearing student using their mobile was walking in the middle of this side road and was totally oblivious to me being behind them. I had to proceed at their slow walking pace until we reached the broader area of the car park (and where has this fashion for walking on the road rather than the pavement suddenly come from? Is it due to fear of being mugged on the pavement; ironically cyclists of all ages seem habitually to go on the pavement, as noted in 'The Guardian' a couple of weeks ago a woman was aghast at the suggestion she cycle on the road; how topsy-turvy is this country becoming). Even coming out of shops, you often find your way blocked by someone just standing there oblivious to anyone around them. If you dare touch them to ask them to move, well of course that brings down a wall of invective on you, so in the UK we hover in that ineffective hesitant way until the chance comes up and the person moves on. How can city centres function with this sort of behaviour.
As you know, I am the first to complain about bad driving. However, safe driving can only work if all users of the road and pavement do their best to be alert of what is going on around them. Many pedestrians are deliberately detaching themselves from the real world for one more removed. However important the next track on your playlist is or responding to that text, it is less important than preventing yourself becoming another road casualty. We will not even get on to the issues of politeness and not being an obstacle when around town, just think about keeping yourself and others alive.
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