Dee Blind Mice

A few years go (not that many, maybe 3 or 4) my mother said to me “do you know who I met down the town? Dara O Briain’s mother. Apparently this comedy thing is working out really well for him”

This after Mock the Week.

Hmmm, really? “Mam, Dara O Briain is really famous now. If you turn on your TV any time of day or night and flick through the channels, eventually you’ll find him.”

When I go home to visit my parents, my mother likes to tell me all the latest about people I went to school with, or knew when I was a teenager or a child. She will crack open the Bray People and show me pictures of people I once knew, getting married, or winning a prize of some kind. It’s a little ritual we have.

In the 90s, I was in college with Dara O Briain. We used to occasionally get the 84 home to Bray from UCD together. My Ma knows his Ma, so for years when I would head home I would hear what he was up to among the many others.

But it’s not just Dara O Briain that I know more about than my ma these days. I’ve recently become facebook friends with some of my old school friends from Bray. I know how many children they have, whether they are married, and to whom.

One of her roles was in maintaining that low-level intimacy that keeps you loosely connected to social groups you’ve mostly moved on from. But now facebook does it better than she can, with less real human interaction.

Now if she hears a rumour about someone in the extended family, she rings me up demanding to know whether I got any messages on facebook.

I could encourage her to just join. But I don’t. There’s a part of me that will always be 16.

87 people (including me) retweeted this aphorism from @alaindebotton:

What gets called ‘laziness’ is usually a pull towards another conflicting kind of work rather than a desire to do nothing.

Only a few of that 87 said things like “yeah, right”.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with the proposition though, because I think there is a case to be made that sometimes

doing nothing = a kind of work

When people describe themselves as “doing nothing”, often they are engaged in the things they do without thinking.

They might be writing, or reading, thinking, fixing or making something, but it is very rare that they will be doing nothing at all.

When I am “doing nothing” I’m usually thinking, writing, or reading, sometimes talking to somene. When Seth is “doing nothing” he’s often fixing something or cleaning. To him making a phonecall is a job he puts off by cleaning his walking boots. To me calling a friend something I do to put off cleaning my boots (and then by the time I get to it, he has already done it – hurray!)

There is a lot to learn about work and collaboration by looking at what people are really doing when they are doing nothing.

I’ve read this phrase on a couple of blogs recently in reference to people who complain about new designs to services, e.g. Google Instant, New Twitter etc.

I’m very familiar at the moment with irrational hatred of any change. I live with a 2 year old. Like many toddlers, she thinks that if you do something once it is a tradition, if you do it twice it is a religious ritual that must always be done in exactly the same way. When you find yourself agreeing to throw out a bowl of cereal because the wrong person took the milk out of the fridge you know you’re in real “I fear change” territory.

There is a particular narrative of recent technological change (this blog post by Jeremy Keith in opposition to the Digital Economy Act is a pretty good exemplar) that sees change as progress and fear of change as irrational conservatism. And to a large extent the narrative holds true.

Keith quotes from John Philip Sousa on sound recording technology:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country… We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

Which is funny. But Sousa wasn’t entirely wrong, was he? Hannah Donovan gave a wonderful talk/Jam Session at dConstruct where she talked about the deleterious effect recorded music had on improvisation. Live, participatory, spontaneous performance did give way for almost a century to the primacy of recorded music. We almost lost our tail there for a second…

I suppose Keith’s point is that it is the fear that is silly. Not that change is always good. But that approaching it with fear prevents us from seeing it clearly. Of course, approaching it with excitement has the same effect. People (like me, a lot of the time) who are very excited about new things, often can’t really see what’s really good about them, never mind what’s bad.

I do worry a little though that continuity is underrated at the moment. There seems to be a cultural bias in favour of rapid change and a lack of patience with expectations that things continue in the same way for a while. Learning how to be constantly adapting to fast-paced change must affect how we behave and how we think of ourselves in the world. I’m far more interested in how this has changed us than whether Google/the Internet/mobiles phones are making us stupid (we were stupid already, let’s face it.)

Culture exists in institutions – old, venerable buildings that have continuously housed the same organisation for centuries, command a respect from us that speaks to a need for continuity. It is easy now to organise rapidly and temporarily, but that shouldn’t mean that we allow important institutions to be dismantled just because they are old. The same blindness that prevented people from seeing how video tapes would transform the film industry also prevents people from seeing why libraries are still important even when there are Kindles. Keeping good stuff around is as important for shaping a good future as making room for the new stuff.

I just learnt a new phrase – social proof. It is when people believe that something is true not because of facts, or proof, or statistics, but because that is what everybody else thinks. I suppose it is what people call “common sense”, which I always think is a very different thing from good sense.

I’m going to keep my eye out for examples of this in the online world, I know there is often consensus around ideas that seems to me to be based on very little other that fellow feeling, e.g. people are not prepared to pay for content online. The ridicule of the Times for their paywall seemed to be mostly based on the idea that it “obviously” wasn’t going to work. Roy Greenslade in the Guardian was interesting on the reasons it might. We’ll see how it goes.