Finding Soho

Using technology that’s nascent and fallible requires an extra level of patience and willingness to relinquish attachments to expectations of perfection and smooth sailing.  Humans are hard-wired to expect routine and tried-and-tested performance. And it’s not easy for us to contend with the uncertainty of system dropouts.  When the expected routine is interrupted, we confront our ingrained fearful reactions to breakdown and failure. Technology compels us to surrender, howeve r unwillingly, to failure. In this way, the event of technical or technological failure is a powerful circuit breaker of our neural circuitry.

How a society treats its weaker and sicker members is a pretty good indicator of its development potential. An underdeveloped country that has a culture of support for social security can potentially quickly and equitably utilise aid and resources to improve quality of life, whereas countries that have a dominant culture of hostility towards weaker citizens and residents are likely to struggle with improvement of quality of life, even with external support. There’s a link between culturally-informed ‘emotional’ attributes (solidarity vs hostility) and socio-economic wellbeing.

Eurovision can teach us a fair few things about life. These are things that we already know but Eurovision helps dramatise the lessons in an inimitably glorious way. Style over substance It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Eurovision is more about pomp, glitz, glamour, pyrotechnics and performance than it is about music per se. It is about exuberance, mirth, irreverent satire, celebration and deep emotion. Happy and cheerful songs; saucy songs; lugubrious songs; bellicose screeches; plaintive cries of longing and loss – Eurovision gives us all genres and emotions. Some of the songs that are performed are absolutely amazing, and there can be little doubt that the singers performing them are virtuosos. But, at Eurovision, performative virtuosity trumps musical virtuosity. Exceptions notwithstanding, performance is paramount. Eurovision is a riotous conflagration of colour and (this year especially) a pyromaniac’s wet dream. Eurovision’s performative and aes...

Some thoughts on the FB ‘scandal’. Privacy is such a fraught concept. If millions of people make their political opinions and preferences known on FB, is it really surprising that this data can be (and is) harnessed? If private corporations have created a business model that is based on the harnessing of user preferences, should politics be exempt? Is it OK for FB to use my data to show me ads for a movie, for example, but not for a politician? User agreement is another interesting piece of the puzzle here.  In this instance, they key contention is that Cambridge Analytica didn't even seek the consent of the people involved (friends of users of the relevant app could have had their data harvested). This is a clear example of a breach of privacy.  But many people appear to be angry more broadly about the fact that their data was used for political purposes.  Of course most people think that they have not explicitly consented to their data being used as part of a po...

Cultural differences between Australians and Americans can extend to and visibly play out in performance spaces. Australian audiences can expect performers to be ‘relaxed’, and to engage them in a jokey, jovial or even blasé manner. Australians might appreciate some self-deprecating humour and like artistes to not take themselves too seriously. They might giggle loudly during breaks in the music to provoke the performer on stage, for example - generally in a good natured way. Americans, on the other hand, can be much more earnest, serious, passionate and intense about their work and perhaps life in general. They might find the Aussie vibe slightly disconcerting. I’m not suggesting that Aussies are unserious. They are very focused and dedicated but appreciate good humour and a self-deprecating disposition, especially in performers and public figures. American performers tend to engage with audiences in a more earnest way. In general, for most of my life, I have also been an earnest and...

Media reporting of stories that involve injuries and trauma are always (necessarily) incomplete. Injuries can be incidental to the story or narrative that is being focalised, and, as such, may appear as a vestigial detail in a report. It is well-nigh impossible to capture the magnitude of the impact on each individual casualty. The word 'casualty' signals that disturbing (but unavoidable) semantic quality of being reducible to a statistic - a part of a tally. A report about a terrorist attack or a mass casualty incident will include some details of the trauma inflicted on a few victims or survivors, but these threadbare details are minuscule and inevitably inadequate markers of the 'reality' of the experience and impact. It is impossible to convey the magnitude of the experience of injury and trauma, and it is completely unrealistic to expect to understand what it was like for each individual person. However, that desire to know and sense of needing to know and underst...

[A blog in progress...] A realisation  In India, the symbolic seems to have greater resonance than the material. By this I mean that the power and potency of symbolic markers, gestures, signage and 'acts', inter alia , is greater than that of material markers, conditions and 'acts'. This is not to suggest that material conditions can be ignored or that they are generally de-prioritised in relation to the symbolic. Certainly not - and it'd be remiss of me to downplay the importance of material conditions as well as the primacy of (what used to be called, with a modicum of dismissive-ness) 'materialism' (essentially commercialism) in contemporary Indian culture. But on a subterranean and more fundamental level, questions of a symbolic nature and significance resonate in a way that questions of a material nature do not.  This is definitely not a contemporary phenomenon but a longstanding one. What does it mean exactly? Well, that is difficult to spell ou...