Media Archive
Posted by Adrian Toll on March 6th, 2009 - Read comments and add your own
Sven Birkets writes in The Atlantic about his fear that the Amazon Kindle will mean the end of the “deep” contextualisation that physical books give – libraries, book shops, history.
What’s at stake here is not so much the physical / digital book divide, but culture and human psychology: what digital books will do to culture that is expressed through the written word and its environs. Birkets’ view seems to be based on a pessimistic view of readers – that they would willingly give up their human need for deep context for the sake of convenience. But I can’t help feeling that the human need for deep context is deep itself. There may be a period of time when people do give up that context for convenience’s sake. However, I think that the need for it will start to reassert itself – you don’t miss the water until your well runs dry, but when it does you don’t just sit and die of thirst, you dig a new one.
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Posted by Adrian Toll on September 6th, 2008 - Add a comment
We start with a commentary on the Olympic opening ceremony as seen from Egypt by Lelyn Masters, Our Man In Cairo:
Envy is at the root of much racism, against China, against America, against the Jews.
I saw the Chinese spectacle. The Arabic commentator, in the dress of a sheik, explained to us that the Chinese were using the spectacle to intimidate the world. It was quite interesting to me how the Chinese adapted the Greek ceremony. It was as if the far east and the west had joined together and skipped the Arab world.
When the commentators spoke of Arab competitors they spoke of competitors from the “united Arab nation.” They didn’t speak of them as if they were from individual countries. The broadcast was from Dubai, of course, and there was no rhetoric of Emirate superiority in sports, the way it was no doubt spoken of in the US. Again, the key phrase was “Arab unity.”
PanArabism is an interesting movement, often at odds with Islamists, but equally enraged at the existence of Israel. It is in a spirit of Panarabism that Egyptians would feel personally threatened by Israel and the US, whereas these two countries are doing nothing against Egypt, but rather are giving tons of financial aid.
So actually, all this talk of Arab unity could be read as antisemitic, anti-Chinese (who are trying to intimidate us) and ultimately an expression of one thing: envy.
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Posted by Adrian Toll on July 29th, 2008 - Add a comment
The dominance of Google is radically changing written language on the internet – through their search engine and advertising programmes such as AdSense they are homogenising the meanings of words. This provides a strong impetus for newspapers to ignore whatever editorial ethics they had left in their desperate rush towards the money from online advertising.
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Posted by Adrian Toll on May 7th, 2008 - Add a comment
One theme that has run throughout the Democratic presidential primaries in the USA has been people’s pleasant amazement that, unless there’s a huge upset (remember George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004?), the next president of the USA will be either a woman or black. This is celebrated as proof of how far the country has come in terms of racial and sexual equality. But, certainly in terms of the political commentary in the media, the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama brings a further bitter twist to Yoko Ono’s comment that “woman is the nigger of the world” (later turned into a song by her and John Lennon - watch it, including a great introduction by Lennon, on YouTube).
Clinton’s appearance features heavily in the coverage of her campaign, for example Carl Bernstein’s disgust at her “thick ankles”. If we’re talking about appearances, what about Obama’s fat lips? Can you imagine the McCain audience question “How are we going to beat the bitch?”, to which he replied “good question!”, rephrased as “How are we going to beat that black bastard?” There’s a whiff of suspicion that, admittedly along with other concerns about Clinton, the commentators would prefer a man to win, even if he is black.
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Posted by Adrian Toll on April 22nd, 2008 - Add a comment
At a party in Bristol a few years ago, I met a barrister who had recently started to train as a magician. He was an intense person, standing a bit closer than people normally do, and fixing me with a stare. When I realised that he was dangling in front of me the watch that he’d removed from my wrist, I have to admit I was impressed. It’s a pretty standard trick, but I count myself as being an alert person, almost to the point of edginess, and it’s unusual for something like that to escape my attention.
What he was using is called “misdirection” – a simple trick where the magician makes you more interested in something else (in this case his close proximity and the close attention he directed at me) while removing your watch. (Having said that, and to his credit, you still have to be extremely dexterous to do something like that).
Another more threatening example was when my mobile phone got stolen. I was sitting outside a cafe when some kids came up to me and one thrust a piece of paper with something scrawled on it into my face, mumbling something unintelligible – all my attention was on the fact that the first kid was too close for comfort, and I didn’t notice that the second one had simply picked my mobile up from the table until they were long gone. Misdirection can seem like magic, but in a different context you can feel like you’ve been conned.
Advertising and marketing have adopted this trick of misdirection, except it’s more subtly done, and it aims to avoid the feeling that you’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes – on the contrary, it aims to please. This move towards misdirection has been recent, as advertising has become steadily more sophisticated. Have a look at this Persil advert from the 1960s:
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Posted by Adrian Toll on March 1st, 2008 - Read comments and add your own
The 6th March edition of the London Review of Books includes Riots, Terrorism etc. a review by John Lanchester of what appears to be a fantastic book – Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. John Lanchester has been writing some excellent articles for the LRB over the last year, including Warmer, Warmer about climate change, and Cityphilia about the current crisis in the financial markets.
Essentially Riots, Terrorism etc. is a précis of the entire book, with some observations along the way – and it makes both fascinating and depressing reading. Hyperbole generally disgusts Lanchester, but he starts the review with a bold claim:
‘Important’ is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means something like ‘slightly above average’, or ‘I was at university with her,’ or ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read it so I’m giving a quote instead.’ Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ‘a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry.
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