Letter from Geneva

Spring is here and with it the 82nd International Geneva Motor Show, which I went to this week.  I’m not a car fanatic – luckily, I already own the only car I have ever wanted, an old Ferrari-red Fiat 500 – but one cannot live in Geneva and in good conscience avoid this spectacle.  So I went along and, well, so bloody what; a ridiculous tuned-up super car here, a €500,000 Maybach there, a nasty Tatamobile somewhere else – I couldn’t really have cared less.

Beforehand many of my colleagues (females included, oddly) had made a big thing of the glamorous ‘car ladies’ who supposedly bring some class to proceedings, as well as an opportunity for us red-blooded males to unashamedly cop a look at hot totty.  They were there all right, but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for these poor women.  I was reminded of part of a poem I wrote about a BA air hostess I saw once: dessicated, weary and plain/the forced fake smile sticks/fixed on a fading face like a stain/spilled between two dimple pricks.  What I’m trying to say, in less pretentious words, is that the whole idea is a bit depressing and sordid.  It’s a tough gig, basically. Rumour has it that one of the most commonly asked questions that they field is (imagine this coming from a bald, fat, sweating man) ‘can I test drive you?’ – which sums everything up.  I’m told they get paid very well, though, and if that takes the edge off all the better.

With the onset of sun and warmth, I am reminded of Lausanne last summer, which offered some of the most pleasant weather I have ever experienced.  I am looking forward to getting into the mountains, hiking, singing and feeding the cows and whatnot.  The snow at the peaks of the Saleve is starting to melt and it could be that the ski season is cut short this year.  But it was good while it lasted: I managed to go three times, once to Courmayeur, once to Les Diablerets, and once to Champery.  What you read about Geneva is certainly true; one cannot live here in the winter and not ski without seriously damaging your social life.  The most popular resort amongst those who I am socialising with seems to be Verbier – which is packed to the rafters with Brits like me, and since I am in denial about being a Brit like me I couldn’t imagine anything worse.  No, Courmayeur is my resort of choice so far: I can communicate with the natives, the food is excellent, and there is a higher chance of seeing swarthy-looking eye-ties attempting to ski for the first time, which is a nice reminder that I am not as bad at skiing as I think I am.

I also finally plucked up the guts to invite a couple of pals round for dinner, and in my 1970s Forster kitchen managed to approximate a meal of pork chops with fennel and lentils, and panettone bread & butter pud.  One of my guests, a lady from Lyon, picked at the meat tentatively before handing the rest to my other guest, a Mancunian, who wolfed it down while I was away tending to something in the kitchen.  Either this means that the food wasn’t great, or I have witnessed the secret of ‘why French women don’t put on weight’.  The former is a distinct possibility, but I prefer the idea of the latter of course – which is to say, French women don’t get fat because they don’t eat that much food.  It’s the best diet advice I’ve ever heard.

Tonight I voyage to Lausanne for a night out with some of my work colleagues who live there.  When I first got to Geneva, I had thought that the night life here wouldn’t stack up against that of Lausanne – clearly I’d drunk the Lausannois Kool-Aid – but in fact things aren’t so bad.  Thursday night was the bi-monthly ‘open gallery’ night in the Quartier des Bains, where the art galleries open late and offer punters drinks and snacks.  It was all very civilised, ambling from place to place and topping the night off with a meal nearby.  I even had an unexpectedly good time a while back in a nightclub called Java, being a sparklers-and-champagne venue with a reputation for attracting lots of skinny, dolled-up Eastern European ladies who are, apparently, ‘in the fashion industry’. I am reliably informed that their services can be procured for the reasonable sum of 5,000 Swiss Francs.  Before you ask, I was there with some work colleagues and we had a riot of a time, which was a surprise.  We befriended a group of Kazhakstani NGO workers on the next table and much fun was had by all.

Film Review: The Hunter

I will admit straight up that I kind of have a man crush on Willem Dafoe.  His inimitable screen charisma – achieved in spite of his Jesus-Christ-this-guy-is-definitely-a-criminal looks – means that a movie predicated on him going to Tasmania and hunting an presumed-extinct animal on behalf of a ruthless German mega-corp means more time watching him, alone, on screen.   Which is a good thing.

That aside, the direction of this film is exquisite.  I hadn’t heard of the director, Daniel Nettheim, before – but this film is a very strong calling card.  The Hunter is the filmic equivalent of a well-engineered German motorcar: not showy, but efficient and very effective.  The scene where Dafoe’s character manages to get a generator running, and the house in which he is living comes alive with light and the music of a long-stalled EP of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I’m on Fire’ surely reckons as one of my favourite in any film of the past few months.

There are weaknesses with the story, the principal of which is a resort to cliché (Jesus-Christ-this-guy-is-definitely-a-criminal hardass wilderness survival expert gets heart won by winsome kiddies whose father has recently died!  Widowed yummy mummy exchanges pregnant glances with said hardass!  Local yokels are not welcoming! Shady German mega-corp is proven to be very shady indeed based on empirical evidence!  etc etc)  but the script is solid and the characters – or character, I should say – are believable, which is testament to the quality of the actors, both adult and child.

Perhaps unavoidably, there is a  predisposition for  the film to convey a facile, and undesirable,  eco-warrior message.  The victim of the piece, the aforementioned widow, lives a hippy lifestyle in a boho-chic Tasmanian mountain shack (probably worth millions in real life, grrr) and our hero Mr Dafoe – at the beginning a clinical contract killer – suddenly develops a conscience thanks in part to this character. I don’t care much for that sort of thing.  To the film’s credit, however, all this is somewhat vindicated by the ending scenes. I won’t give away spoilers, but it’s not overly sentimental, and relatively well-handled.

I consider myself lucky that there are people out there willing to commit money to making films that will definitely appeal to dudes with Willem Dafoe man-crushes.  For the rest, though, The Hunter qualifies as a Good Movie anyways, no questions asked.   There is sufficient talent on show both in front of and behind the camera to warrant a view.  Do go.

Supertc at the Cinema: The Adventures of Tintin

Refreshed by  a long and leisurely hiatus  of working 20 hour days (primarily in order to keep his pet dinosaur in salty snacks, alcoholic beverages and oriental voyages)  supertommyc has tripped off to the cinema, that temple of the modern age, wherein the hopes and fears, dream and nightmares, fart and excrement jokes and Adam Sandlers of great civilizations are played out. As he skipped gaily to the picture house, the natural joy of our hero’s heart was bolstered by the simple and entirely reasonable hope of experiencing a motion picture worthy of this great tradition.  And what could go wrong? A director who is master of the medium, a character impervious to fickle generational changes of taste as the cherished companion of a million of childhoods, three (count ‘em) hot young screen writers rosy-cheeked and freshly plumped by popular acclaim, and the finest acting talent and special effects that money can buy.

Unfortunately, much to our hero’s (for I am he) disappointment, the film we speak of is Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, a motion-captured composite of the adventures of the eponymous be-quiffed eternally adolescent boy reporter, who has kept children of families with a certain degree of literary and cultural aspiration away from tedium since his invention by George Remi under the pseudonym  Hergé in 1929. The technology is a recent invention that recreates Tintin’s world – here inspired by Tintin’s 1943 and 1944 adventures The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure – is recreated in three dimensions faithfully, seamlessly and with some flair, but at the cost of expressive authenticity. Somewhere beneath Tintin’s somewhat blank face the acting talent of Jamie Bell is buried. Tintin’s nemesis  Dr Sakharine is played, recognisably, by Daniel Craig, whilst Captain Haddock is provided by the completely transformed Andy Serkis (a talented movie actor whose face for radio has placed him at the forefront of motion capture technology).  The real star, however, is Snowy, Tintin’s faithful fox terrier who is the only character in the world of Tintin with any real character, pizazz or style.

And this is the point. Whilst they have produced a wonderful facsimile of the world created by the drawings of Hergé and also provides a number of flawlessly realised action set pieces Spielberg, Peter Jackson (as producer and second unit director), Joe Cornish, Steven Moffatt and Edgar Wright (screenwriters), all brilliant men with great achievements behind them, have, in the process of, also transcribed all the failings of the original books.

Tintin, true to the books, is the void where the heart of the film should be, a cipher for the audience, but stripped of any emotional hinterland or motivation that might engender empathy, with only the alienating priggish certainty of any over-educated and unreflective exchange student. The “truth!”  he gasps intermittently and without passion , an unconvincing motivation for his progression through the basic boys-own mystery constructs  of the plot. Worse than this the narrative’s jerking convulsions across Europe, the Mediterranean through the Sahara Desert and back again via the palace of a North African princeling (with a convoluted and pointless, if spectacular, digression into the Haddock family history) are, it is finally revealed, all for the spectacularly uninteresting purpose of re-uniting Haddock, a scion of a sunken aristocratic family, with a sunken treasure worthy of his pedigree.

This is not inspiring or evocative of stuff. The Adventures of Tintin’s nostalgic globe-trotting action occupies the same cultural terrain as James Bond and Indiana Jones but, in comparison, those films are masterpieces of historic scope, thematic nuance and character depth. Tintin’s world is an affluent interwar Europe that tiptoes away from history. There is not a hint of the political, social, economic or intellectual – perhaps thankfully, given the content of Tintin in the Congo – conditions of the era. Tintin himself is effortlessly successful and at ease dealing with the conspiracies of international business and finance, as a pilot, a connoisseur of opera, and as a sultan’s guest.  There is not a jackboot or hammer and sickle to be found. We are thus presented with an arid bourgeois fantasy.  This is not just a bad thing morally, but, much, much more importantly, one of entertainment. Without evocative themes, without characters that live and charm and wrestle with ideas and urges and passions that drive them, the action of Tintin is inert. A clever set-piece does not thrill or excite if you cannot care about for the safety of chased and do not fear the chaser. Tintin’s dizzying dance of flawlessly conceived and executed chase sequences are boring; the filmic equivalent of an X-factor power ballad.

In the past Spielberg has been a master at creating hugely entertaining fantastical blockbuster movies, to obliquely and powerfully deal with important ideas – indeed, War of the Worlds is probably the most viscerally exciting, entertaining and evocative film made about the plight of a refugee from war.  Unfortunately, although he has dealt directly with issues and historical events of terrifying and disturbing power and importance his other films,  Tintin is suffused with a sleek and glossy chocolate-box reverence that borders on the crass and exploitative. The great shame of film is that Spielberg and company have made a dull, mechanical circus-ride pastiche of a movie. The best talent Hollywood can muster has produced a film that will only satisfy the nostalgic cravings of middle-aged Tintin fanboys and the bored children they once were.

Lausanne

On 4th of July I arrived at Lausanne’s central train station, overdressed in a crumpled linen suit and underprepared with just enough to fit in a small suitcase and shoulder bag, having, the week before, accepted a temporary job with a company based in the city. I had barely the faintest inkling of the place. A few years before I had passed through on the train en route home from a skiing holiday near the Valais, and at least knew where it was, but beyond that I was utterly ignorant. I presumed that, being in Switzerland, it would be small, clean, and quite well-run – that much turned out to be true, but I hadn’t anticipated it being a perfectly self-contained, efficient human-scale city that offered a wonderfully fresh experience after the often chaotic sprawl of London, where I had lived for the previous six years.

At about 5pm on that first day I was deposited in a spacious two-bedroom apartment, fully furnished and replete with curly bamboo in pots and Warhol-esque prints of Audrey Hepburn on the wall. But it was instantly endearing – made all the more so by the south-facing balcony that presented an expansive view of the lake, across to Evian-les-Bains to the South and practically as far as the eye could see along its vast length to the South West, toward Geneva. I would spend a lot of time on that balcony, looking at that view. In the early morning, before the yachts, pedalos, paddle boats, ferries, speedboats and waterskiers had the opportunity to disturb it, the surface of the lake was calm, not quite mirror-like, but nearly, that gave the impression of it being frozen solid, as if it were mid-winter. I had arrived at an opportune moment; the summer was just beginning, and the city’s microclimate ensured remarkably consistent weather until the end of September. I got into the habit of making myself a drink after work and sitting on the balcony, listening to the ambient noise of the well-to-do quarter of the city the apartment was in, watching the sun set behind the Jura mountains to the West.  In the wider scheme of things, it was a privileged existence.

The town itself left no less of an impression. The old center is built across a series of steep, narrow river valleys that give it an sometimes-confusing dimension. It happened often that I would see a landmark and confidently walk toward it, only to be confronted by a chasm that required a either a detour to a nearby bridge or a walk down, and up, steep steps. I got a lot of exercise this way as I wandered the streets, and soon found myself following a very Californian lifestyle: sun, healthy living, and healthy eating.

Ouchy, the old port a kilometre downhill from the centre of the old town, is the city’s closest physical manifestation of this West Coast ideal. There you will find swimming pools, water skiers, pedalo and sailboat rental, and long promenades on which runners, joggers and rollerbladers jostle for attention. It’s as if someone took Venice Beach, removed the hipsters and crack addicts and replaced them with stuccoed villas and well-to-do ladies walking their well-groomed Westies. And that stunning view of the Alps, ofcourse.  Rather more pleasant than the inbound flightpath to LAX.

On Saturday mornings the steep streets leading from St Francois to Place de La Riponne become an open food market, primarily vegetable sellers but also, as you enter the Riponne square, bakers, butchers, cheese-sellers and bric-a-brac pedlars. I was drawn again and again to a stall in the the corner nearest the Hotel de Ville, next to the Post Office that sold freshly-baked patisserie. My favourite was a long, flat slab of bread sweetened with sugar and sprinkled with pine nuts.

It was all quite a contrast from the lodgings in Finsbury Park whence I came. And now I write this from a small studio apartment off the Rue d’Athenee in Geneva, in the shadow of an expansive 1960s block of flats, where I live after my employer moved its office to the Northern fringes of the city, on the road to Ferney, near the airport. I can’t help but feel a small sense of loss after having a fleeting taste of the safe and salubrious Lausanne life that attracted Gibbon and Voltaire, 20th-century rock stars and 19th century aristocrats, and countless others besides.

What is Success?

Here’s a question: are the cool kids at school more or less likely to become successful adults than their uncool classmates?

It’s a weird one, admittedly.  It’s also difficult to answer, because it’s largely pointless to try and define what ‘cool’ actually means and ‘success’ is many different things to different people. If you were to distil it further, though, it might be put another way: are characteristics that lead to success in life identifiable at an early age, and do those characteristics tend to be exhibited more by the popular kids, or not?

I ask because, at a recent work training course, my colleagues and I were told to list the characteristics of a leader and we collectively responded with a top three of honesty, intelligence, and charisma. Nothing surprising, certainly, but on later reflection I wondered if this would have applied to the popular kids at school.

And it’s true, any of the more popular people did indeed exhibit all three of these leadership qualities.  But not uniquely so.  How many of us remember popularity of the brain-dead but good-looking girl who had boys at her beck and call, or the chiselled jock who could barely string a sentence together?  These are Hollywood clichés, yes, but there is a reason why they are so enduring – because, at their core, they contain a kernel of truth that we can all identify with.

But if we were, as teens, drawn to people who we wouldn’t be as adults, what changes our value system between adolescence and adulthood?  Darwin suggests that we place a greater emphasis on characteristics in the opposite that are conducive to more successful reproduction.  In the largely consequence-free world of the teenager, these don’t figure so highly,  so we make sub-optimal choices, from an evolutionary perspective, about who we associate with.

That’s, of course, one interpretation. It probably explains the majority of how social and sexual attraction changes between adolescence and adulthood, and is all well and interesting, but doesn’t satisfactorily answer the question originally posed about the characteristics that lead to success in life.

Ultimately it comes back to the initial problem of defining what ‘success’ actually means.  An enticing solution presents itself when you consider how adults, as opposed to teenagers, deal with the twin burdens of consequence and responsibility. This leads to one possible definition for the word: the ability to better able to take on the responsibilities of life, and being better able to do so because of greater awareness of the consequences of one’s actions.

Kids live in a world mostly devoid of responsibility, which creates a disregard for consequence, which creates a social dynamic very different from the world in which adults live. Those teenagers perspicacious enough to be aware of the consequences of their actions, be it through nature or nurture, are likely to be well-equipped to deal with the responsibilities of life and thus more successful.  They may have been cool, they may not have been – either way, it’s irrelevant; some people are just better adults than they are kids, and some are better kids than they are adults.  It all depends on how they deal with responsibility.

Then the question becomes: “what is responsibility?”  But let’s leave that for another time, shall we?

Book Review: The Beautiful and the Damned

The biggest problem with the commonplace descriptions of India as a country of contrasting extremes, of huge opportunity and abject poverty, or of lively democracy and chronic corruption is that, in fact, the place is mostly just abjectly poor and chronically corrupt.  But this is unpalatable to Western, especially British, sensitivities (post-colonial guilt is very much a trans-generational phenomenon, I can safely report), so much writing about India tends to scratch around for positives of the whilst managing only trite clichés.

Out of this literature a tedious and patronising half-truth emerges: a ‘spiritualistic’, ‘mysterious’ or ‘unknowable’ India, which rides roughshod over a vastly more complex reality.  One more book of the likes of Eat, Pray, Love and I can only hope that the whole lot be crushed into a fine and non-reconstitutible dust under the collective weight of its own fatuousness.

The title of Siddartha Deb’s book therefore does not bode well, but the simple fact that he is from India and grew up in relatively impoverished surroundings lends much-needed veracity to his writing. He proves to be an astute observer of his fellow Indians through his ability to immerse himself with ease into Indian society at both ends of the social spectrum.  The result is a series of vignettes that will be instantly recognisable to any person who has spent more than a few weeks in the country – corruption, confusion, wretched poverty, and blind opulence feature in almost equal measure; indeed, based on the content of the book, it would better be named simply ‘The Damned’.  And why not?  In 2011 this is the reality for the majority of the population.

The book is split into five parts, each a profile of a different kind of India.  Two chapters look at the the lives of wealthy business owners and computer engineers, the remaining three focus on farmers, factory workers, and casual labour in the hospitality industry.  Mr Deb is a factual writer, a reporter in the true sense of the word, and conceals his value judgements very well.  The result is frank and well-paced exposition that successfully captures the mundanity and hopelessness of the lives of his subjects, many of whom appear to exist with no other objective than survival.

A stylistic precursor to this book is Suketu Mehta’s engaging and highly-recommended account of Bombay, Maximum City.  Both Mehta and Deb have lived and worked in the States and approach their homeland with similar sang froid, but whereas Mehta is able to draw stories from a more tumultuous and thrilling milieu, Deb is constrained by his choice to remain largely in the hinterlands of the Subcontinent.  This is not a criticism.  The stories that emerge are more typical of ‘the World’s largest democracy’ and what they lack in instant readability they make up for with greater instructive value to the casual Western reader.

Film Review: The Tree of Life

A warning: The Tree of Life is a contemplation of the conflict between grace and nature, humanity’s relationship with God, the pain of loss, the strength of love, the Freudian impact of emotional trauma on the child self and the meaning of life from the start of the universe to the modern day. If that sounds pretentious to you, don’t go to see it. If it doesn’t, you should – with an open mind.  This is a film that can be thought-provoking and rewarding if you approach it in the right manner, but even the most easy-going viewers may find it difficult to digest.

There are a few reasons for this. To begin with, there is no narrative to speak of.  A mother in 1960s American suburbia finds out that her 19-year old son has died, and from there the film embarks on a free-form journey that encompasses the creation of the universe, the dinosaur age, the KT extinction, the birth of the mother’s sons, and the subsequent domestic life she and her husband  lead bringing up their family in 1950s Waco. There is little structure holding these various parts together, and the initial conceit – the death of the son – is ultimately the only event familiar to viewers accustomed to the slickly plot-driven films produced today.  This can be quite a discombobulating experience, but if  you accept the way in which Malick has constructed the movie as a whole you will be more clearly able to appreciate the scenes within that, in aggregate, have startling emotional strength born both of their outward familiarity and their inward emotional sincerity.

The Texas scenes which form the main part of the film, for example, astutely capture the mundane, imperfect intimacy of family life. The husband is a loving but strict father to his three boys, obsessed by them not being pushed aside by those stronger-willed than they.  The mother, in contrast, is the physical manifestation of innocent magnanimity and love. These characteristics are revealed to us by free-form camerawork – a particular strength of the director - and a non-linearity that draw the viewer into the lives of the protagonists with powerful efficacy.  One moment we see the father reprimanding his eldest for slamming a door, making him close it 100 times quietly as punishment.  The director cuts to a completely unrelated scene;  then, much later in the film, when the boys discover that their father has gone away on a business trip the eldest immediately runs to the front door and starts slamming it, the mother powerless (or unwilling) to stop him.  The relationship of the young boys to their mother, and hers with them, is especially well portrayed.  At various points we see the three boys chasing the mother with a lizard before all collapsing in fits of laughter, or jumping on their beds with her, unbridled happiness expressed on their faces, or one of them, as a baby, being shielded from the distressing sight of a man having an epileptic fit. These vignettes serve no narrative purpose, but anyone with an ounce of humanity cannot fail to feel deep empathy with both the mother and children, and that is the point.  The universality of what we are shown is in itself a powerful message about the nature of human psychology.

By explicitly setting out to make the mother the representation of divine grace and the father that of human nature, however, Malick obliges viewers to think about an abstruse medieval theological discourse.  Since the central strength of the film is that it communicates so much complex information through universally-understood expressions of fear, love, and anger, it is a shame that Malick feels the need to introduce an unnecessary layer of conscious academic intellectualism when it would have done so well without it.  There are other areas of weakness, in particular the dinosaurs – which not only are depicted in low-grade CGI (a serious flaw), but fail to serve any purpose even within the context of the film’s amorphous structure.

But these can be forgiven.   The film portrays basic emotions with such authenticity that is is bound to evoke a visceral response in whoever watches it.  That response will be different for each viewer, and you can take as much or as little away from it as you wish.  If you do go to see it, please try to give it the benefit of the doubt.  It will be much more rewarding.

Google+

I’m not hugely excited by Google’s wannabe Facebook-beater, Google+, but its developers at least have an interesting take on how they believe social interaction over the internet should work.  They took as a starting point the huge complexity of offline human interaction, put a lot of thought into what it means, and then tried to reduce it into a set of codeable rules.

At first glance, this seems obvious.  The internet is only an extension of our offline experience, not its replacement.  But Facebook worked from the opposite premise, that the Internet provides a new way of interacting, not just a new medium of interaction.  It lets the chaotic, open and impersonal elements of the internet constrain the interaction it hopes to encourage.  This does not fit easily with our conception of how relationships should work – so, while it’s great as an email system or photo sharing site, beyond that Facebook’s attempts to being people together can actually create a sense of unease, which in turn is the source of the all the ‘love it or hate it’ debate about social networking.

To understand the real source of this phenomenon, consider that in offline human interactions there is a bias towards certain modes of behaviour that the anonymity and technological complexity of the Internet have made either more difficult to exhibit or less important, depending on the context. Since these patterns of behaviour form the backbone of face-to-face human interaction, their relative scarcity online is not a good thing.  Any social network, Google+ included, is going to struggle to overcome this basic fact, although I reserve judgment for Google’s latest effort until I see it in practice (it may well go the way of Buzz and Wave, who knows).

The first of these behavioural biases is a bias towards control.  By this mean both control of behaviour – anger, sorrow, fear, and so forth – and control of the consequences of your interaction.  Emails ‘going viral’ is a perfect example of how the internet breaks down the controls that are inherent in a spoken conversation, and demonstrates how a slip of the keyboard can have far greater ramifications than ever intended.

The second is a bias toward discretion, which is a simple consequence of social etiquette.  The majority of us are not sociopaths, but our tendency to be indiscreet online can make us appear so – one need look no further than the comments pages of blogs or chat forums to see the vitriolic maliciousness that complete strangers are capable of expressing to each other when secreted behind the internet’s veil of anonymity.  The missing inputs, body language, eye contact, and social setting, are as communicative as words themselves and the reason why offline human interaction is inherently self-regulating.

The third is a stronger sense of the principal of reciprocity, which is the basis of most reasonable human relationships, from romance to small talk around a barbecue. In the real world it’s ignored to the peril of those choosing to do so.  The convenience given to us by the internet has had the unfortunate unintended consequence of making us lazy in this regard, however; after all, it’s simple to take and not give back in a consequence-free – or nearly so – environment.

If Google+ does anything to bring these kinds of behaviours online, it will be a thing to celebrate.  It cannot be simple to distil them into computer code, however, and I fear that the site will barely depart from the existing social networking paradigm.

Small Talk

You know the conversational moment at which you suddenly realise you are talking drivel but you keep digging yourself deeper into a hole until in desperation you resort to something like ‘nice weather we’re having isn’t it?’ or ‘so, did you watch the football yesterday?’, at which point you might as well get your coat and leave?  I do, too.

I’m actually not totally socially inept, before you ask.  I haven’t ever initiated a conversation about the weather, but I’ll admit trying once to talk football – which, in the context, was entirely justifiable. I was standing around a barbecue, sipping a beer with two English fellows. If there were a time to talk footie, this surely was it, so I jumped straight in.

Me (casual nonchalance): So, did you watch the football yesterday?

Lad 1: No.

Lad 2: Actually I have no interest in football whatsoever and don’t want to talk about it.

Thus my brief career as a football conversationalist was quietly throttled to death within the space of about three seconds. The irony, that I have no interest in football either and I was just trying to make conversation, was not lost on me. I found it all highly amusing.  I still do.

An episode like this encapsulates the pitfalls of small talk. Or – to put it another way – the art of casual conversation, because that is what it is, an art.  But who lacked the conversational artistry around that barbecue?  It could have been me, for resorting to formulaic conversation starters; or  perhaps it was him, for not at least trying to reciprocate.

When you engage in conversation with someone you don’t know and have little interest in, you enter into an unspoken contract bound by the norms of social etiquette. This contract states that you are both playing an game, probably inconsequential but at the same time difficult to play, that requires each player to maintain a facade of interest and inquisitiveness in the other whilst being careful to not cause offence by betraying your real feelings of apathy (possibly) and boredom (likely).

So, if someone starts talking about the weather – and I use that as a catch-all for cliché conversation – the rules state that you don’t roll your eyes and walk off. You respond in an engaged manner and see if you can direct the conversation elsewhere, rather than killing it dead with a terse one-liner.  Indeed, if you’re a skilled conversationalist, you’ll be able to turn the weather into something interesting to talk about.  That is a skill worth having.

Someone once defined charm to me as the ability to make someone feel that they are interesting, and they at least partly were right. At its heart, this is what the game is all about. One can be a humorous and skilled story-teller – and, let’s face it, we all love meeting people like that at a drinks party – but still may lack charm if he or she doesn’t express an interest in the other person.  So the next time you find yourself around a barbecue with people you don’t know and all else is failing, just show interest in them.  The rest will take care of itself.

The Unwisdom of Crowds

A few years ago, a school colleague of mine set up a website that was essentially an RSS news aggregator with a ‘credibility’ rating system attached. The big idea was that the users of the site could rate each story on its accuracy in order to provide a web news outlet free from general internet hokum and the bias of big media. Its inspiration was the presumption that the users, on aggregate, knew what they were talking about – that the crowd, in other words, was wise.

This idea, that the internet unlocks the ‘wisdom of crowds’, was not new. The common argument was straightforward: the internet was invented, people were brought together in an entirely new way, and a new way of making decisions by drawing on consensus opinion of a large group of informed individuals was created.

It’s appealing, but it doesn’t bear scrutiny. Start with the most simple problem of all – crowds are dumb. It’s the individuals within it who are informed and intelligent. When opinion is aggregated, the valuable input is obscured and a homogenous, non-attributable block of data – arguably the internet’s most pernicious contribution to modern information gathering and decision-making processes – is left. (Tripadvisor’s point system comes to mind as the most obvious victim of this phenomenon.)

This is made worse by the difficulties inherent in representing a large number of complex opinions in a coherent and understandable manner. On my schoolmate’s site, each article was shown with ‘credible and ‘not credible’ scores, as voted for by previous users. Whilst this drastically over-simplified the task at hand, I didn’t ever expect to see anything different. To give a proper idea of an article’s credibility would have require a classification system tailored to each (e.g. ‘credible, apart from the bit about such-and-such’ or ‘not credible but the author is correct to assume so-and-so), leading to a number of classifications as numerous as the articles themselves. That is not feasible, and so the crowd’s dumbness is reinforced.

With the explosion of available information on the internet the pressure to simplify, collate and categorise is accelerating. This is counterintuitive.  If there is an ever-increasing pool of knowledge available at any given time, the language used to bring order to it should also become more complex, not less so – but this is indeed what is happening. An example, the increasing use of the Facebook ‘like’ meme, is concerning for the simple fact that a ‘like’ rating means very little beyond a vague indicator of popularity or approval. Nevertheless it is being used more often by media outlets to rank and order their content, and so once again we are drawn back toward unattributed, homogenous data sets masquerading as valid opinion.

We should instead focus ever more on the internet’s ability to find those valuable and rare individual, informed points of view. Sites like Twitter are an excellent way to directly connect opinion makers with content consumers as individuals because there are no categorisations or aggregations, and the crowd, whilst present, can be safely ignored. This is the secret of crowdsourcing, which is a spectacularly useful tool for finding anything from restaurant recommendations to attributing mystery World War II photographs.

My schoolmate’s site, meanwhile, has morphed into a back-end IT infrastructure provider to companies who want branded media content for their customers and employees. The ‘credibility’ system has completely disappeared. It’s possible he was attracted to the intellectual purity of the idea at first before realising its meaninglessness but, whatever the case, I’m glad to see he has adapted to survive – and I’m not surprised. He’s a smart individual.