This is a neat little 10 minute talk by Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford in the US (http://mindsetonline.com/abouttheauthor/), explaining the simple but powerful idea of the “growth mindset” for learning.
This is going to end in a fight. Growth Mindset would be well advised to leg it before Fixed Mindset lamps him. He’s well hard and a bit mental.
The basic idea, based on real life study results, is that pupils with a “growth” mindset about their abilities ultimately out-perform and become more self-motivated than pupils with a “fixed mindset” about them. In the growth mindset, pupils believe that their abilities are not fixed but develop over time. They believe that effort activates their abilities; and setbacks or deficiencies are taken on the chin as just part of the process of learning. By contrast pupils in the “fixed mindset” believe intelligence is innate and relatively unchanging. it is revealed rather than developed. Effort is associated with a lack of ability; activities in which they may not be proficient are avoided and mistakes are hidden, because they jar with the self-narrative the pupil wants. As a result, they tend to try less hard, give up more easily when they hit a difficulty, and ultimately do less well.
Fatboy Slim was onto this 20 years ago. As was this fat boy.
We can all see that the growth mindset is better. But I suspect many people I know were raised to some extent with the fixed mindset. We’ve been told at some point we are bright and we came to believe it. That said – and I did pretty well at school, if I can be so immodest – it strikes me listening to Dr Dweck that the secret may have been that I never really believed I was particularly bright (and probably indeed wasn’t). This probably gave me a growth mindset by default – a belief that my brain would be capable of nothing much without a lot of work and organisation.
I’d never seen it as positively as the term “growth mindset” suggests though, I must admit. I diagnosed it in my later teens as something of a curse: a product of chronic insecurity, something I actually needed to conquer. And for a good while I probably lost my “growth mindset” as a result. That was probably exacerbated by the cultures at both Oxford, where I was a student, and the law firm in the City I worked at in my 20s, where many people seemed to be obsessively evaluating and commenting on others’ “intelligence” or “how bright” they were. I feel like I have been in recovery from that stultifying habit of thought for a good while now. Changing career to qualitative research helped me get back to my old curious and engaged self. More recently, seeing my elderly mother’s struggles with memory and cognition is another regular reminder that the brain changes, and the person with it. Cultivating what you have is the only response to that.
Dr Dweck has some simple advice too on what this means for praising your child. “Praising children’s intelligence harms them,” she says, as it pushes them towards the fixed mindset. Telling them how smart they are turns kids off to learning. Instead, send the message that you value process, regardless of the end result. Engaging in something vexing and difficult should be presented to them as desirable in itself. (Note to self: my teenager-esque performance yesterday, groaning loudly then rolling around and pounding the floor repeatedly because I couldn’t make iTunes work, may have sent my 12-year-old son the wrong message about perseverance).
The RSA, by the way (whence the Dweck film comes), is a great resource for discovering new thinking and sharing big ideas about society. If you become a Fellow, it also provides a great place to go for a few hours to get some work done in central London, not to mention opportunities to collaborate with other fellows, if you have the time and inclination. I am a fan.
Doing some research on this soon and it’s pretty new to me. Here’s an interesting article that explains the basics for anyone interested: Tech Crunch: machine learning
I’m pretty confident it will be a long while, if ever, before machine learning usurps the proper research consultant as the deliverer of insights. But it’s worth thinking about what kinds of qual data gathering may in future be enhanced by forms of machine learning – web-scraping springs to mind – to give us more tools, or indeed to perhaps reduce our role in certain types of data gathering. However, qual is more protected than most from being simply dumped out of a job by this technology:
our role has long been partly as a “reality check”, a complement to the “desk” data that shows clients whether what the data seems to be suggesting about people’s thoughts and behaviours is really the case in real life. In a machine learning age, that is no different.
much of our data generation is from human interaction, usually face to face – people often need social interaction, prompting through ‘natural’ conversation, to open up and share what’s interesting. We’re the masters of that.
qual is participant-led – that is, we’re not throwing batteries of questions at people, we let them lead while we gently steer the topic flow. We respond to particular comments and probe on what they mean, both individually and in relation to what other people are saying. This isn’t something machine learning could easily be applied to, even if we can imagine a robot moderating a group (and that’s some leap, for now at least).
In the analysis, we listen not only to the literal meaning of words, but also need to assess their meaning in several contexts (e.g. as part of a story, in a physical environment, within the wider language, within the wider culture, their meaning in brand terms, in business terms, etc) – not to mention the participant’s tone, body language, mood and so on. We jump between these islands and these layers of meaning to reach holistic insights that draw it all together and make sense of it, to create advice for our clients. Again, for machines it’s the stuff of artificial intelligence, way beyond where machine learning is now or is likely to be any time soon.
I don’t want to sound complacent – who knows where we will be in 20 years – but it does strike me that qualitative research data gathering, analysis and insight, being about as far away from mechanistic thinking as it is possible to be, is one of the least machine-replaceable pursuits there is.
We in qual are a bit different and a bit removed from the usual worlds of our clients in business, government or NGOs. We sit partly in their world but we move to the rhythms of the wider public more than the rhythms of our clients. It’s been thrown back at us as a weakness. But this, I passionately believe, is our very strength – the source of the real value to our clients. Being a human-shaped practice could be what keeps us relevant and needed, not only in the face of the rise of technology but because of it.
Qual is a messenger from the real, messy human world, into the sometimes sterile environments decision-makers find themselves inhabiting. The messy and the human have plenty of life left in them yet.
It’s time to post something actually useful – I hope – about qualitative research.
Inspired by the best
After a long hiatus with this blog in 2015 for technical reasons – WordPress somehow produced an unbreakable security loop which prevented me and my IT guy accessing it for several months – I’ve managed a couple of ultimately quite self-indulgent posts in the last week to blow away the cobwebs. Now for some qual. This is my circumlocutory “announcement” of a new occasional series of practical qual tips, which I’m calling Top Qual Tips. Before long, the chattering classes will be casually referring to them as The TQTs. “Read the latest TQT?” they’ll splutter, over lunchtime tapas and mescal at the local roller disco. “No,” will come the response. “How did you get in here? This place hasn’t been a roller disco since 1982. This is a Pets At Home warehouse facility. Now leave that gerbil alone or I’m calling the police. And take those albondigas with you.”
So, to business: TQT No1. Generation vs illustration. It’s really just a rule of thumb I came up with, aimed at non-qual-researchers or clients who are planning a project in which they have an inkling qual might be useful. It’s this: at a very basic level, before you think any further about methodology or sample or anything else, ask yourself whether this qual’s basic purpose is “generative” or “illustrative”.
The drawings are better when the book’s been written first. I say “written” – this is from ‘Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas’, so I use the term loosely
The purpose is really to properly identify illustrative qual projects early on and thereby make sure they are designed with their real purpose in mind. This liberates them into being the best they can be. Because otherwise, illustrative projects can be commissioned that are also expected to generate insights. It’s like driving with the handbrake on and the insights end up being thin too. Worst of both worlds.
So what do I mean by generative vs illustrative? It’s pretty simple:
Generative – any qual whose main role is to generate new insights into a topic – explore it and tell us things we didn’t previously know, or weren’t sure about. Isn’t that all qual, you ask? Almost, but not quite … because a small minority of projects are illustrative and the illustrative project is quite a different beast.
Illustrative – where a piece of qual work comes in after the insights have been generated and the territory mapped for the client, to bring it to life. It’s not there to generate any new learnings, just to illustrate the learnings we already have. Typically this is about showing the reality of people’s lives through pictures, visuals and films, or it can be using sounds, objects, anything to help an audience connect with, ingest and subsequently remember the research findings.
I should also say, many projects have elements of both – and that’s of course fine. But do ask yourself quite hard: am I going to be using the outputs in a basically illustrative way, or to establish new insights? Of course it’s not always going to be either/or. But asking the question makes you think more clearly about how the outputs of the research are going to be used – how you want the findings to live on within the client organisation after debriefing is over. And it really helps you think clearly about what the recruitment and fieldwork needs to look like to produce those outputs.
It may be that you want to do generative and illustrative qual, but realise you need to dedicate some particular parts of the fieldwork more purely to the illustration task. Or it may be that you realise, actually, we need a separate illustration piece after the main qual fieldwork is done.
There’s room for some production values at this stage
Or it may be that what participants have been doing in the name of generating insights will also double up nicely as an illustration – collages and scrap books, little clips from interviews, pictures taken in-home and so on (usually it does work well). But it’s good to ask the question: do we need something more dedicated here?
Typical examples of illustrative pieces are:
in segmentations where we are “bringing a segment to life”
in a shopper study, where perhaps footfall and EPOS data has identified a particular interesting purchase behaviour and you now want to just show people doing it and listen to them talking about it
as an accompaniment to innovation research, you want to show the exact place in a family’s home life where there’s a practical gap or problem a product can address (say with kitchen appliance designs, for example).
There are many more of course; arguably all qual has some kind of illustrative aspect, I’m just picking out examples where a pure illustration piece might be needed.
What kind of approaches might you see then in a dedicated illustrative piece that are different from a “generative” methodology?
recruitment may well be different from a generative piece, because having the previous insight work at your disposal allows you to focus now on particular types of people you already know are interesting or important. You’re not casting the net and hoping, you are homing in on particular people. When you meet them, you can go more or less directly to those behaviours; you don’t have to spend time working out what they are. You can just prompt them and get them to show you what they do. You produce a lot of relevant illustrative material this way.
You have freedom to be a lot more visual in the data you collect – and you’ll need it. Ultimately, your outputs have to be strongly visual, so designating a piece of work as “illustrative” frees you up to really focus on that in the fieldwork. So, you’re going to be thinking of film, of capturing detailed pictures of relevant environments like in-store fixtures and signage, of picking up objects that can represent an idea, a segment or a kind of person. Think audio too – turns of phrase, but also music that helps capture an idea or a person’s behaviour.
Linked to that, you can also deploy short-form methodologies that you avoid like the plague when seeking depth, e.g. 5-minute vox pops to capture some talking heads in situ.
Perhaps you might bring in a creative non-researcher to help craft the outputs, since the task is really one of producing an engaging piece of communication, whether in a film, a workshop presentation or a slide deck.
One of the most enjoyable pieces of work I’ve been part of was a partnership with segmentation gurus Bonamy Finch on consumer insurance segments. It worked so well, I think, because we separated out the stages so clearly. I did an up-front generative stage, Stage 1, full of creative material and itself really rich – but the client had the foresight to commission, after the central Stage 2 quant segmentation, a Stage 3 dedicated to segment illustration. We recruited three in-home “ethno-depths” per segment, which I conducted with professional film-maker Tim Crawley [https://vimeo.com/tctv] on hand, designed to generate between them a three-minute segment film.
Removing the creative shackles: focussing on illustration for what it is can free you up as a communicator and transform the qual piece. It’s not as scary as it seems …
As an interviewer, I was freed up to focus on eliciting the key things from the participants that I knew we needed to be in the segment film (but with them talking naturally about themselves, not pre-scripted). I intervened and mmm-ed much less than in a ‘normal’ qual depth interview, so the audio on the footage would be clean; and we took footage and stills of household items that reflected the segment we were illustrating. We also used visuals from Stage 1 scrapbooks and collages in the final three-minute segment films, a kind of montage approach. The films were then used in the client business to educate staff on customer segments and remember how they differ in their needs and attitudes around risk and insurance issues.
Nine times out of ten, qual is commissioned to be basically generative in nature. But asking the “is it really illustrative?” question early on can be liberating for those qual projects that are really about illustration of already established insights. It allows it to do that illustration job properly, unshackled from the need to generate insights. Illustrative qual might be seen as fluffier than generative qual, because all the hard thinking is done. But it’s actually no easier, it’s just a different kind of challenge – a creative challenge.
Since I branded my qual consultancy Shore in 2010 – the ‘shore’ idea being qual research as a liminal, in-between place between communicators and the public – I find myself regularly awash with cultural references to shore-related stuff. I think it’s like when you buy a new Toyota Avensis and suddenly start noticing how many other Toyota Avensises there are out there. I don’t have one, it’s just a simile. Anyway, sometimes I feel the urge to decorate my Shore blog with a particularly enjoyable addition to the coastal cultural treasure chest. So, here is the video is for a nice Julia Holter track from last year, Sea Calls Me Home.
Losing My Edge. The heartbreaking thing listening to that genuinely funny LCD Soundsystem track is: AT LEAST JAMES MURPHY USED TO HAVE SOME EDGE. But hey, edge is overrated anyway. The Middlemass is where it’s at.
The album it’s from, “Have You In My Wilderness”, has been a grower in our house in recent months. I usually run about 5-7 years behind even the mainstream music industry these days, let alone the more interesting stuff. I used to be a reliable 2-3 years behind, but I’ve lost a yard of pace after a series of injuries. So only being a few months behind on this one makes me feel like Brendan Foster challenging for Olympic silver (never gold; not Brendan).
In the marathon of musical life, my old mate Paul Margree is a kind of front-running guardian angel. His excellent new music blog is We Need No Swords. Despite being near the front, Paul regularly scrapes me up gasping from the tarmac as I get trampled by hundreds of luminescent pairs of New Balance, administers a pouch of PowerGel and whisks me up to the top of the field, just behind the four Kenyans and the emaciated Sale Harrier who’s gone too soon. It’s in such moments I “discover” new favourite artists.
Clifton: brutally competitive as a runner and a trombonist
My utter lack of cardio-vascular fitness soon sends me plummeting down through the field once more, to be elbowed to the ground and vomited over by Bernie Clifton in an ostrich costume.
Julia Holter’s back catalogue is more ‘avant garde’ than you would guess from “Have You In My Wilderness” – here’s a really nice Pete Paphides review of the album for the Grauniad: http://www.theguardian.com/music/julia-holter which may also serve as a gateway into her stuff.
Holter ends the song:
I hear small words from the shore
No recognized pattern
I’m sure I overheard one of my clients saying that …
Sometimes – well quite often – I come across a little film or piece of writing that identifies something I’ve long felt and articulates it better than I could. This piece from the School of Life, on what some time behind the wheel on the open road does for you, encapsulates why I’ve come to find driving therapeutic. It’s one reason I’ll sometimes choose car over train for getting to fieldwork.
The narrator comes from Belfast, like me, so it even sounds like me.
Neglected parts of one’s inner life emerge on the road …
he says.
Driving is an unexpected tool for thinking.
In staccato, interrupted, inchoate daily life, a long drive can provide an island of continuity, flow and control. The “cocooning effect” he mentions rings true – though I probably don’t exactly emerge as a butterfly at the end of it.
Cocoons: transformative miracles of nature; pretty disgusting to look at. Much like the inside of my car.
There is also a less life-affirming side to life behind the wheel, which was in evidence in a particularly grim six hours I spent last month on a stretch of the M6 en route to fieldwork in Wolverhampton: http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/m6-likely-remain-closed-most-10835662. I never made it to my workshop on ‘big data’, emerging from the traffic jam only at 10pm, some four hours after the workshop session had been due to start. We were lucky the good folk of the Black Country agreed so readily to come back a few days later. Much luckier than the poor driver who joined the choir invisible on the M6 earlier that day, the source of the gridlock. But even then, once the evening was lost, the panic subsided; and released from M6 imprisonment, I experienced a fecund few hours of thinking as I slipped back along the M40 home.
I used driving-as-therapy quite deliberately just before the arrival of my daughter back in 2012. My wife and I agreed I could be spared for a day, a few weeks before time, and anticipating the intense months ahead I drove to the Brecon Beacons – briefly walked up half a beacon – and drove home again. It was beautiful. I just let my mind wander wherever it wanted to go; I followed whatever roads seemed interesting. I returned home refreshed and ready for the domestic whirlwind. Even listening to Man City snatching the title from United with the last kick of the season, as my Toyota Prius rolled out of the Welsh hills, failed to spoil the healing glow of that late Spring day.
A Pyrrhic victory … O Aguero, where is thy sting? A drive to Wales in a second-hand Toyota eclipsed your vainglory.
The School of Life, by the way, which made the film, is worth checking out. Started by philosopher and writer Alain de Botton among others, it’s a great resource for thoughts, books and courses if (like me) you’re interested in how life can be more satisfyingly lived, but religion isn’t your thing: http://www.theschooloflife.com.
This is a webinar Joanna Chrzanowska of Genesis Consulting did for the AQR (http://www.aqr.org.uk) last month. It piqued my interest for at least two reasons. Firstly, it’s an illuminating trot through the roots of qualitative research and its relationship with ideas of the sub-conscious, unconscious and non-conscious. Secondly, it maps out Joanna’s take on where qual now sits on this, in the light of the break-through of the ideas of behavioural economics into mainstream business thinking.
She starts with the Freudian split of superego / ego / id, quoting Bannister’s wonderful description of this:
A maiden aunt and a sex-crazed monkey locked in mortal combat in a cellar, refereed by a rather nervous bank clerk.
Thinking Fast And Slow. Thanks to The Green Book Blog for this
We have moved on since Freud’s ideas, even if they do still provide a useful metaphor. Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 now dominate discussion of how unconscious – or perhaps better to say non-conscious – factors play out in human behaviour. But in Chrzanowska’s view, behavioural economics, while giving intellectual weight to qual’s long-standing arguments against ‘rational decision-maker’ approaches, has actually “failed to light up the qual universe”. She asks why.
Kenrick and Griskevicius. Got to love a Lithuanian name, they often have the ring of a Roman provincial prefect about them.
She finds the answer, in part, in the book The Rational Animal by Kenrick and Griskevicius. If Kahneman et al punctured human self-importance by showing how error-prone and riven with innate biases we all are, it can be argued it left the job only partly done. Human behaviour was left looking just a bit too random for comfort. Personally I’m pretty comfortable with behaviour being a bit random, but I get the point – aren’t there deeper reasons why we make the mistakes we do, which may be the next step on from behavioural economics? It describes the processes of non-rationality, but perhaps is less focussed on why these processes lead us in the directions they do. The Rational Animal is an attempt to explain these in evolutionary terms:
Kendrick and Griskevicius posit seven “sub-selves” as an underpinning explanation for behaviours. These are a bit like core evolutionary human needs. The seven sub-selves they list are:
affiliation
self-protection
disease avoidance
status-seeking
kin care
mate acquisition
mate retention
Actions that at first look irrational or even stupid make sense, the authors contend, when seen as being done non-consciously in pursuit of one of these essentials of human thriving. We have a sub-self for each one, that concerns itself with that issue alone. A lot of of our moral dilemmas are really clashes between these sub-selves.
Paean to the unconscious: I know, I know, it’s really serious
Sub-selves are only one part of the non-conscious landscape, as Joanna points out. It also includes habits, emotions, cultural beliefs, heuristics (short-cuts), social cognition, implicit attitudes, stereotypes and automatic processing. And just as these factors in explaining human behaviour are buried deep below the surface, the qualitative researcher’s wrestling with them is usually just as hidden from our clients. Many remain blissfully unaware it is even going on; no wonder they sometimes ask why full analysis is really needed. It’s because there’s quite a lot to dig out and weigh up.
By the way, Joanna’s experience and wisdom on all matters qualitative has been an invaluable asset for the UK qual industry for many years. Pretty much any British qual researcher you meet will have done one of her courses at some time. She was one of the teachers on the AQR Foundation Course when I went on it back in 1998; and she’s trained me since on subjects as disparate as projective techniques and the use of online platforms, always accessibly and inspiringly. I’ve bigged it up before, but her Qualitative Mind site is a fantastic resource on qual, for practitioners and clients alike: http://www.qualitativemind.com.
Windy Miller – too much cider again. At least he didn’t pass out this time.
As I get older – which I gather many other people are also doing – I become ever more interested in popular and, even more so, unpopular folk traditions. Tomorrow is a belter of a day in the folk weirdness calendar: May Day. It’s like a clarion call for every nut job in the land to emerge, dress up like a character from Camberwick Green and drink themselves into even more incoherence than when they got up. But I do love it.
The Bard himself: Shapps wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays apart from King Lear, which was of course by Jeffrey Archer; and who can forget how he pipped Norman St. John Stevas to the 100m gold at the London Olympics? And still found time for a pint and a game of bingo with some hard-working families. He is also a former Mayor of Trumpton.
Today, 30th April, is big enough in its own right. It heralds both Walpurgisnacht in Germany – apparently, party time for airborne witches – and here in the UK, May Eve, the night upon which Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set. Yes, today. Summer in April is something only The Bard or possibly Grant Shapps would try to get away with (what is it about Conservative Party chairmen and Walter Mitty-esque relationships with reality? I think the clue may be in the question).
England – and it’s this part of the UK that I write from – has quite a set of insane folk traditions lined up for 1st May. Here’s a quick run-down of some of my favourites:
Weighing the mayor (High Wycombe, Bucks)
Corby pole fair – people are put in stocks and only released after paying a ransom (Corby, Northants)
Pretend dancing bears – a boy puts a sack over his head and pretends to be a dancing bear, complete with pole (Blackburn, Lancs)
Ducking Day – shoving people’s heads into buckets of water if they don’t have a branch of whitethorn or elm on their clothes when approached (Devon and Cornwall)
Mass punch-ups (for example at Wrekin Wakes, Shropshire)
Horse decorations (especially in the north west)
Jack-in-the-Green – a wicker-adorned character put on by chimney sweeps, as a way of collecting money to see them through the lean summer months (London)
May Goslings – a kind of second April Fool’s Day (Cumbria, Lancs and elsewhere)
If you want to know about the Coconut Dancers of Bacup in Lancashire, you need a copy
The source for all this knowledge I seem to have, but don’t really, is a hefty tome by leading English folklorist Steve Roud called The English Year. It’s a big old £30 book, but worth every penny. Here’s Nicolas Lezard’s review in the Guardian from a few years ago – he loves it too: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/26/history3.
Jolly amusing stuff. But there’s deeper meaning in it too. The folk traditions Roud describes are little chinks of light into two things: some of the older history of how life was lived in towns and villages centuries ago; and how people in more recent times have felt about their past, often yearning for a simpler, pre-modern idyll that almost certainly never existed.
As regards the latter, I’m referring to Eric Hobsbawm’s apercu that much ‘tradition’ is not as old as it appears. His famous book The Invention of Tradition is probably a wise companion piece to anyone reading The English Year. http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/regional-and-world-history-general-interest/invention-tradition-2.
Gaelic football: a very Victorian invention. Though hurling is genuinely a very old sport.
A huge amount of what we imagine to come from the deep past is in fact a product of the rather camp imaginings of some Victorian antiquarian or other. They were grasping, it seems, to keep onto a simpler and more colourful past that, in the age of industrialisation, seemed to be slipping away. Scottish clan tartans and Gaelic football (the latter dates only to the 1880s) are but two striking examples.
Thomas Hardy, writing in the late Victorian era, often featured in his novels a transition from a romanticised pre-industrial, pre-railway Wessex to something more modern, corrupt and urban – the Wessex Hardy lived in when he was writing. Books like The Woodlanders, Tess of the D’Urbervilles or even Jude The Obscure are melancholy paeans to a lost past; a past that was becoming more exotic to readers with every passing year. Hardy was perhaps more devoted to preserving some kind of truths about the past than most. Many of his Victorian contemporaries heavily remixed the past they were seeking to honour. Ultimately, a tradition is something that lives in the present. It is natural to cobble together your best guess at the past – and even improve it where it’s not really what you’re looking for – through half-remembered bits and pieces. You can fill in the rest. It’s that act of creativity which is perhaps the most interesting thing about folk “traditions”.
Original is best – back to basics
All this creatively inaccurate remembering is just as relevant today, as many of us who work in the world of brand communications will recognise. We live in a time where the retro and the contemporary are almost indistinguishable. The recent recession brought a deluge of nostalgia branding – those Hovis ads came back, we got lots of 1940s typography on our hession carrier bags and so on. It’s still going on. Even Football Focus now shows the club badges on the screen in the background in monochrome. At times of difficulty, we like to be reminded of simpler times, when things just worked and quality was quality. We become averse to the mess and waste we associate with today. It was ever thus.
When it comes to invented tradition in the world of branding though, you can’t beat the sheer gumption of the ads of Werther’s Originals in the 1990s. This product simply didn’t exist in the UK when I was a child in the 70s and 80s; but appeared in the 90s with a fully formed back-story. The ads featuring an old man enjoying them with his grandson. He is thrown into a nostalgic reverie, as if he’s recalling having enjoyed them as a child watching Buster Keaton matinees at the picture house. Unless he spent his childhood in Westphalia in Germany, where Werther’s does have a history, this is pretty unlikely. Werther’s Originals were every bit as 90s as Brett Anderson singing Animal Nitrate at the Brits, looking like a girl.
But since when did we let the truth get in the way of a good story?
This is from a talk at the RSA, in which the American sociologist and writer explains the toxicity of blame. Not only is blaming people not usually really about some right-minded demand for accountability, it tends towards the opposite. Seen for what it is:
Blame is simply the discharging of discomfort and pain.
Her point is that our focus on finding someone responsible is really a way of avoiding the messy truth of events. We blame individuals because it gives us the illusion of things being more controllable than they really are – a fantasy most of us are hopelessly lost in most of the time. We need someone else to have ’caused’ our problem, because that’s a neat, wrapped-up thought that appears to do the job of providing an “answer” – which is really what we want.
Dr Brown’s website is worth a gander: http://brenebrown.com. “Maybe stories are just data with a soul,” she says. I prefer to think of it the other way around. Maybe data are stories in search of a soul.
Sometimes there is a direct, proportional relationship between album sales and the need to throw up over the recording artist. Exhibit No1: “Soul Provider” by master long-hair-at-the-back exponent Bolton. See how I took the cold, raw data of album sales there and injected some soul (and bits of my breakfast) into it?
Which is where qual comes in. Like barber-worrying soft crooner Michael Bolton, we are perhaps “soul providers”.
Actually, I hope nothing like Michael Bolton, as having analysed his work, I’ve found every last note of it to be total pants.
I seem to have lapsed into blame again. It is, as Chicago once put it, a hard habit to break.
Enough crap white soul for one day. I’ll give the final word to Mark E. Smith, in an onstage rant during The Fall’s “A Part of America Therein” tour in 1981. This line turns the tables on the blame-merchants with acid simplicity:
I am not here to cheer you up.
A line I never tire of repeating, if only in my head.
The Grauniad has a nice interactive tool on the website now, allowing you to check the polls constituency by constituency (click on the link above).
I also like the UK map on there a lot, which is morphed to reflect where most people live. It’s a great antidote to those more strictly territorial maps which make the country look like it’s about 80 per cent Conservative. In this one, the urban Labour seats are given their fair due and you get a much better idea of what colour different regions of the country are. Democracy is about people after all.
Last year, the mutts of Billy Idol and Cristiano Ronaldo fought it out for best in show
I heard one commentator describe this election as “an ugly dog competition”, which is why perhaps the leaders are finding it so hard to make any headway against each other – it’s not such an inviting choice for many, I suspect. The irony is, there is a bigger ideological divide between the parties now than at any time for several decades; there is a very stark choice for what direction Britain’s future will take. This one really matters. But I suppose you need to have switched on to politics to some extent to even realise that much. It seems many haven’t.
But as my fellow Ulsterman Col. Tim Collins said on The World At One today, if some imagine they are sticking two fingers up to the established order by not voting, they are wrong. As he put it, if you want politicians to crap themselves, tell them you’re certain to vote – and actually do it.
In the same World At One panel discussion, comedy god Armando Iannucci pointed out that a candidate rushed for time will visit an old people’s home over a university, because he/she knows proportionately many more will vote there. This carries through into policy choices too, with sometimes inequitable results. Should financially-struggling younger voters really have taken quite as much of the economic pain as they have in recent years, versus better off pensioners? If more young people voted, perhaps generational inequality might have been more challenged. Politicians are supposed to govern fairly, but they are also expected to listen to voters. That’s voters – people who actually cast a vote. (Incidentally, an interesting article from Iannucci on the need for more truth-telling in politics here: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/armando-iannucci-it-s-time-very-british-revolution).
Oh and if by some weird chance you’re reading this in the UK and aren’t registered vote, you need to register today!! Probably worth mentioning, just in case.
Don’t get in touch with me on 8th May, I’ll just warn any potential clients now. I will have had no sleep.
Strangers on the Shore 