Posts filed under ‘culture’
Learning from your staff
Andrew Curry writes:
Visiting the British Museum’s Hadrian exhibition on a wet Sunday in August isn’t perhaps the most sensible thing to do, although the exhibition is striking even when it’s teeming with visitors. But the trip was at least as educational about the BM’s approach to customer service.
While waiting to buy my timed tickets, the screens behind the ticket desk advertised to me the benefits of membership (‘Join today and see Hadrian free’). I had some time to do the sums, and it seemed like a reasonable offer. So when I reached the desk I asked if I could buy membership instead. Not here, apparently, but over there – at a desk with another long queue at it. Having waited several minutes already, I bought the ordinary one-day exhibition tickets instead. Lost revenue, lost relationship, from the Museum’s point of view. ‘It doesn’t seem sensible to advertise membership here and not to sell it’, I observed, helpfully. ‘I know’ said the woman at the counter. ‘We have mentioned it to the management’.
Being a wet Sunday, I had an umbrella with me. It had been pretty visible when I bought the tickets, since umbrellas aren’t the sort of thing you tend to hide unless you’re a hitman. When we got to the entrance of the Hadrian exhibition for our timed entry, 40 minutes later, the attendant told me that I couldn’t take the umbrella in; it would have to go to the cloakroom. ‘I could have been told that when I bought the tickets’ I pointed out, both to the attendant and later to the man in the Cloakroom. ‘I know’, said the man in the Cloakroom. ‘We’ve been telling the management for the last two exhibitions, but they haven’t done anything about it’.
Of course, the British Museum’s not unique in not listening to its customer-facing staff. Lots of organisations forget that they’re the first to hear (often the only people to hear) when their customer-facing systems aren’t entirely customer friendly. Usually managers are too busy telling their staff about new instructions to find the time to listen to them.
As for the Hadrian exhibition, it’s open until 26th October. But don’t go on a wet Sunday. And if you do, don’t take an umbrella.
18 August 2008 at 12:09 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
The commoditisation of sexual relationships
The image is a plot of the sexual relationships of students at Jefferson High School occurring within the preceding 6 months
Trevor Harvey writes:
Over the past few years, society has moved stealthily from viewing sex as a commodity, to the commoditisation of sexual relationships – the ‘free availability’ of the relationship surrounding and driven by sex.
The development of technology has facilitated easier sexual relationships, including changes in pornography and sexual material. Top Ten Reviews reported in 2006 that 43% of internet users viewed porn, and 35% of all downloads were porn, while porn sales themselves have been dropping rapidly over the past few years. Technology means that anyone with a mobile camera can now be a porn star or producer.
In fact, technology has touched all aspects of sexual relationships – from user-generated content sites such as XTube, PornoTube and Gaydar, to the public spat between Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia co-founder) and Rachel Marsden (the end of whose sexual relationship was played out in Wikipedia and eBay), to the re-interpretation of pre-arranged marriages through online sites where daughters are promoted by the parents. MMOEGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Erotic Games), which provide a safe haven for people to have sex virtually, are showing a rise in numbers – showing perhaps that while sexual relationships are increasingly treated as commodities, we’re still concerned about their safety.
And for good reason. The effects on health and well-being are alarming. A 2007 BMC Public Health study showed that a third of 16 to 35-year-old men and nearly a quarter of women questioned said they drank to increase their chance of sex. HIV infection rates rose sharply (by 48%) in the US between ’05 and ’06, according to the US Center for Disease Control, and also increased (less dramatically) in Western and Central Europe in 2007, despite years of public health and education campaigns. Other disease infection rates are as alarming: the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV reported that sexually transmitted infection rates have risen rapidly over the past 12 years, with incidences of Chlamydia and HIV both tripling, gonorrhoea doubling, and syphilis increasing by twenty times.
There have also been disturbing changes in the sexual relationships of children and young adults. UNICEF reported last year that more children in the UK have had sexual intercourse by the age of 15 than in any other country. UK Government figures show that the UK has the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Western Europe, while the sexual health of young adults in the UK has deteriorated over the last two years. In the US, the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease. Meanwhile, by way of further evidence that the commoditisation of sexual relationships is affecting teenagers and young people, media reports say that the number of teenage girls having breast implants have more than doubled in the past year in both Britain and the US.
Sex is a powerful motivator in human behaviour and society and when it comes to analysing trends we must understand it as a significant driver of change. But as a rule sexual relationships are something we prefer not to think about in this context. If we are to seek a rounded view of the behaviour of consumers, we need to consider the increasingly apparent commoditisation of sexual relationships, which is starting to raise moral issues for brands, and for products and services, as well as for society.
“We are where we are”
Rachel Kelnar writes:
I went to two really interesting futures events last week and was struck by the extent to which some emerging learnings were common to both, despite having expected beforehand that the topics would have little in common.
First, I attended a debate at the London Transport Museum (LTM) on the future of transport – ‘Survive or Thrive: What will urban life be like in 2055?’ The LTM used the intelligent infrastructure scenarios which my colleague Andrew Curry and I wrote for the UK Government’s Foresight Programme as the starting point for this discussion. I also participated in ‘Museums in the Long Now’ – a roundtable exploring the future of the museum, organised by the Cultural Leadership Programme at City University and Compton Verney, with funding from the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise (LCACE).
An emerging theme of both sessions was ‘we are where we are’ – that if we were to design a transport system for the UK, we would not set out to design what we currently have, and neither would we fund or develop our museums in the way we do now. However, ‘we are where we are’ – and we therefore have to temper our views of the future with the reality of this starting point. We don’t have the luxury of a blank slate.
However, it’s important that this doesn’t limit us in terms of what we strive for, and both sessions used scenarios to help participants resist the temptation to think too short term, or too negatively.
Another interesting reflection for me was the potentially changing role of museums. They are generally considered windows to the past and this is pretty uncontroversial. But, if museums are to remain relevant in the future, they perhaps need to do more than reflect on what has already happened. They need to start providing a window on the future as well. The LTM has certainly embraced this idea, with the Future Generator, which allows every virtual or real museum visitor to explore how their choices can impact the future of London and the type of city we will all live in. It’s about putting the Museum at the heart of the debate about our transport system, sustainability and the London we might have in 2055, and pleasingly, it’s also based on the scenarios we were involved in writing.
Discussing the Museum of the Long Now, it became increasingly clear that many museums may well be a natural home for such futures exploration. They are naturally places where people go to learn – to be challenged, provoked, and to understand a culture, a society or a particular event in our history. This mindset is a good one for thinking about the future of our culture and our society – because thinking about the past is the first step to thinking more effectively about the future.
This shift is not without its challenges – it requires, for example, that museums get a bit more comfortable with conflict than many are at the moment. If museums can successfully place themselves at the heart of our future – regardless of the issue – than they are helping to cement their role in our lives going forward. We are where we are – but we don’t have to be stuck here.
Liverpool Street freeze
The Liverpool Street Freeze was a few weeks ago now, but Denise’s post somehow got lost in the machine. Better late than never.
Denise Hicks writes:
Flash mobbing and its variations, such as ImprovEverywhere, have been around anecdotally for years now, but I’d never participated in one – believing that it was the preserve of the select few. Although there was an air of irreverent young trendies about the Liverpool Street Freeze, what surprised me was the inclusivity and breadth of the nature of participation. Alongside the BAPE-clad creative types with oversized headphones sat elderly women in mid-page turn of their daily paper, city types with briefcases stopped in mid-swing and construction workers pre-coffee gulp.
Preceding the Freeze was a strange sense of the anticipation of performance, but years of training on the underground have helped to perfect the art of being motionless and devoid of expression. As I stood, there was a strange sensation of being connected to the many people around, all with the same purpose and associated anticipation and sense of breaking the rules, doing something different, and yet you’re still anonymous to one another. It’s refreshingly uncomplicated in a world of hi-tech and complex ‘connections’.
While it would have been more poetic to end the four minutes as subtly and as nonchalantly as we’d begun, the Freezers couldn’t resist acknowledging the sense of achievement with a round of applause. Even for those of us who believed it should have ended in silence, leaving the viewers dumbfounded, we were secretly sharing in the celebration that for four minutes, we’d turned just another day into an extraordinary day and given hundreds of people something to talk about.
The power of ‘we’
Becky Rowe writes:
I’ve been in Australia for a few days for a client project and one of things I have noticed (aside from the jetlag and great weather) is the constant reference across all kinds of public communications to ‘us’, ‘we’, ‘together’, ‘you’, and ‘community’.
New building projects mention ‘helping our communities grow stronger’, while ‘no alcohol’ signs on the beaches explain why it is beneficial to everyone if you don’t drink your beers on the beach. The taxi rank at the airport had a large sign which communicated clearly and simply what you could ask of your taxi driver, and what he could expect of you (you are entitled to ask your driver to turn on or off the radio or aircon, and to take a different route, but you aren’t allowed to be drink or eat in the cab).
The prevalence of these signs, the explicit wording, and clear reference to shared responsibilities, all communicated in a friendly and understandable way, somehow surprised me. In some ways I found them a bit patronising, but I also found it refreshing to have ‘the rules’ of ‘good citizenship’ made clear.
Knowing the rationale behind an apparently bureacratic or even irrational rule can make all the difference to compliance. I think the UK has something to learn from the Australians about how to behave – and how to get people to behave.
Can the arts cure cancer?
Rachel Kelnar writes:
While teaching part of a module on “Planning for the Future”, part of City University’s Cultural Leadership programme, I was struck by a provocative comment from one of the participants, which led to an energetic discussion.
We were exploring future challenges for the arts sector, and someone said, “Soon, the arts will be expected to cure cancer.” While there was clearly some irony intended, it highlighted that we might have reached a critical point in the debate about instrumentalism in the arts. There’s been quite a long policy trend about developing the arts on the basis of how they can advance particular social or policy aims, but Brian McMaster’s recent report, Supporting Excellence might be a sign that this is coming to an end.
McMaster’s report was commissioned by the previous Culture Secretary, James Purnell, and it has certainly injected energy into this debate – but we’ll have to wait to see whether his replacement has the same appetite for his argument.
Unravelling the cassette
Stacey Yates writes:
The audio cassette is 45 years old this year, and is reaching the end of its life, at least in Europe and the US. It peaked in the 1980s, but started to decline after the CD was rolled out in 1993. As our music consumption becomes increasingly intangible, people are pointing to some of the pleasures of more tangible forms – as a amusing post at the design blog Core 77 recently reminded me: the cassette as a design convention.
In contrast to the age of digital, the cassette was a lo-fi, low tech object and it was the first hard format to emerge in response to a more mobile society – the age of the Walkman preceded the iPod generation by 25 years. It could get stuck down the back of your sofa or crammed into your banger’s glove compartment for months, and you knew you could still rely on it to work when you found it again. Unlike the CD, it was near unbreakable and was always ready to play just where you left off. If it did get a bit chewed up, all you needed was a pencil or a biro to sort it.
The one time you might have been precious about a cassette was when you made a mix tape. In the 1980s creating a mix tape for someone was an act of dedication. Sitting through selected tapes with your finger hovering above the pause button took time and choosing the right mix of songs took creativity. The mix tape could also be a personal selection, creating a whole new way to mix and match music that has been reinforced by the rise of the celebrity DJ and by digital music. But let’s face it, there’s no romance in a USB stick. So perhaps it’s not surprising to find a site which, perhaps cunningly, is selling the ease of the digital ‘mix-stick’ - but in a package which offers all the personalisation that you used to get from the cassette.
Image © Stacey Yates
[Correction: A typo above has the CD launched, incorrectly, in 1993. In fact, it was launched commercially in Europe and the USA in 1983 (late 1982 in Japan). Thanks to Harry, in Comments, below, for pointing this out.]
Grand Central Station freeze out
Andrew Curry writes:
Is it an event? Is it an experience? Is it play? Is it participation? Is it performance? Probably all five. ImprovEverywhere’s recent two hundred person ‘freeze’ at Grand Central Station is another example of the type of shared participatory private-but-public moment which is enabled by digital media – and amplified by it, through YouTube and Flickr.
Watching the video, I was also reminded of the work of the sociologist Harold Garfinkel, who combined ethnography and social sciences research to test how people constructed meaning, sometimes with not so hilarious results. (In one famous experiment, in an age when the ethical limits on research were, well, looser, he sent students home for the vacation with the instruction to treat their family home as a boarding house. Quite a few got thrown out.)
The Grand Central Station freeze lasted for only five minutes, but in less than that time passers-by have moved from confusion to interpretation to action – and the two minute video catches this whole process brilliantly.
[Thx to Core 77 for the tip]
6 February 2008 at 8:15 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
The lure of celebrity
Andrew Curry writes:
I think we sometimes under-estimate the power of the relationship between our increasingly audio-visual world and the rise of celebrity culture. And the second part of this story is about the way in which media coverage of celebrity is a classic form of ‘reveal and conceal’ narrative, where the audience is simultaneously invited into this world of money and power and exclusivity and also excluded from it. Media empires have been built in the space between knowing and not knowing. Some of the sharpest commentary on this world has been in the work of the artist Alison Jackson, who works with celebrity lookalikes. TED.com has just posted a revealing lecture she gave in Oxford three years ago. It runs just under 20 minutes – and some of the images she uses to illustrate her talk are not for the easily shocked.
The picture at the top is a publicity still for Jackson’s Channel 4 film, Blaired Vision, shown last year. She’s interviewed about it here. And yes, that is a Blair lookalike: she’s currently looking for Gordon Browns for her latest project, apparently.
29 January 2008 at 1:54 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
