Over the last few years, as technology has moved from pen to typewriter, to typewriter with a memory and finally to the computer into which I am presently feeding my thoughts, a certain set of possibilities and potentials have been put in train. Whether it be with a text on a mobile or a sudden psychological rupture in our defensive wall as we think we are sending out a secret email, we can make mistakes that cost. No longer, as once, a single letter misdirected and arriving at the wrong door but a missive intended for one person, suddenly dispersed like autumn seed on the fertile ground of the internet to a myriad strangers.
These mistakes can be costly to the individuals concerned and for whom it should be a private matter. But, seizing upon the heavily publicised consequences and realising how appalling they are, protagonists of pain have entered a new dimension. Now, there is commonplace posting of embarrassing images on Facebook, the bullying of classmates or teachers on You Tube, the sharing of mobile-phone video-nasties and even the mocking up of party political broadcasts to lampoon and undermine candidates. (The latter not necessarily a bad thing!)
Once upon a time the only way we could make our views felt was via a letter to an editor and then, more often than not, the politics had to be in accordance with the paper in question or the letter had to achieve a certain literary merit. Now, a little skill with photo-editor and text and a motivation to do damage has allowed us to recreate the medieval stocks and place our chosen victim there. As with all things infinite, the potential in the world wide web is for good or ill. Burma has closed off the Internet but what does get through sustains hope for its suffering people. Meanwhile, here in the cosy affluence of our sceptered isle, with little better to do, we turn our hands too often to serving our base emotions and causing hurt and misery. There are powerful tools about. We should cultivate better ways of using them.
Excuse the gossip in the last
The email set off far too fast
For my personal checks to halt its flow
I hate it when the dice's throw
Has dropped from inside my sleeve
Without a single 'by your leave'
And suddenly the world does know
That I’m a prurient so and so
Our physical selves are much in the news these days. By 2050 the majority of UK citizens will be clinically obese. At the same time the current epidemic of binge drinking has been augmented by middle class quaffing. And it, too, is projected to get worse. As a sometime resident of a village near Guildford, it comes as a thrill to realise that when I shop at the weekend I am eye to watery eye with the nation’s heaviest every day tipplers. They are downing wine by the carafe-load most evenings without thought to their significance as British role models. At the same time I am slaloming past the expanding girths of the town’s citizens.
The species is undergoing a metamorphosis that points towards Lamarck rather than Darwin. Even as I speak, people are changing. Children are inheriting the evolutionarily dead-end, dominant genes of their parents. If all the statistics are true they are fatter, more depressed, work-shy, indolent, drunken and thick. And all this is happening in my one lifetime.
Since the majority determine what kind of government we have and the laws that that government pass, it is easy to forecast that by 2050 the thin, fit, hard-working, emotionally stable, intelligent teetotaller will become a squashed, second class citizen, hardly able to breathe beneath the soft underbelly of the new ruling class.
Notes on Japan: 7
There are outlets in some of the major Japanese cities, called Alibi shops. These are purveyors of apparently innocent goods. They comprise the full range of city souvenirs – from any destination but the one in which you may be shopping! In Kyoto, for example, you can buy chocolates, mugs, paper flowers and fans branded with the insignias of Osaka, Tokyo or Hiroshima. The shops flourish for the obvious purpose – to support illicit philandering and provide concrete proof that you were where you said you were.
In the land of exquisite manners, even an affair can be aesthetically arranged and packaged in a deliciously duplicitous wrapping.
Labels: Sex in the cities of Japan...