Monthly Archives: November 2018

Britain, Culture, Government, Society, Technology

Whose job is it to keep us nice online?

SOCIETAL: SOCIAL MEDIA

Imagine and visualise a debate that you’ve just had on stage at the Cheltenham Literature Festival concerning a neat little modern conundrum: ‘Is social media the curse of our age?’ Imagine, too, that you and your fellow panellists have agreed that it probably is. In this scenario, should you, or should you not, tweet about it?

We would assume that people normally would. But maybe you would be unsure. What would be your motivation? Would you be publishing an event that you’d found fascinating? Quite likely. Or would you just be craving the sort of “like”-induced serotonin surge you and your fellow panellists had just been talking about, given your addiction to social media networking? What demons were ruling you? What damn tech tricks made you feel that you ought?

And so it goes viral after comments from the Festival audience stick with you. The young woman who saw social media as the vector of the eating disorder she suffered from as a teenager, but who now was using social media platforms to rebuild her sense of self-worth. The older man who, after tweeting in support of Boris Johnson’s comments on burkas, had been shocked to find himself subject to an onslaught of fury, including people trying to get him sacked. Or, another man, say, active on platforms but tired of competing with screens for attention and convinced that the world around him was narcissistic and utterly crazy.

There might be a sense of social media acting the heavy beast squatting upon all our shoulders, forever seen in the corner of an eye. It might also be an overdue reminder that your own thoughts about all this can get a little lofty. Yet, we could trot out the gotcha about the billionaire moguls who run these platforms banning their own children from using them, even while marketing them to yours. We could talk for hours about the damage being done to the fabric of our democracy.

For most people, however, concern about social media has nothing to do with any of that. Instead it is about obsession and compulsion. It is about self-worth and self-harm. It is about friends and relatives developing new violent politics that seem to have come from nowhere. It is about teenagers living their lives as a constant performance on apps that their parents barely comprehend, for audiences that they can scarcely imagine. It sits in the lives of many as an ever-grinding mill of misery, even when they cannot imagine life without it, and they feel that something must be done.

 

EARLIER this year the Government let it be known that it was working on a white paper of proposals to tackle the nebulous business of online harm. Matt Hancock, then culture secretary, declared that Britain was to become “the safest place in the world” to be online. You’ll maybe understand the urge of ministers and can probably see where this is going: “something must be done”. But does this rule out making anyone less fearful?

In some areas, certainly, legislation is desirable and overdue. Criminal hate speech, libel, grooming, copyright violation, fraud and violent radicalisation are all areas that technology companies should be taking far more seriously. We really should have no objection to them being forced to do so. Likewise, there is growing evidence that the chemical hits of serotonin, dopamine and adrenaline that drive online behaviour creates a dependency culture, in the manner of nicotine or cocaine. The notion of a cigarette packed-style warning on your Snapchat or WhatsApp might seem ludicrous today but it could become a necessary measure to help improve physical and mental wellbeing.

The pervasive public miseries of social media, though, are more low level. They involve not hate speech but vitriol and nastiness; not extremism but political polarisation; not libel but rudeness and disrespect. Not grooming, even, but sexualisation. They involve, in other words, forms of speech that today are free and uninhibited, and where the government almost certainly plans to make less free.

Who will complain? Feel the way the wind blows. The public sees a harm and worries about it. Paradoxically the users of social media are increasingly censorious, blocking undesirables and avoiding certain platforms. In parliament, the very bedrock of democracy, you have a cohort of MPs radicalised against popular free speech by some 100 tweets a day threatening rape or murder, or by calling them traitors or fascists.

Many will wish that social media giants should be policing themselves more effectively, yet simultaneously doubt they ever will. Tell those same people that the state ought to do it instead and they will balk, hard. You will remember the instinctive illiberalism of so many politicians in the Leveson battles over press regulation. You might be feeling it is coming back.

Next time, when it’s those hated tech behemoths who pilfer the revenues from traditional media organisations, will even the press be prepared to put up a fight? They must. Like it or not, what was true with the press is even more true for social media. Except in areas of outright criminality, liberal democracies do not curb your freedom of expression. They may fret about it, lambast it, implore others to close their ears. Yet the moment they shut it down they are liberal no more.

This fight is coming. It is likely to be ugly and all the nicest people will be on the wrong side. Trolls, those ugly creatures who once lived under bridges, now reside right behind the screen you’re looking at. Prowl they will. But you have a choice.

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Arts, Britain, First World War, History

The Magnificence of the British Bayeux Tapestry

WORLD WAR 1 MASTERPIECE

CAPTURED on fabric in intricate and delicate detail for the benefit of future generations hangs an epic pictorial history of conflict and conquest – death, destruction and warriors in action. Displayed not in the Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy, but in the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent.

There is no sign of Norman ships in this tableau, nor King Harold with an arrow in his eye. What we see is the wreckage of Ypres, rats in the trenches, artillery barrages and an enemy pilot plunging to his death.

Yet, as in Bayeux, the theme is timeless: war on a grand and mighty scale.

In this case, it tells the story of one battalion’s valour and sacrifice through the Great War. It is a vivid memorial to the fallen by those lucky enough to have returned home. It could easily be described as the ultimate Roll of Honour.

It is unlikely that many people would ever have seen this stunning work unrolled to its full 70ft length. Were it not for a stroke of luck last year, it might have disappeared for ever, having long ago been dumped at the back of a municipal storeroom. There it sat for years, wrapped in a sheet with a faulty label attached to it saying, ‘Tram Map of Stoke-on-Trent’.

Now, however, it is in pride of place in the city’s museum, ahead of the centenary of the end of World War I this month.

Whilst it has never enjoyed the fame of that illustrious tapestry and needlework in the Bayeux – which recounts William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066 – there is, nonetheless, a similar magical quality to what we should call the Great Wall-Hanging of the West Midlands. It, too, commemorates a monumental, bloody cross-Channel military expedition.

It honours the 5th Battalion of the North Staffordshire Regiment, a unit which suffered almost double the average casualty rate on the Western Front. Running beneath it are the names of nearly a thousand men from the Potteries who never returned.

The first thing that should strike you on entering the gallery is the sheer size of it. Though a third of the length of the Bayeux model, it is much taller – 9ft from top to bottom. But, of course, this is not a tapestry.

 

AT a 1921 reunion of veterans, Tom Simpson MC proposed the idea of a pictorial Roll of Honour for the battalion and recruited a small team of old comrades who, like him, had an artistic flair.

It was painted in the same year on to an industrial roll of canvas. It was then brought out for display at regimental gatherings. But when the last of the old ‘Terriers’, as the North Staffords called themselves, ended their reunions in the Seventies, the great canvas disappeared with them. Last year, it was found in a warehouse. The staff who unrolled out were said to be astonished at their find.

For here was a warscape on both a grand and human scale, set amid towns and villages with tragically familiar names like Ypres, Lens and Passchendaele. And the colours have not faded because they were never exposed to daylight. The canvas still needs expert conservation work before it can go properly on display. For now, only a central section is on show, alongside a facsimile version of the original. Once £50,000 has been raised, the original will go on display in a new gallery.

Levison Wood, 65, a former teacher and Territorial Army officer turned historian, started the hunt for the lost work. He has spent four years recording every fallen member of the North Staffords in a magnificent two-volume register and says, “these are the teardrops of a lost generation.”

A replica version of the ‘tapestry’ shows the scenes which open in Flanders in 1915 when the battalion saw its first action.

Shortly afterwards, they were stationed at a notorious pinch-point in the Western Front’s trench network known as Hill 60. Here the men witnessed their first aerial dogfight. Many regimental accounts refer to a grim scene on June 25, 1915, when a German pilot leapt from his burning aircraft above the British lines – in pre-parachute days. And there he is.

In the same year, the 5th North Staffords suffered their worst losses at the battle of Loos when 800 men went over the top and 500 were lost in just half an hour (including three brothers). They endured similar carnage a year later during the Battle of the Somme where they were ordered to charge an impregnable German bunker at Gommecourt Wood.

By the start of 1918, so many men had perished that the battalion was disbanded and its survivors transferred to other units, including the 6th Battalion which helped capture the Riqueval Bridge over the St Quentin Canal, a pivotal action at the end of the war. As a result, the bridge features right at the end of the ‘tapestry’.

After the war, survivors resumed civilian careers. The last of the ‘Terriers’ is now long gone, of course. And yet, thanks to the efforts of Tom Simpson and his comrades, their memory lives on. The North Staffords became part of the Staffordshire Regiment. They, in turn, became part of today’s Mercian Regiment, who served with distinction in Afghanistan.

Their motto: ‘Stand Firm and Strike Hard’. By looking at this profoundly moving testimony to their forebears you will see why.

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Arts, Books, History, Literature

Book Review: Agatha Christie’s Golden Age

REVIEW

WHAT a fiendish and villainous person Agathe Christie could have been, had she chosen to commit crimes instead of only writing about them.

When asked about her approach and methodology, she said: “You start with the wish to deceive and then work backwards.”

John Goddard, the author of this forensic examination of Christie’s complex puzzles and tightly constructed dovetailed plots, stands amazed at her satanic ingenuity. He relishes, as many readers will have done , the arresting opening lines such as “You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”, which have (to date) hooked more than two billion readers.

There have been many studies of the Queen of Crime, who died in 1976 – full-scale biographies, accounts of her world travels and archaeological excavations, editions of her notebooks, picture books featuring her big house in Devon, cookery books and even a scholarly investigation of her days as a dispensing pharmacist and nurse.

Goddard, though – a former partner in a firm of City solicitors called Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer – looks at Christie’s work from the viewpoint of a lawyer. He spots how key information in the tales is extracted from the Matrimonial Causes Acts of 1857 and 1923, particularly in connection with insanity as grounds for divorce.

 

THE Legitimacy Act of 1926 has a bearing on Christie’s many plots about lost or unwanted children and those born out of wedlock, and how this ties in with the laws of inheritance, intestacy, and the Wills Act of 1837.

Christie knew the difference between the Poisons and Pharmacy Act of 1908 and the Poisons and Pharmacy Act of 1933 and thus on what the average killer could lay his (or her) hands.

She therefore created stories revolving around the effect of bromide on a solution containing strychnine, what happens when you inhale prussic acid, the effect of phosphorus on the liver (it mimics liver disease) and how a quick injection of apomorphine can function as an emetic.

Christie often made use of the double jeopardy loophole – only closed in 2003 with the Criminal Justice Act – whereby once a person had been acquitted, they can never be tried again for the same offence.

As Hercule Poirot points out, “It’s not enough to be arrested.” There has to be a full jury trial, as in The Witness For The Prosecution.

In addition to the innumerable short stories, Christie published an impressive 66 crime novels, beginning in 1920 with The Mysterious Affair At Styles. This is where we first encounter Poirot, this “queer little foreigner”, a World War I Belgian refugee and “fusspot for whom specks of dust are more painful than bullet wounds”.

Obsessed with neatness and symmetry, he wears button boots and sports an absurd moustache, though not as farfetched as Kenneth Branagh’s in the latest film.

“I am probably the greatest detective in the world,” says Poirot, modestly.

Whilst he claims to be an exacting intellectual – “It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think” – Poirot’s little grey cells do, however, always need a bit of help. He examines stains, looks under mats, finds charred fragments of paper and spots the importance of candle grease, cigarette cases, discarded kimonos, brooches or a thornless rose. We, the readers, are, says Goddard, “skilfully deceived as to their significance”.

Whoever saw the importance of the repaired Dictaphone in The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, or the fish paste sandwiches in Sad Cypress?

As awkward in company as Sherlock Holmes, Poirot nevertheless always interviews several suspects, “sometimes in a pleasantly disarming manner, sometimes threatening”.

David Suchet was always good at the curdled courtesy, followed by a sudden snarl of rage. Poirot’s general belief is that “there is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation”, an aphorism worthy of Oscar Wilde.

The more Goddard probes Christie’s work, the more psychological – indeed, subjective and impressionistic – is the approach.

“When I know what the murderer is like, I shall be able to find out who he is,” says Poirot in the ABC Murders, sounding more like a novelist than a cerebral policeman.

As a legal practitioner, Goddard can see how clues support, but do not actually always prove, the solutions given.

These often rely on intelligent supposition – that is to say, sheer guesswork – as in Murder On The Orient Express, where “one cannot complain of having no clues in this case. There are clues here in abundance.” There are also five plausible versions of events, until it is revealed they all did it.

The bustling, busy approach is the particular realm of Miss Marple, the heroine of 12 complete novels.

Far from being a sweet, harmless little old lady, Miss Marple has an instinct for recognising wrongdoing and she mistrusts each and every person she encounters – who do, in fairness, all seem to be gossips, liars, adulterers, cheats, frauds, bastards, stranglers and poisoners.

“I always find it prudent to suspect everybody just a little,” she says, understandably. St Mary Mead is rampant with bodies in libraries, on the golf links, in vicarages and under rhododendrons.

 

GODDARD points out that Christie makes her venues – cosy and comfortable studies, resplendent drawing-rooms, train compartments, paddle-steamers – take on “a tense or sinister atmosphere”. She was particularly keen on placing horror in settings of picturesque Thirties luxury, such as the railway carriages belonging to the Calais to Nice “Blue Train”, which went via Paris and Lyon.

The Middle Est turns up a lot, too. This is an area and region Christie had explored with her husband, Sir Max Mallowan. She made extensive use of the Art Deco hotel on Burgh Island in Bigbury-on-Sea, Devon – it became the Jolly Roger Hotel on Smugglers’ Island.

Instead of explaining Christie away with his analytic exercises and legalistic assessments, Goddard’s superb take should serve to deepen and enrich her success and mystery.

We are shown how Christie can formulate characters we dislike, but who may be wholly innocent, and characters whose side we take – yet who are then unmasked as villains. Christie always saw through the perils of charm.

As a connoisseur of evil and ego, Agathe Christie is as great an author as Graham Greene, Muriel Spark or Jean Rhys.

Christie’s Golden Age brilliantly shows how she wove particular tales around the universal themes of greed, lust, hate, redemption and atonement.

That said, Goddard the lawyer does, however, catch her out just once in the dock. In Lord Edgware Dies, a character arrives home in Piccadilly at 8.30, changes for dinner and gets to Chiswick at 8.45.

This is simply not possible, is it, Miss Christie?

– Agatha Christie’s Golden Age by John Goddard is published by Stylish Eye for £18.99

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