Russell Davies

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Carry on

I always remembered the histories of Keep Calm and Carry On saying that it was never actually issued and displayed in public, so I was surprised to see this picture (above) in Cecil Beaton's Air of Glory.

I checked and though some histories still say that, the wikipedia entry says "the poster was hardly ever publicly displayed" (my italics)

I wonder if the fact that it turns up in a Cecil Beaton photo suggests it was more widely distributed than previously believed, or that this photo was staged with the assistance of the relevant Ministry. Or, indeed, if it suggests nothing.

 

Helplessness and the snail

When thinking about large organisations and their relationships to 'digital' a couple of concepts from other fields always pop into my head.

(That's some of the fun of doing something new - you get to appropriate language and ideas from other areas and see if it helps your understanding of what you're doing.)

Learned helplessness is the first. I thought I'd written about it on here before, but it turned out it was in Campaign.

The second is wilful blindness, an idea I first came across during the Enron trial. Wikipedia describes it as "a term used in law to describe a situation in which an individual seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally putting his or herself in a position where he or she will be unaware of facts that would render him or her liable."

ie people seek to avoid knowing the obvious, so they don't get the blame for it.

And clearly, in many instances (as described in this edition of Analysis) it describes more serious corporate failings than not grokking the internet - though the underlying dynamics seem similar.

It's somewhat akin to the famous Upton Sinclair quote:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

And is a nice companion to this cartoon.

But, really, in the end, I think we can agree that both Learned Helplessness and Wilful Blindness are just manifestations of the well-known Coates Snail Syndrome.

 

 

 

As true today as it's ever been

hello lift people

Nice to meet you all today.

I'm not, in fact, going to post my slides on here. That's just something you say when a conference organiser asks you to do it live on stage.

But I will try and write some notes soon which say something similar.

Watch this space. 

undercroft

I hope there's some sort of permanent time-lapse thing set up in the undercroft. The layers! The accretion!

'sky' 'garden'

 

We went up here on Friday morning. It looks good on pictures but is as awful as everyone says - a spectacular waste of a view. Badly designed and badly run.

It's like they've closed the loop on misleading pixels - straight from a lying 3D render to a space that only works through a camera - without ever creating a decent real-life experience in between.

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