(very) Belated Easter thoughts

Easter week is a time for reflection. A time for austerity and solemnity, before giving way to celebration. The time when one man’s blood and death saved a nation and the world. On Good Friday I sat reading in a coffee shop looking out, watching passers by milling in the street. They frequently stopped outside a shop bearing a massive sign:

 

‘Easter event: 20% of homeware’

 

There we have it, Easter now holds significance as the perfect time to buy a discounted toast rack.

 

This started thoughts about the government sponsored way out of the current economic climate: the spend-your-way-out. It stands in harsh contrast to the Easter message: instead of one person saving a nation, we the nation are saving the economy. Pouring money, life’s blood, away in a bid to save what has been lost.  

Consumerist News?

News. Here one day, replaced with more the next. New news quickly sours into old news. And old news is rapidly tipped into the cavernous backlogs of our mental and literal recycle bins, where it merges with and is absorbed by similar stories of old.

In a world in which we are bombarded with information and assaulted with headlines is it any wonder that we often watch, or read, the news with emotions which are luke-warm at best? News has become all too convenient. By this, I don’t mean that we should be foraging for our information and news stories, but simply that in our ‘news 24’ culture, it’s easy to take a spoonful of each story, often without sticking around to finish off the whole bowl. This might seem like a good thing when the story reported is the news equivalent of sprouts (tastes nasty, leaves you with bloated and uneasy feelings) but, as your mother would be sure to remind you, sprouts are good for you. You really should eat them all up. I suppose my point is that in our headline culture, we usually only expose ourselves to the basics. One headline flashes up ‘ice sheet size of Scotland breaks free’ and we only have a second or so to register, being to think ‘how terrib…’ before the next headline has interrupted thought mid-flow and our attention is directed to the next gobbet ready for consumption.

Given this, is it any wonder that people are largely apathetic about ‘current affairs’? Often we don’t have that much time to care about or digest a story before it moves from currency to attentional bankruptcy. Why is this? Is it the fault of the media and its reporters? The owners of the media? Or our own?

Neither. Or Perhaps, at least, a blend of them all.

Listening to a podcast yesterday, my attention was drawn and focused by a single phrase. Five words, which I think come uncomfortably close to the way we often inhabit and take note of the world around us, and its affairs. The speaker talked about our ‘Soap Opera Arc of Attention’. The phrase provoked thoughts of what we might identify as the phenomenon of commodification and individualisation of the news. That is the recentish phenomena that news is something to sell to us. That news can be ‘exclusive’, and that reporting in this fashion can boost ratings for one news show over another. This mentality leads to a shift, I think, in reporting news stories largely from a grandstand view, to the level of the individual. Bound up with this is the idea that news has a sell by date. Once a conflict or event has been going on for a while, it slips the media attention. A classic case might be that of the long term Sri Lankan civil war which has been going on since 1983, but which I hadn’t much awareness of until recently.

A potential source of the problem lies in the dynamic between the newswatcher and news supplier, and the insidious creeping of what we might call consumerist values (if we’re feeling particularly post-Marxist) into the sphere of journalism. In our fast-paced lives, there is a heavier demand for the neat and concise which will not drain the precious resource that is Our Time. News channels recognise and respond by wheeling out the headline artillery, from which we get our daily obligatory news hit. So far, fine. Rolling headlines are a way of acquainting ourselves with what’s going on. Quick style. But my concern is how this affects the way major news events are covered in light of this.

If we are used to shots of news in the form of headline, that we can knock back easily, what effect does this have on the way news stories are presented in more depth? The question for news providers becomes one of how they might reel us in to listen in more depth, and to choose their channel over another. One of the answers it seems to have found to this is to convey and pitch stories from the level of the individual. You only have to look at ITV news, or similar to see this in action. We are increasingly led to care through being presented by one person’s struggle, or another’s loss. In this way, individual-centred reporting seems designed to draw and sustain interest on a direct empathic level, rather than an impartial and detached reporting of events as and when they have happened. In stating this, I don’t wish to state that the stories of individuals are trivial or less worthy of attention than a grandstand view. Not at all. I just wonder to what extent this is ‘news, but not as we [have] known it’, and on the other extreme, whether such reporting must always entail a subtle form of propaganda. Our opinion-formation on root issues and events are primed by the manner in which the case is reported. In presenting us with an individual’s case from one side of a conflict, say, we might come to empathise with the plight of the ‘side’ which the particular individual comes from. In a sense, in pitching news from the level of the individual there is a loss of emotional distance between us, the consumers of the news, and the events.

But does this lead to difficulties in forming an objective opinion on events? And we've got to wonder what happens to these individuals once their news story reaches its sell by date.

Useful Feminism?

Reading the guardian website this morning, I was shocked to come across this story:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/04/taliban-flogging-inquiry-pakistan

It started me thinking about feminism, and the decline, or relative unpopularity, about using the term as a by-word for the fight for basic women's rights (or basic human rights made available to all). Recently, I've come across a few debates, on radio or where ever, which have been questioning where (if at all) feminism went wrong; that is, why feminism doesn't seem to be all that useful, or has slipped off the agendas of modern women. Against this backdrop, reading this article, I was struck by how much feminism still has to do.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Western women, who have achieved a degree of equality (as far as they have similar rights to male counterparts) and freedom, take their freedom for granted, as the norm. What is surprising is that most women would not elect to call themselves feminists, despite agreeing with the view that women deserve to be treated, paid and respected as much and as well as their male counterparts. This is especially the case when issues such as domestic abuse, inequalities in pay and abortion (to name a few) are brought up. That said, I’m left wondering what is it about the word ‘feminist’ which provokes the squirm and giggle response, the ‘oh-I-wouldn’t-go-as-far-to-call-myself-that’ rejoinder, in most people? I am left wondering whether the freedom and ability to follow whatever path decided on, and our freedom from institutional and social constraint when deciding what to make of our lives, is integrated to such an extent in a reality of living (for most in this country, anyway), that is, we take it for granted that we are even able to do this, or that this freedom just is the norm. According to this, feminism, and feminists, just aren’t needed. They’re outmoded. The oppression of women seems something out of history, far removed from our enlightened practices of 'today's world'.

But it's not.

The largely unbounded freedom of western women entails and is bound up with a blindspotting of small cases of what we might think of as gender inequality (such things as the relative 'acceptability' of men being able to behave certain ways to women, which would be thought of as grotesque the other way around); however, those small acts are nothing compared to what life is like for women in the border regions of Pakistan and similar places. Imagine not having a basic education, rights to visit a doctor without permission of a male relative, the freedom to go into public places and talk to whoever you want. Imagine the right to refuse sex to your partner being legally removed (as might be the case in Afghanistan if Karzai doesn’t cave under UN and US pressure). I don't know about you, but I can't. Perhaps I'm being naive, but the fact that I can't, leaves me with a curiously blended sense of privilege and responsibility. Who is it that gives these women's experiences a voice? Why don't we know about the general plight of women who live in such oppression? What is being done about it? I don't really know the answer to such questions, which troubles me further.

Being a philosopher by trade, a cluster of questions announce themselves: Is feminism is dead? If so, should be resurrected? How can we make feminism speak out to women who consider the f-word to be a dirty one? I, for one, think it has to be, but am unclear as to how.