Cultural Cartography

Tidying up before the guests come

I have registered my site for Orange's internet balloon race. I am getting quietly excited about it. And I also thought I have should have a new blog entry on my site to welcome the guests. It really feels like just before a party when the guests are about to arrive and you are worried that they will spot the only corner of the flat that you haven't cleaned.  So here we go and dear guests, please don't look too closely in the corners.

The brilliant thing about this balloon race is that it makes complete semiotic sense. If you imagine the web as a loosely connected cloud of virtual ideas, then having balloons float from one idea to the next makes perfect sense. It also seems to tap into what happens when many of us surf: you float from one thing to the next. It isn't really hopping like it is when you watch TV, where the different channels have nothing to do with each other. For most of us I am sure when we surf, the sites that we navigate to have something however vague to do with the last site that we were on - if only syntagmatically by virtue of there being a link from one site to the next. 

And also the balloons look great and they have these clever widget things that really work.

Cultural schizophrenia

In case you hadn't realised by now, I am living in Germany.  And of course Germany are through to the semi finals of the European Cup, as well as Turkey. One phenomenon I have noticed recently are a lot of cars and flats with both the German and the Turkish flag. Now that is a great sign I think. To me it means that people are leaving behind their restrictive nationalistic thinking and acknowledging that they can be a member of more than one culture. 

Now comes the tricky part. Not only are both German and Turkey through to the semi finals, they are playing each other on Wednesday. I for one am looking forward to the match but not to what will happen afterwards, no matter who wins. I am sure that there will be some very nasty moments on Wednesday night where the winners rub the losers' noses in it. 

I wonder what the evening will be like for those who have been flying two flags. I can't help thinking that despite the very positive sign that it sends, that when it comes down to a match between the two teams and cultures which you are part of, you can only support one team. You can only shout for goals from one side. 

But maybe just maybe these enlightened beings won't shout quite so loud as the others and won't draw any other conclusions from a loss of the team they ultimately support, than that they lost. No vicious repercussions, no expressions of deep seated cultural resentment, just losing a game of football. And that would definitely be progress, wouldn't it? 

World's first online balloon race

I will have a bit more  time on my hands in the next couple of months and so I have decided to celebrate by letting off a balloon. Virtually of course. I am going to take part in the first online balloon race. Don't quite know how it works yet but I like the balloons.

I liked the idea of the orange animal packages from the start. The films were great (see here) and I thought that giving people who use their cell in a particular way an animal name was very clever. It taps into our inate desire for story telling and metaphors. Even if there was some inital discussion about the types of animals. 

And now I get to be my own animal. I chose a dolphin. Like lots of other people. Semiotically it is simply the most sexy animal as far as I am concerned. So help me swim or fly to freedom. Thanks. 

Tubes and Tunnels

On the underground going home recently I looked up and down the train to see that I could see all the way down the train almost to the wall that separated the driver's carriage from the train. I have often wondered about the designs of underground carriages and in this case, they had obviously decided to put all the seats down the side of the train to leave a big long space in the middle. It is probably a very effective way of getting more people in the trains, but it made me feel decidedly strange. For as I looked forward, I realised that I could see the actual way that the rails the train was on twisted and turned, went round corners and then straight on reflected in the way this tube twisted and turned. It was like being inside a very long worm which is sliding along through the earth and you can see the way its body bends, because you are inside. 

I did not like this sensation. It made the whole experience feel much more alien and unnatural than otherwise. Which made me reflect: Do the designers of tube trains talk to the people who travel in them and how it feels to sit in the trains when they are actually moving?