Cultural Cartography

Spring in London

I heard an ice cream van today playing Bobbie Shafto. It made me think that you don't only have to see green spring grass, you could just hear the ice cream van coming round the corner for the first time that year.

Spring greens

March in Seattle
Originally uploaded by Paola: mirrormirror.

I was travelling back from York on the train yesterday to London. It was a beautiful spring day. Green, blue and sparkling. It got me thinking about spring a lot and also about green. The classic semiotic interpretation of green is that it is about nature and growth; the use of the word 'green' for anything that has any supposed environmental credentials is a case in point. But yesterday started me thinking whether we had forgotten why green was such an important colour. We have become disassociated from our environment and forgotten that green in spring was the sign to our ancestors that the bitter tribulations of winter were over. It signals hope and rebirth to us now because it literally meant rebirth to generations of people who lived off the land. Add to that the beauty of the spring sun. There is a certain crispness, thinness to the air which I find intoxicating. You can smell the newness, the delicate nature of the buds in the delicate whiffs of earth and bark that come to you on the breeze.

It was as you can see a beautiful journey yesterday and turned me all poetic.
Coupled with the fact that since Saturday I have my first nephew, Milo, a lovely beautiful little boy. So maybe that started me thinking about new beginnings.

Traffic lights

There is an interesting debate going on in the UK at the moment between what roughly seems to be the food industry and the govt about the labelling of food. The food industry has opted for a system based on Guideline Daily Amounts (IGD website) and the Food Standards Agency has opted for a traffic light system. I don't want to go into the whys and wherefores of which system is better, because I'm not qualified to do that. Interesting however if we want to think about semiotics in the real world is the argument that the traffic light system is easier for people to understand (See this article from the BBC). I heard the interview with the Mum they quote there; she basically was in the store with her little kid running away from her and she said, 'I want to be able to understand things immediately. This is very clear to me.'

It got me thinking about 1) traffic lights and their origins. And also 2) their semiotic significance.

1) The origins of traffic lights seems to be widely accepted that they stem from railway signals which had a red lantern and a green lantern which were hidden alternatively by a semaphore arm. It has never been otherwise than Green was "go" and Red was "stop". Why Amber was introduced as "think about doing something" I don't know. It's an interesting case where a colour's coded meaning has come about because of its association with other colours which have very clear meanings.

2) Traffic lights are semiotically significant and also particularly interesting for this site because they are a perfect example of how a code become historically and culurally entrenched and then spreads. There is no ontological reason why red should be for danger and green for safety but it is now culturally embedded so much so that now that is what those colours mean.

or to put it another slightly more academic way:

"It should be noted that whilst the relationships between signifiers and their signifieds are ontologically arbitrary (philosophically, it would not make any difference to the status of these entities in 'the order of things' if what we call 'black' had always been called 'white' and vice versa), this is not to suggest that signifying systems are socially or historically arbitrary. Natural languages are not, of course, arbitrarily established, unlike historical inventions such as Morse Code. Nor does the arbitrary nature of the sign make it socially 'neutral' or materially 'transparent' - for example, in Western culture 'white' has come to be a privileged signifier (Dyer 1997). Even in the case of the 'arbitrary' colours of traffic lights, the original choice of red for 'stop' was not entirely arbitrary, since it already carried relevant associations with danger. As Lévi-Strauss noted, the sign is arbitrary a priori but ceases to be arbitrary a posteriori - after the sign has come into historical existence it cannot be arbitrarily changed (Lévi-Strauss 1972, 91). As part of its social use within a code (a term which became fundamental amongst post-Saussurean semioticians), every sign acquires a history and connotations of its own which are familiar to members of the sign-users' culture." This from a very useful website for students of semiotics by Daniel Chandler. 

I realise that I've already talked about German traffic lights but don't worry, I don't think there will be many more posts on traffic lights.  

The death of real thinking or the rise of mediocracy

In the UK recently there has been a spate of blogging about whether blogging is causing the death of planning or not. See here for the ongoing debate. There was in fact an actual debate (the details of which I can no longer find).  I wonder if the issue here is about something else: control. Who has the control over ideas, thoughts, approaches and who decides if they are right or not?

I personally think that blogging is a "good thing", however I'm very aware to the power of the mass. I thought this entry on Edge was really interesting. It's about how digital collectivism (such as Wikipedia) and the sense that pertains there that the collective has some kind of greater knowledge than the individual. Now I'm not saying that they don't. I am saying however that we need to be very wary of letting the mass dictate how knowledge develops. There are cases (and this is where I think John Lowery of Grey London) is coming from where expert knowledge is necessary.

It reminds me of Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" and the idea he develops there of the "tyranny of the majority". It's quite simply: if lots of people don't know what they are talking about together, they can still dominate the few who do know what they are talking about. 

However in this case, I feel that the people who are blogging still know what they are talking about.  And the other thing that no-one seems to mention is, I'm sure none of them are going into their day job and saying "NO I am not going to read and comment on that brand tracking report because I blog!"

And for light relief after this heavy post, a short ad about the virtues of planning from someone who is obviously an expert on his parents.

Where am I?

A little quiz for the readers: I am on a train in a major European city and this is the pattern on the PVC in the carriage. Now where am I?

A clue: Look for big important buildings you might know.

The Brandenburg Gate. The Reichstag. The TV Tower and now we are getting more into things for the locals, The Red Town Hall ; the Deutsche Dom etc.

Yes, that's right. I was in Berlin (again).

When I realised this, I thought how great. Let's use the semiotically most important symbols of our city to decorate the way you get around them.

I know that the Tube has a different pattern for the seat covers for different lines as witnessed by another quiz here but that's making it too difficult for tourists.

Imagine fitting the symbols to the places the line goes under or even to. You could have Buckingham Palace on the Piccadilly Line and the Victoria Line because they both go to Green Park and it would be a much nicer of way of working out the intersections. 

Urban ethics: Part 1 The skip

This is an interesting area that I've been thinking about a lot. It's got a lot to do with living in a city but also a lot to do with living in society, so I guess it applies to most of us. I'll start with the example that got me thinking about this and then expand.

I live in a block of flats which has a shared refuse room. If you want to dispose of any large items which the council won't collect, you are supposed to organise for them to pick them up. This costs money. If you don't do this, they won't collect the items. What happens instead is that the firm that manages the building then contacts the council to pick up the items and they pass the cost onto all the residents of the block (probably knowing them also with an bit added for their bureaucracy). Recently we came downstairs to find a carpet and several other large items in the refuse room. They stayd there for a long time.  Despite heartfelt appeals no-one admitted that it was their carpet, so it became apparent they had been dumped.

At the same time as this realisation dawned, a skip appeared outside the outer door to the refuse room. It was from some building work that was being done on a block nearby. So one night a little elf from our block took the items from our refuse room and put them in the skip.  Now they were gone and we all didn't have to pay for them to be disposed of. But of course someone pays for the skip, and they didn't pay for it to be put there to have other people's waste dumped in it.

(this is not the skip in question but it is in London: not taken by me)

So we have counter-acted an anti-social act committed against our community by committing an anti-social act against another community. Right or wrong? 

Or just a case of urban ethics in action.

How would I define urban ethics? Ethics is the branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions (you can tell I got that from a dictionary). So it would seem only right that there can be urban ethics because the values relating to human conduct must be affected by living in an urban environment.

In an urban environment deciding what is right and wrong is not governed by an abstract rule of morality, instead I think it is predicated upon the understanding that it is what works best for you. The definition of "you" is the interesting case in point here. In the case of the person who left the carpet, "you" was themselves and not having to pay for the carpet to be removed. In the case of the little elf who put the carpet in the skip, "you" was the group of which he would have been a part. I think it might be interesting to consider in more important cases of urban ethics in action how we can make the "you" more inclusive.

So for example many of those interviewed about the recent spate of gun crime said that the thing was that if they weren't in a gang, their lives were much harder, even if being in a gang meant possibly having to carry a weapon and use it. If we could change their definition of what is best for them, then we might have more of a chance of stopping them getting into a mess. I need to think more about this.

Interestingly  the origins of society where about moving away from what is best for me, if you agree with the theory presented by Norbert Elias in The Civilising Process . It was about increasing self-restraint due to the interconnected nature of society. I wonder if the world has become so interconnected now that it actually feels like we are no longer connected. Too much of a good thing makes it seem like it doesn't exist (but that's another thought). 

Know your audience

Went into Harrods recently (don't ask me why) and despite all the nastiness of the sales, I realised that Harrods definitely knows their audience. They know that the majority of the people coming to shop there are not from the UK, they are from America or the Gulf or Europe. So what do you do as an international brand with that kind of customer? You make it very easy for them to buy your wares and you show them that you have recognised they exist.

Letting people know you exist

how do brands tell you they exist nowadays? By telling you they do. spotted this at Charles de Gaulle waiting in line. Now I know that Usbekistan Airways is a force to be reckoned with, as least as far as their ability to organise queues is concerned.

Pre-flight blues

I'm flying to NYC today. Flying business with BA so what is there to complain about? Nothing and everything. I am really starting to have pre-flight blues. I try and get myself excited about the trashy films I can watch but then I also start to worry about what all the other serious people will think when I start hiccupping with tears at "The Reef" or some other CGI film (my personal faves for films). I think I could have some nice champagne but I also know it's bad for you and dries out your skin. I worry about the environmental damage I'm doing and whether carbon offsetting really does make any difference (see the article in the Guardian Money this Saturday). But mostly I think about how terribly terribly tedious and pointless the whole thing is and how all these little treats only go someway to making up for the fact that I am wasting precious hours of my life in a metal tube in the air.

This is an example of the passport held by us busy business travellers: Every one of those stamps is half an hour at immigration!