Talking about change where can we go in a crisis?
Mediatisation, Political realities or fiction as fact
The work of Harold Innes (1894-1952) contributed to the concept of time, space and media when he writes in ‘Empire and Communications’: “The concepts of time and space reflect the significance of media to civilization. Media that emphasize time are those durable in character such as parchment, clay and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture. Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character such as papyrus and paper. The latter are suited to wide areas in administration and trade. The conquest of Egypt by Rome gave access to supplies of papyrus, which became the basis of a large administrative empire. Materials that emphasize time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while those that emphasize space favour centralization and systems of government less hierarchical in character.” (Oxford, Oxford University Press. P.7)
The concepts that Innes apply reflect on how the materials of communication can be applied contextually to a communications medium. While here, I will attempt to address how industrial and corporate conceptualisation of time and space can be applied linguistically to demonstrate how today’s electronic media contributed to the detriment of a number of important social imperatives and impairs organizational learning. It is accepted that an industrialised culture values a product not only for its usefulness but also for its ability to reshape society with the reshaping being marked by a widening of cultural acquiescence to technological ascendancy. This means telecommunications, marketed on the basis of immediacy, coverage and economy, will take social precedence over other forms of communication such as letters, face to face meetings or document exchanges. This form of social ascendancy is then mirrored within language whereby the older, slower technology is often referred to disparagingly, as was seen when e-mail ascended over the posting of letters which then became ‘snail mail’ and whereby, face to face meetings between individuals became ‘talk fests’ as video conferencing became the norm. For example, the telephone, by its domination of interpersonal communications in the early 20th century was to become even more ubiquitous than the hamburger. However, with its global reach and its promise of instant communication via voice, text and then the internet, the advent of digitalized communication was to concurrently develop into a worrying font of bullying, invasion of privacy and increasingly expensive outlays for its users.
Corporate advocates within the telecommunications industry were very quick to defend their industry against such observations by contending that it was the end user who had to accept and demonstrate responsibility in technological usage rather than for government red or green tape, or even industry self-regulation to mitigate any limitations of usage or expense. However, this argument becomes fallacy when it is acknowledged that in society there exists a Duty of Care which manifests as a shared responsibility between the manufacturer of an artifact, in the first instance, and its user in the second. This Duty of Care means ethically a number of social and governance expectations mandate that artefacts must be produced and marketed in the first instance as suitable and safe for purpose when utilised in accordance with socially responsible guidelines and they are used in a manner consistent with health and safety legislation in the second. However, as already argued, Corporate thinking dismisses many forms of ethical expectations within product compliance as socialist altruism so, in our technological world, ethical concerns are, by default, excised from language to be replaced by legal jargon derived from the culture of avoidance which asks of itself only, ‘can I’ rather than ‘should I’.
So, having utilised history to demonstrate how language has been used to diminish many of the social and regulatory restraints of corporate power as somehow being counterproductive to the profit margins that drove and controlled the marketplace. I can now argue that the corporations, once freed of the red and green tapes of governance, would target consumers who stripped of ethical product protection or tempted by industry towards overindulgence and its debts would be henceforth blamed for their victimhood as part of the toxicity carried within the myths of the Culture of Avoidance. Although many have argued (including the author) that it was mainly the industrialisation of society that created much of the dependency of overindulgence, as is perceived in the Western World in general, such an argument may not be applicable here. This is because it can be suggested that a deeper reading of the effects of industrialisation demonstrates that it is the way that Time and Space came to be valued economically in the 18th Century which can provide a greater insight into the conceptualisation and usage of modern telecommunications and how mediatisation came to effect both thinking and its language.
As we are talking here about contemporary society we could turn to such as George Harrison (1943-2001) and how he saw his contemporaries perceiving time, “[i]t's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.” Here we see expressed the Now view, as in ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ the imperative being expressed is that an individual should live for the day as they may not see another. Harrison’s observation also demonstrates that contemporary society sees Time as something fleeting as in, “[t]here's no past and there's no future” so he appears to be channelling the modern reading of the adage, ‘carpe diem’ which can be translated as ‘seize the day’. However, we should note that this adage was part of a longer phrase “carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero” which, when literally translated, becomes " pluck the day, trusting as little as possible in the next one. "(Horace, Book 1, Odes, 23BC). This famous quote encouraged the reader to use every day and be happy in life so days, like the fruit on a tree, were a gift so every day was to be lived to the fullest. However, in contemporary times the Now view conceptualizes that we “seize the day”, as we now see life itself, as linear and as something that cannot be relived, so what changed man’s philosophy so radically since Horace?
With the industrialization of Europe, as we have already explored, the advancement of Capitalism was to commodify all cultural artefacts so they could be sold or bartered. Henceforth even Time and Space were to become conceptualised as commodities whereby they could be ‘owned’, increasingly divided, portioned, sold or bartered. So, as conceptulisations, Time and Space became things that people would value and own economically rather than metaphysically and henceforth language changed to mirror this new value system thereby setting the seeds of political opposition to the feudal ideals of Common Lands, Common Law, Common Rights, Common Wealth or the many forms of Mutualism that had sustained societies throughout the world. Once the division and bartering of Time was established in language the ‘Working Week’ and the ‘Work Day’ would henceforth stand opposed to ‘Wasted Time’, ‘Time wasted is time lost’ or ‘Time and Tide wait for no man’. Contemporary sayings such as, ‘Open around the clock’, ‘24/7’, ‘Just in time’ (delivery), ‘Buy Now or you may miss out’ created an urgency for ‘there is no time like the present’, because as Harrison noted we can’t relive the past. Benjamin Franklin’s observation, “[i]f time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality” clearly demonstrates how deeply ingrained this economic valuation of time was to become.
Even when Albert Einstein claimed that, “time is an illusion” this was no barrier to industry since mediatisation had already harnessed technology such as the Atomic clock, to scientifically divide time, cutting it into ever smaller periods and then mathematically dictating how every millisecond of every day was to be costed, valued and economically appreciated. And it is here where we can see how technology’s greatest mantra, ‘Time is Money’ became an institution within Corporatised language.
So, turning back to the telephone, we will now see how this application of corporate language was applied to, quite cynically, the users of telecommunications because as they were already imbued with the contextualisation of Time and Space, distance as an adjunct had also became conceptualised as a form of linearity. As this corporatisation of communications developed, even though there was no extra cost involved to the industry, time-based calls were introduced and, of course, charges were then applied and multiplied by distance. Users soon learned to speak quickly and not unnecessarily because the telephone, from this very beginning, was to be the epitome of ‘Time is Money’. But is it not ironic, that although the telephone was heralded as a 20th Century victory over time and distance it also meant that industry had found that technology not only made money from society’s need to talk but also from the time and distance that it involved? Here I would suggest we should study this irony for as the telephone moved from the subscriber toll dialling (STD) calls of the 20th Century to the Smart technology of the 21st, telecommunication’s obsession with Time and Space continued. In contemporary times Corporatocracy changed the way the user utilised telecommunications because mediatisation was also, through social engineering, defining the way society valued communication in general. So, what social changes did these fundamental challenges to our value system bring to the conceptualisation of communication in the first instance and the contextualisation of language in the second?
To answer I must now turn our attention to what the linguistic emphasis on time, distance and associated economic imperatives meant to phatic (social) communications at the communal level. Socio-linguistics explains that phatic communication, or small talk, is an important social lubricant for in the words of Erving Goffman (1922-1982), “[t]he gestures which we sometimes call empty are perhaps in fact the fullest things of all". However, if we apply the cultural and social ascendancy of technology, in this case telecommunications to this equation, we are able to discern how phatic communication came to be so devalued. The metaphors and similes, ‘Talk is Cheap’, ‘Talk to hear your own voice’, ‘Like to hear one’s voice’ and even ‘sweet talk’ are the type of derogatory language that obviously do little to inspire confidence in the description of talk as an ‘important social lubricant’. Even the way phatic communication has come to refer to itself does little to instil or inspire our basic need for self expression. As ‘chit chat’ or ‘small talk’ it becomes easy to overlook that, in fact, it is the most important part of our self expression since it, alone, carries the trust that is implicit in belongingness, relationship and social rather than individual compassion.
Therefore, it is through phatic communication that the bonds of personal union and companionship are forged and strengthened. But, since corporate thinking perceives there is little economic value in companionship, telecommunications will always value the transmission of information over that of ‘chit chat’ simply because information, like knowledge, is more highly valued as something which can be possessed, while mere ‘chit chat’ is something that is freely shared. This observation can also account for the common utilisation of manufactured dissent in the mass media in order to cross fuel into the social media since it can be argued the default to conversation is animosity while inquiry defaults to apathy both of which are very evident in the culture of avoidance.
So, this observation thus brings us to the crux of the argument since it appears that the conceptualisation of ‘Time is Money’ may have more implications than we might realise. Marcus Padley, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald observes:
“In finance, we are constantly talking about the time value of money. But in life we now have the basis for calculating the money value of time. A minute for someone earning $100,000 a year is worth 61¢ in cash. Waste a minute and you waste 61¢. On that basis, brushing your teeth costs you $1.22, boiling an egg costs you $2.13, travelling to work (40 minutes) costs you $24.40 on top of your fare. More seriously, a VB stubby appears to cost $1.66 but under the money-value-of-time formula, a VB actually costs you 2.72 minutes of your life. A carton costs you one hour and five minutes and if you take more than 2.72 minutes to drink each bottle instead of earning money, it gets even more expensive. On top of that, if you drink the whole carton and spend 24 hours with a hangover, it actually costs you $517.20 of lost earning capacity on top of the cost of the case. That's $23.21 a bottle. Expensive stuff. … Money is time and this is just the hard numbers calculation. For some people, time is more valuable depending on what you do with it. A minute schmoozing your spouse, for instance, is more valuable than a minute being grumpy about the fact that the Dow Jones just fell 353 points.” (SMH, June 26, 2013)
Padley here makes an important distinction when he perceives that, “money is time” in that, “time is more valuable depending on what you do with it” (my italics). Therefore, it appears he is saying that we can actually, ‘Spend our Time’. This is a very intriguing argument because it conceives Time as being the ultimate resource granted to Man and as such ‘Time is precious’ and therefore it can be spent as such. But surely, as accorded to Einstein, “Time is an illusion” so how can Time be conceptualised as a resource?
Although Man’s imagination appears infinite the ability to express one’s Self is not. Language is the limitation that delineates the boundaries of our creative expression and as such it is the seeking of self-expression that prompts language to dip within the metaphysical Self where language itself becomes an attempt to put a physical body upon the spiritual. Hence, conceptual Time becomes a ‘body’ of seconds, minutes and hours which now enslave us, as a commodity, within a technological chimera. And this means that we, like time itself, can be valued, bartered and dehumanized since technology has been enabled to trump the human condition. So, contemporary Time, as something that can owned, sold, bartered or wasted, now defines Life itself and if this is so, how are we now to ‘turn back the clock’ to undo these Corporatised conceptions?
I am arguing these conceptions have and are restricting the human ability to join with others to freely express, through conversation and the arts, our metaphysical or spiritual Selves. As the English language has been enslaved by an Imperialistic, Colonialist and Capitalist language and the toxicity of its economic imperatives is heavily influenced by the binaries proposed by the pragmatism and positivism of the Corporatised mass media this means that most of what we see or hear is being ideologically dictated by the utilisation of metaphorical contextualities. We have already seen that the metaphor ‘Time is money’ creates a context which leads, in language, to an application of an adage such as, ‘Time is precious’ which thus creates an economic imperative or concept of a personal value. However, I would suggest that if this is so then all that is needed to change such an imperative is to apply another metaphysical definition to what it is being valued. For instance, if we were to change the word Time to Life how might this change the metaphor?
If we accept that in language the metaphor plays an important role in definition or comparison, since it designates a likeness or value. I could then argue that when ‘Life’ is applied to the ‘Time is money’ metaphor it would also apply to the adage, ‘Time is precious’ which would thus become ‘Life is precious’. This change in context thus challenges the linearity of the metaphor which in turn invokes the adage ‘carpe diem’ as Life itself is again being extolled to be enjoyed and valued within the present while time becomes representative of the tomorrow in which one can put “very little trust”. Through this linguistic exercise I can now argue how this metaphorical application of Life and Time demonstrates the manner by which the economic imperative creates both economic and linguistic limitations within social communications. This means we are able to oppose the economic imperatives in language by immersing oneself in the art of the social sciences which means absolutely within the ability to join people in conversation. As philosopher, John Armstrong observes in “The Art of Conversation”. “A conversation is a work of art with more than one creator. So, quite often, two or more people cannot rise to the level of conversation. They talk with one another. It may be cheerful, it may be polite, it may be a bit funny, it may be informative. But it lacks something crucial to conversation: the risk of seriousness. Secretly we yearn for real conversation, because we long to encounter the best and most substantial versions of other people. We long for the truth of ourselves to be grasped and liked by another person”.[v]
I must repeat, “[w]e long for the truth of ourselves to be grasped and liked by another person” for I believe this to be the crux of not only this conversation, but that within the paradox which faces our contemporary world. Here it would seem that although we have an innate desire to converse, we have lost the art of connecting with our metaphysical Self in times of change or crisis to enable a relationship that can then share a meaningful connection with others. So, while we have addressed corporate language and the economic metaphors it utilises, we must now concentrate on corporate thinking and how technocracy has made it increasingly unable for people to consciously, instinctively or subjectively initiate the conversation that they so long for, simply because the mediatisation of our thinking has divorced our language from its social metaphors.
Which thus brings me to what really commends phatic (social) communication in that it asks nothing of you other than you engage freely in social life and enjoy the companionship that others may offer in order that we can then learn how to share and embrace the importance of compassion for both yourself and others. To begin this discussion I believe men have been taught to apply another social characteristic to any desire, especially desire which has been long hidden behind a conformist sexuality or one that has been coupled with religious or political correctness. This malign characteristic is that of abstention. When we look to our past we find abstention being spoken about as an answer to doubt, “when you doubt, abstain”[vi] so, we have been taught that basically, if a man abstains from anything he is assured that he can do no wrong. Therefore, if such is so, we should be able to lay a link between this and other, so called, male dysfunctions and I believe we may. But what I would add before we go further is what seems to have been forgotten in this politicisation of the Male is that, “when you abstain, even the worst stuff begins to look good.”[vii]
So, while abstention itself might not seem applicable to the child of today it has become evident that too many of our boys are said to be exhibiting a number of characteristics or behaviours that are concerning. For instance, there are studies that suggest that boys do not responded to schooling with the same enthusiasm or application as that demonstrated by girls. Teenaged boys and their behaviour are often demonised in the media because of a perceived overindulgence in popular culture or its technology and the cultural artifacts that are seducing them. This in turn leads to a never-ending stream of demands for parents, schools and of course police to exert ever more discipline, in other words more political correctness, coupled with the ubiquitous CCTV to emphasis an ever increasing social surveillance. But when the corporate practices of the past are applied here it can be perceived quite clearly that in fact our children are being blamed as the victims of a technocracy that made over indulgence and addiction a globalised economic imperative by seducing and corrupting the world and its people in the name of greed for over 400 years. So, the culture of avoidance while seducing parents into spending a great deal of time and increasing amounts of money teaching their children to read and write are also actively discouraging parents from joining with their children in regular serious conversation. Here the ubiquitous advances in ‘paid entertainment’ can be found at the root of the family withdrawal from meaningful conversations. Too many families no longer plan or make their own entertainment they merely buy it. But there are a number of mythologies that support this mediatisation with excuses that often involve the child being far too busy in their spare time with sport and friends, entertainment or social activities, which then couple with the widespread myth that children don’t talk to their parents. However, it should be noted, there are also the hours spent by young people in front of televisions, computers or their phones which can be taken to argue that corporatized language, practices and seduction are applying far more inhibiting factors than neglectful parenting. So, while it might be an exaggeration for me to claim that children rarely converse it would seem here it is important that we apply John Armstrong’s observation that when, “they talk with one another. It may be cheerful, it may be polite, it may be a bit funny, it may be informative. But it lacks something crucial to conversation: the risk of seriousness.”
So, I could argue that when we apply the political correctness of abstention to the Corporatisation of popular culture we can recognise that the disconnect represented by teenage angst is actually being sustained by the inequities of blame the victim. So, the toxicity of social media feeds a manufactured dissent that weaponises the tears of a multitude of lonely young who desperately seek to explore and share the truths they feel within them. For here there can be no doubt that technology is the ultimate shape shifter, for while it presents as a friend and confidant one day, it can deliver bullying and vile innuendo the next. However, technology is only a medium and what it delivers is always an illusion, so be it your friend or your enemy it is still merely a chimera which is why technology can never represent a ‘Safe’ space no matter what is promised. This is an important distinction because although we recognise our ‘personal’ space as important to us we often don’t recognise that to converse means we must allow someone else into our space and through this act we endow someone else with not only our social wishes but our human desires as well. Therefore, this means if we trust technology to help us communicate human desire, we bare ourselves to the world for we can have no idea as to whom or what the chimera portrays. So, before we can join in conversation the ‘safe’ space or Place we occupy must be made to be ours and to whom we open it has to be our decision and ours alone.
The Roman architect Vitruvious (De Architectura) eloquently proposed that human architecture spoke spiritually to the Self through its symmetry to nature and thus, by extension, to the universe. This observation was to lead others such as Da Vinci (Vitruvian Man) to recognise that structures do form an important part of the human environmental psychology. Indeed, in recent times, the study of ‘common ground’ (Manzo C. & Perkins D. 2006) demonstrated that through a dynamic phenomenon with Place, “patterns of beliefs, preferences, feelings, values and goals” develop alongside of attachments and relationships which grow and transform through lived experience (p.337). A question we must address therefore is how can this sense of ‘common ground’ be created in communities where corporate thinking and the economic imperative have imposed ‘user pays’ fees and tactics designed to reduce usage and the associated governance ‘costs’ of communal spaces? I will argue here that an Australian response to the increasing corporatization of communal space during the early 1990s inspired the exponential growth of the Men’s Sheds' movement. While many sheds were founded as a response to a local crisis, such as flooding, fires, unemployment, an aging population or a perceived lack of communal activity the men’s sheds themselves represent a phenomenal success story.
Today, the sheds according to a study I conducted, are providing focal points in local communities that are able to transform men’s lives through the interest and the self-esteem a shed can inspire. This observation was supported by my study when a men’s shed member claimed, “I don’t think it (the shed) just changed men’s lives I think it actually changed the whole community where a men’s shed is” (sic). He enlarged on this theme by observing that involvement with a shed gave people in the community a way to engage with the physical and social skills of the men in a way that they didn’t have a “pathway to before”. Expanding on this theme another respondent said a shed had provided him with a “place to land” because he felt that before the sheds there was no place for men like him to go in a crisis and that there was nowhere to be “just who we are” outside of a men’s shed. The men’s sheds’ ethic of Place can be said to be defined by the Gosford Men’s Shed mission statement which states the shed is a place where members can, “enjoy each other’s company, promote self-worth and work ethics while developing and sharing skills for the benefit of the individual and community”. Here the importance of a Place that provides a structure to lives is addressed by the opportunity to access “a particular place … that had the ethos around it of men’s stuff”. So, when the observations of these men are combined, it can be read that the emotional bonding being created within a shed are products of both the neighbourhood, as represented by the shed’s social processes, and the individual, as in the internal process of self-identity, which when combined, “create a communal attachment and a strong relationship between setting and place” (Manzo & Perkins (2006) p.338).
The men also spoke of how a shed’s “relaxed environment” creates an “atmosphere where a man can be free of his anxieties”. But although they also talk of the shed being a place where men can be comfortable while “having a bit of fun” these statements together do not provide a clear answer as to how a shed might provide a place for men who are in crisis. As a member explained to me, “I was tired, I was emotional, I was bereft of ideas and I genuinely had … no idea where I was going … I was a bit lost, lonely and confused”? My visiting of the sheds did much to clarify how the men’s sheds rise to this challenge when I observed how the sheds tried to “buddy” men up by finding like-minded others who had the same sort of background or the sharing of a common interest. I saw the sheds getting the men involved in doing things together because, they together, could do things that alone they could not do, even if they possessed the skills to do it. It is also notable that many sheds had developed and integrated a number of self-help workshops such as the Tool Box Talks which were designed to bridge and support professional assistance from other organisations such as Beyond Blue, local shelters, the Samaritans and their local Neighbourhood Centres. So, what is apparent here is how the sheds’ Folk Media as pageantry enables the men to bring together and enhance the reflection and recounting of personal experiences while separating and protecting the men from the inhibiting politics or the dynamics of hegemonic health or masculine discourses and the accompanying fears of urban crisis. Today, in thousands of communities globally the Sheds represent a particular place, “that you always knew was there”. As a global phenonium they have taken the recreation, the celebration and the ethos of men’s stuff like “wood and metal, tools and guy talk” to the world. But still must be asked whether the folk media or their ethos alone is enough to create new pathways into the entire spectrum of community and involvement in business and governance and economics and accounting and legal matters?
To answer this, we could turn to Marshall McLuhan (1964) who alluded to the artists’ individual ability to create a conscious adjustment to the changing extensions of personal and social life. Here I can argue that because the sheds are places where artists and artificers can come together fre