Class and Innovations II

In Agatha Christie's The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side Miss Marple and Miss Hartnell face Progress in their different ways: “Nothing was what it had been. You could blame the war (both the wars) or the younger generation, or women going out to work, or the atom bomb, or just the Government—but what one really meant was the simple fact that one was growing old... Miss Hartnell’s house was still there, and also Miss Hartnell, fighting progress to the last gasp... The fishmonger was unrecognizable with new super windows behind which the refrigerated fish gleamed... Where Mr Toms had once had his basket shop stood a glittering new supermarket—anathema to the elderly ladies of St Mary Mead. ‘Packets of things one’s never even heard of,’ exclaimed Miss Hartnell. ‘All these great packets of breakfast cereal instead of cooking a child a proper breakfast of bacon and eggs. And you’re expected to take a basket yourself and go round looking for things.”

And where once there were fields, they’ve built a Development of new houses, harbouring a new kind of family. Cherry “was one of the detachment of young wives who shopped at the supermarket and wheeled prams about the quiet streets of St Mary Mead. They were all smart and well turned out. Their hair was crisp and curled.”

In the Development itself, the very new buildings look like dolls’ houses: “The people, too, looked unreal. The trousered young women, the rather sinister-looking young men and boys, the exuberant bosoms of the fifteen-year-old girls. Miss Marple couldn’t help thinking that it all looked terribly depraved.”

If Miss Marple thinks women in trousers and uplift bras are depraved, what would she have made of a Roman orgy? The bosoms are probably the result of better nutrition. In Miss M’s young day 15-year-old girls would have worn concealing box-pleated gym tunics. And in the 60s Upwards and Weybridges whinged about self-service as much as they now moan about “unexpected items in the bagging area”.

Upwards gibbered that biological washing powder would digest them, microwave ovens would cook them, and they’d be bitten by rabid foxes immigrating through the channel tunnel. None of these disasters happened, but they fail to draw conclusions, and invent a scare story for the next innovation.


Technology

The Upward view of technology is uneasy and opinionated. They seize on something to pontificate about.

WikiLeaks, he says, is the extension of a Facebook culture that reflects our prurient appetites for status updates and a constant drip of minutiae… (Interview with John Malkovich, Independent)

The internet has become a “Petri dish of opinion inflation, breeding commentary like bacteria”. (Stephen Randall, LATimes Jan 2011)

But there’s another Upward tribe (possibly more common in the States) who seize onto every innovation and run their whole lives through smartphones, wifi, cable TV (not to mention cars full of gadgets), but eat artisanal food off slate slabs.

And you can get a hemp cover for your ipod printed with a tree of life… and a beechwood mouse. One of the reasons Upwards shrank from technology was the, well, hitech look of the gadgets. They’re so shiny and plasticky! And everybody's is the same! They very quickly got over it and the gadgets live quite happily alongside the retro printed linen and genuinely distressed recycled industrial furniture. The gadgets enable everything from knowing where you are to identifying ladybirds – but where is our pavement cleaning robot?

Upwards are still “succumbing” or “giving in” to Facebook, rather than just signing up, like everybody else.

Some elderly Upwards are still slightly embarrassed about having an email account, and give themselves an arch address.

Upwards would have blogs but they can only say the word in quotation marks. And now they like to say that blogging is so over. They hate the idea of other people (for other read "ordinary") telling the world about their lives, and they loathed it when in the early days of the internet people got their own web pages and put up their holiday snaps. Weybridges used to say that an Englishman’s home is his castle, and Teales prided themselves on “keeping themselves to themselves” – code for not mixing with people who might be less good class. (Novelist Ivy Compton Burnett’s parents wouldn’t let their children meet anybody at all because nobody was quite good enough.)

Twitter is now part of life, but the middle classes are still distancing themselves from it while using it.

The only telephone in the house [hung] on the wall of the silver-cleaning room beside the knife-polishing drum. (Nicky Haslam, Redeeming Features)

When telephone answering machines came in in the 80s, Upward actors made a few bob recording messages for their friends in the voice of Laurence Olivier, Boris Karloff etc. There was a bit of foot-dragging and refusal to leave messages. (“I thought it was you and it was that terrible machine!”) But people got used to them. Now Upwards remark with some puzzlement that nobody has wacky ringtones any more, they just use the default.

People often phone Samantha Upward and can’t get through because her battery has run down and the phone is charging. “I tried to phone you, but I just got a funny noise!” “The battery ran down. The phone was charging.” Other party acts puzzled, and Sam is puzzled that they’re puzzled. The darned battery keeps running down – doesn’t everybody’s? She also goes on holiday without her phone charger or Kindle charger, and when the batteries run down, that’s it. Jen Teale plugs her phone into the charger every night, and always takes her chargers on holiday. She’s making herself a charger bag – a bit like a hanging shoe-bag, with the device names embroidered on the pockets. It’s quilted, and incorporates a lot of velcro and binding. Next year, she’ll go on Dragon’s Den and get funding to manufacture them. All she needs is a whimsical name! (The Chargeit!?)

The English treated this novelty with the grave suspicion due to anything foreign: ‘We need no little forks to make hay with our mouths, to throw our food into them,’ complained Nicholas Breton in 1618. (If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home, Lucy Worsley)

The reservations of my grandmother and her friends [about duvets]: ‘Isn’t it heavy? Isn’t it hot?’. (If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home, Lucy Worsley)


Old BBC radio instructions advised turning off all the lights so that you could “see the pictures better”. (BBC yearbook 1940)
Make sure that your set is working properly before you settle down to listen. (So the first few minutes of the programme aren’t obliterated by tuning noises.)
Choose your programmes as carefully as you choose which theatre to go to. (Don’t just “have it on”.)
You can’t get the best out of a programme if your mind is wandering, or if you are playing bridge or reading... If you only listen with half an ear you haven’t a quarter of a right to criticise... Give the wireless a rest now and then.

They are telling people to treat radio like a middle-class entertainment (theatre) rather than a working-class one (cinema, music hall, melodrama – audiences talked and smoked all through). It sounds like the current “We, the Smugs, took a holiday from all devices!”

Why do we have this obsession with removing technology from our lives? So long as children form healthy relationships, get a solid education and aren't unaware of the outside world, it makes no difference how they spend their leisure time. We used to go to the phonebox all evening to call friends, or used the landline with the wire stretching up the hall to our room. So why not email, IM and Face Time now? It's still communication, it's still forming relationships. There's no need to ban "screens". Simply suggest other activities more frequently. Let's go to the park? The zoo? A museum? Play a board game? (Robert Greenberg Borehamwood, Hertfordshire Guardian 2013-06-22)


And what do "we" think about driverless cars?
But from an emotional and romantic perspective it is a dispiriting prospect: the driverless car belongs in our sexting, vaping, auto-tuned age. There is a smack of fat-free yoghurt and elastic waistband about it, something hopelessly, passionlessly convenient, something so joyless, wipe-clean and flat.”(Laura Barton in The Guardian 2014-08-05)

"New Medium Terror" has begun as ppl callin 4 3dPrinting 2 b regulated. (AdamNathanielFurman ‏@Furmadamadam)


More here.

Class and Innovations

Is there a word/phrase for that process where people first complain about technological change, then accept, then embrace it? writer and blogger Lee Jackson 

Middle-class Upwards and Weybridges are not early adopters – they chase fads, not things. And there weren’t all these innovations when they were young: every time a new gadget comes along they act as if it was the first they’d ever encountered. They have to go through a stage of calling the remote control the Herbert and leaving silly messages on answering machines. Also they have to act very puzzled about the whole concept. Video? Why would anyone want to watch a film at home? Email? Why send a document from one computer to another? Talking books? For the blind, or maybe while you’re driving or ironing. (They’re doing it now about Kindles. “People can’t remember books they’ve read on a Kindle so well because Kindle makes it too easy.” Daily Telegraph Jan 2011)

"One of those audiobooks in which some plummy thesp intones a classic novel" Richard Morrison, Times November 11, 2011 (Audiobooks have been around for 25 years and they’re usually read by character actors.)

When the first few got videos, they used them to watch the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby. And they insisted on turning them on for you if you went round to their place. Nobody knew how to programme their video (except me). And they never set the clock, so it blinked all the time. “The pictures are better on radio” must date from 1951. Remember when they insisted black and white TVs were just as good if not better than colour? Colour TVs were something terribly vulgar that Americans had. Eventually they explained that they had “given in” for the sake of the nature programmes. (Now they’re complaining that benefit scroungers all have flat-screen TVs. Possibly because they’re the only kind you can get.)

Although Upwards have had phones since the 1880s, they went on being terrified of expensive phone calls while spending hugely on drink and awful private boarding schools. When telephones first came in, Upwards had one “instrument” in the house in a stuffy cabinet under the stairs. If guests were allowed to use it they had to leave two pennies to cover the cost. (These were households with butlers and maids, and the guests were being fed three-course meals cooked by a chef.) When watching American films of the 50s, they were rather surprised that Americans had wall-mounted phones in their kitchens, with a long flex so that you could have a conversation while doing other things. According to Debrett’s (1980 version) it used to be unacceptable for women to add a phone number to their visiting card.

Gadgets are made of metal and plastic and they are the same for everybody. You can get one encrusted with pink rhinestones, but not an artisanal one made of natural materials. When mobile phones arrived Upwards supposed vaguely that they might be useful for plumbers. Actually they were outraged that mobiles were immediately taken up by plumbers, builders and anyone who saw how useful they were. The Upwards had to fight a rearguard action by getting them banned from railway carriages and joking about people who rang up just to yell “I’m on the train!”

The Evolution of Adoption
1: Affect great puzzlement about what it’s for.
2: Contempt for those who buy/do the thing.
2b. Smugness about not using it.
3: Grudging acceptance.
4: Hysteria about a drawback: RSI, radiation poisoning, complete social breakdown.
5: They buy one but a phone that doesn’t take pictures, or a TV that isn’t flat-screen/colour.
6: They’ve all got one and boast about how many apps they’ve got and how theirs is bigger/more expensive/classier than anybody else’s.
7: They carry on as if they were the first to discover it.
8: They carry on as if they’d invented it.
9. They won’t allow that you (who have been using computers and social media for about 20 years longer than they have) know anything at all.

Once they’ve adopted the technology, Upward etiquette lags behind and they shove their camcorders into their friends’ faces while shrieking with laughter, or email vast numbers of holiday snaps, unfunny internet jokes, virus warnings or chain letters to everyone in their address books, not blinding the email addresses. If they’re not too snobbish to have Facebook accounts, they “like” a page that sends spam to all their friends.

Upwards used to be very shocked if a fellow Upward admitted listening to radio phone-ins. Now it’s Twitter and Facebook. Facebook is funded by the CIA, and Twitter lets the whole world into your living room. Upwards don’t even like to think that there are people living in the UK who aren’t Upwards. Twitter might connect you to people who live in the wrong part of West London. And Twitter was created laterally, not top-down. It’s not run by or for Upwards.

“Children… have been routinely counselled to use FB infrequently and with enormous caution, thus protecting themselves from – to name some of the more obvious traps – obesity, time wasting, stalkers, bullying, invasion of privacy, bitching, hideous embarrassment, isolation, career damage and unwitting complicity in Zuckerberg’s latest schemes for monetisation…” Catherine Bennett on FB’s sudden reinvention as a must-have, or acceptance as a normal part of life. Now it’s the people not on FB, she says, who are pathologised. Aug 12/12.

Are the middleclass parents who won't let kids join Facebook (or the 21st century) for fear of trolls and bullying the same ones who "won't wrap kids in cotton wool"? What happened to "children must learn how to manage risk"? (It’s a bit like not having a house in case you get burgled.)

“I'm not on Facebook" is the new "I don't even own a TV." @rainnwilson

Adding “xxx” to text messages “is a way to be friendly without resorting to dreadful emoticons”. Carol Midgley Times May 9 2012 I bet she went through “those dreadful mobile phones”, “those dreadful text messages” first.

Lower middle class Jen Teale has been using emoticons for years - she used to write PTL! and a smiley face on postits and stick them to the fridge (it stands for “praise the Lord”). And emoticons and acronyms were being used on “primitive” social media in the mid-80s and their origin is probably earlier. Teales moved seamlessly from home movies and holiday slides to camcorders.

And innovations are always dangerous – until they’ve been accepted and are just part of life. Microwave ovens would cook your innards if you left the door open, didn’t use “real heat” so the food wasn’t really cooked, and got as hot as a nuclear reactor (thanks to Giles Coren). TVs were bad for your eyes and killed conversation. Upwards put them in a special room (they had one to spare), and watched them from a great distance with all other light sources turned off. The game was played out again with computers: radiation, RSI, protective lead garments for pregnant women… And mobile phones give you “texter’s thumb”.

Try Googling “we finally gave in and got a”: laptop, taxi, tanning bed, gas powered mower, fake Christmas tree.

When travelling, I often bump into an elderly and aristocratic couple who want to make it quite clear that they are slumming by using the same mode of transport as ordinary people (and a cheap mode at that). They have bitter public disputes about how to use lifts or read departure boards. You meet them in self-service restaurants too, pretending to be baffled by the procedure (“You get the eating irons, Freddie.”) They are always sending one of their party off to check the departure time, bag a table, go on to John Lewis etc etc. Before mobiles, this meant a 75% risk that they’d never find each other again. But maybe that was the point: you’d either lose Araminta, or have an excuse for a lovely prolonged row in which you accused her of waiting by the wrong pillar.

“My doctor told me to drink decaffeinated tea but I can only get horrible bags. Can I get proper leaf tea that’s decaffeinated?” Letter to Times

Upwards were never going to use teabags or eat flavoured yoghourt. Ahem… Here are some innovations they used to ban – or at least hedge around with prohibitions – and now accept:

Teabags: they contained the sweepings of the factory floor.

Supermarkets: the muzak sent you into a trance and you bought more than you needed and it feels like stealing. Supermarkets were American, and so ipso facto common. Then they came round to Sainsbury’s and Waitrose because you can drive straight there and buy everything you need surrounded by like-minded people and don’t have to walk along streets and go to corner shops and mingle. They told you to shop at Sainsbury’s rather than corner shops “because it’s cheaper”. But now they’re against supermarkets again and are supporting corner shops (but they have to be delis run by people like them, not Costcutters).

Central heating: American. Dries out your nasal passages.
Ariel (bio washing powders): Cause a skin rash.
Hula hoops (the toy, not the snack): Cause slipped discs.
Miniskirts: Cause cystitis and chapped thighs.
Mobile phones/bras/deodorants: Give you cancer.
Platform shoes: Cause twisted ankles.
Sony walkmans: Cause road accidents (now it’s mobiles and soon it will be in-car television).

The Tellytubbies: Will encourage our children to speak badly. (The great Tellytubby flap is entirely forgotten and the kids are all right. Now we’re whingeing about In the Night Garden.)

The Internet: Causes sex addiction. Or just Internet addiction.

Twitter and Facebook: Encourage people to make nonexistent “friends” with thousands of people, or follow stupid “celebrities”. It will mean the death of privacy! Both Twitter and Facebook give you instant access to everybody in the world. (This one is still current.)

The Twist (it was a dance, me lud): Causes slipped discs.
Convenience food: It’s OK now you can get it at M&S.

Comics: Will stop children learning to read (and you earned a lot of brownie points if you didn’t let your children read them). Now it’s texting that will stop your children learning to spell.

Fruit-flavoured yoghourt (only plain was allowed): When yoghourt came in Upwards refused to put sugar on it. But they believed magical claims about it eg that it helps you live to 100.

And these are the people who are always complaining that the media whips up utterly unnecessary panics about paedophilia, swine flu, foot and mouth… Some (a dwindling band) still refuse to use any machine invented after 1960. More about technology refuseniks here.