Jonathan Chatwin RSS

Your Digital Life

jonathanchatwin@gmail.com — 2010-06-08T20:57:03+01:00

I’ve been reflecting recently on how technology imposes itself on everyday life. The jeremiads concerning the decline in civilised standards as a result of technological advancement have always struck me as short-sighted, in the same way as the accusations that the novel exercised a corrupting influence over nineteenth century culture have come to seem absurd. But technology has changed the way I think, and it has changed my daily routine. I’m not a slave to my technology - I can happily turn my phone off for the weekend - but I am more easily distracted than I used to be, ever alert to the incoming email or message, always willing to have my head turned.
The New York Times has a fascinating article on this phenomenon. It seems that the short term rewards of being always connected are physiologically very difficult to resist. They ‘play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.’

You can read the whole article here.

You can also read leading commentators on how to disconnect from your digital life here.

And with that, it’s time for me to switch off.

The End

jonathanchatwin@gmail.com — 2010-05-11T19:54:58+01:00

So, at a time of economic crisis, we’ve rejected a man with thirteen years of direct experience in managing the economy, widely admired around the world for his financial prowess, a man who was the youngest ever attendee of Edinburgh University at age sixteen, and who went on to complete a PhD in history at that same university, for David Cameron, a man who cut his teeth shadowing Norman Lamont through Black Wednesday and directing corporate affairs at a television company. Interesting choice, I’d say. Give it two months, and we’ll be pining for Gordon like a spurned teenager.

The Gord Cave

jonathanchatwin@gmail.com — 2010-05-08T11:40:05+01:00

From Malcolm Tucker:

“I have spoken with the Gordon. He's very tired. As I'm sure you know, all of the carbon in our bodies was created in the white heat at the centre of stars billions of years ago. We know this intellectually. But it's only when looking at Gordon's face that you really feel it.”

His advice? Let Cameron deal with the mess:

“Let him do the cuts. Where there is discord, may he bring petrol bombs. Where there is error, may he bring bullshit. Where there is doubt, may he bring Osborne. And where there is despair, may he bring the noise.”

Sound direction, I’d say.

Jim Naughtie thinks it’s a done deal. He may very well be right.

Time to leave the country for a few years, then? Apparently Greece is lovely at this time of year...

Hat tip: The Guardian

PPT

jonathanchatwin@gmail.com — 2010-04-27T18:32:36+01:00

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

The Pentagon on the danger of Powerpoint. The comment was made in reference to this image, shown to Stanley McChrystal in an effort to clarify the challenges faced by the US Army in Afghanistan:

Hat Tip: The New York Times

Happiness

jonathanchatwin@gmail.com — 2010-04-01T19:24:14+01:00

Would a million pounds make you happy? Most of us believe in a consequential relationship between financial success and happiness; indeed it’s one of the key motivating factors in getting us out of bed and into work each day. Yet millionaires aren’t happier than the general populous. Indeed, millionaires aren’t even happier than paraplegics. In the late 1970s a study was conducted in which three groups of people were interviewed: state lottery winners; serious accident victims; and a control group randomly selected from the phone book. The results were - to say the least - surprising:

“Clearly, the winners realized that they’d been fortunate. But this only made the subsequent results more puzzling. The winners considered themselves no happier at the time of the interviews than the members of the control group did. In the future, the winners expected to become slightly happier, but, once again, no more so than the control-group members. (Even the accident victims expected to be happier than the lottery winners within a few years.) Meanwhile, the winners took significantly less pleasure in daily activities—including clothes-buying—than the members of the other two groups.”

The study concluded - and this is a conclusion backed by further research - that the things we think will make us happy simply don’t:

“A whole range of activities that people tend to think will make them happy—getting a raise, moving to California, having kids—do not, it turns out, have that effect. (Studies have shown that women find caring for their children less pleasurable than napping or jogging and only slightly more satisfying than doing the dishes.) As the happiness researchers Tim Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have put it, “People routinely mispredict how much pleasure or displeasure future events will bring.”

In many ways, it stikes me, this is a comforting conclusion; we aren’t likely to be vastly more happy or unhappy than those lucky few who win the lottery. We thus have the freedom to think about life as a striving towards something else - something more meaningful, perhaps.

Hat tip: The New Yorker

DFW

jonathanchatwin@gmail.com — 2010-03-20T18:40:08+00:00

I’d forgotten - if indeed I ever knew - that Infinite Jest is subtitled A Novel. I’d recommended it to a friend, who for reasons best known to himself is currently abstaining from reading novels, and for whom the subtitle posed an interesting dilemma. Are we to take it (as my friend did) as ironic? Or does it fulfil the relevant criteria to qualify as a novel? As I rule, I’m not terribly interested in these generic questions, which seem a peculiarly British preoccupation. Yet it seems interesting to me that DFW would consciously and overtly allude to the idea of the novel at the beginning of his baggy masterpiece. Did he have a reshaping of the format in mind? Or was he thinking of the never-ending competition to write the Great American Novel? I don’t know enough about DFW to answer these questions - but they interest me.

Quality Control

jonathanchatwin@gmail.com — 2010-02-27T12:14:39+00:00

Caroline Miller writes on Zadie Smith’s new collection of miscellaneous pieces, Changing My Mind, in this week’s TLS and questions the liberal humanist values implied by Smith’s commendable advocation of the power and pleasure of reading, and her assertion of particular works being ‘good’:

“Value judgement and tolerance can be awkward fellow pilgrims: Smith often praises writing she believes to be “right” or knows to be “beautiful”. As a corrective to academic dryness this is refreshing. But, as a wider credo, it has little except its superior eloquence to recommend it – and no principle from which to recommend superior eloquence. If we each decide whom to worship, then there can be no arbiter on beauty and truth other than the mass market. If the dreams of our fathers – Forster’s “dream of mass connection”, or Obama’s or Shakespeare’s – are to be realized in literature, then we need a critical vision to make the case for its value. Does it matter if Changing My Mind’s tolerant defence of individual preference and its inspiring and well-informed enaction of reading as a private pleasure reflect the broad pop cultural norms that are marginalizing the “literary” novel? It certainly doesn’t diminish the pleasure and erudition on offer here. Yet, in an era of choose-your-own worship, ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies are at the top the books charts and liberal arts lovers struggle to defend the “truth” and “beauty” that these essays so perceptively reveal.”

Miller’s argument is there is no ideological or critical rubric by which to judge Smith’s own value judgements. Yet, I can’t help but feeling that in adopting a ‘show your working’ approach to literary studies, we are levelling the playing field in a counter-productive way. Just because an English first year student can justify their love of The Shawshank Redemption through recourse to psychoanalytic critical theory, it doesn’t mean that their opinion is automatically more valuable than Zadie Smith’s friendly, but ill-defined, recommendation of George Eliot. Writers, academics, critics - these people know what they are talking about. There is little more delightful than having a reliable literary companion who has read more and who knows more than you, and whose assertions of quality you can take on trust, without requiring the ideological rubric. Some people, whether we like it or not, are more qualified to make these value judgements, even as we are free to ignore them. That is the corrective to mass market thinking which Miller fails to identify.

You can read Caroline Miller’s full piece here.

Emerging Ideas

jonathanchatwin@gmail.com — 2010-02-14T15:01:13+00:00

It’s a bright, still afternoon, and the noise of the birds implies springtime. I should be working - and indeed will be, soon, if I can avoid the temptation of the outdoors, having so far failed to resist the indulgences of tidying house and dealing with various computer-based tasks. It is Valentines’ Day, and the riverbank will be strewn with hand-holding couples, in any case, so my resolve should hold.
The river is lazy and vodka-thick at the moment, and seems impotent in comparison with the rivers of John Irving’s Last Night in Twisted River. In that work, which I’m currently enjoying in-between other, more work-critical texts, the river is a bringer of death, a threatening force. The novel’s eponymous river lacks any metaphorical depth - as so often in Irving’s work, the meaning is surface, and the complexity is evoked by the characterisation, and the conception of life indicated by the characters. Irving has become lazy, though, and this work drops familiar template characters (the Exeter educated, self-determining, attracted to older women author) into new surroundings. There is madness in his method, though - his approach of reformulating the same characters in each book lends him a sense of authorial eccentricity, and his continued popular success testifies to the validity of his approach. I suppose one just wishes for a little of the unexpected idiosyncrasy, and sheer shocking twists of fate, which were hallmarks of his two finest works, The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany.