Society

Rubbish in cinemas bugs me. There, I said it.

So here’s what happened.

Tamara and I like to watch a film to the end of the credits, so we are often the last to leave.

Seeing the room after the film has ended is like seeing a room after the party has ended – rubbish (‘trash’ in American English) and detritus everywhere.

Call me a fuddy-duddy (actually don’t), but I can’t believe the mess that a gathering of human beings can leave after being in one place for two hours.

Popcorn, discarded cans, boxes, wrappers – the popcorn sometimes looks like someone decided they didn’t want popcorn after all, and scattered the contents of the box on the carpet.

One night we went to see Coco Before Chanel – a French film with subtitles, with Audrey Tautou in the lead role.

As we were leaving, I noticed that the floor was clean.

A cleaner came in with her black plastic bag to pick up the rubbish, and as we passed her I commented that the room was unusually clean.

Oh yes, she said this one and Screen 3, which was also showing a French film. I asked whether this was always so, and she said yes, audiences at foreign language films always left very little rubbish.

So now we know.

We all know that Netflix and Amazon use ratings to make recommendations.

Recommendations tap into the force that the public relations counsel Edward Bernays wrote about in the 1920s in his book Propaganda, through to what Chris Anderson wrote about in his 2006 book, The Long Tail.

That is, that we look to others whom we respect to guide us to what we want. Therefore what we want is often a product of the groups with which we want to identify.

Opinion leaders, peer recommendation, group identification, tribes, niche markets, the wisdom of crowds – recommendations and ratings are the life blood of all of them.

Google depends on it, Amazon thrives on it.

There is more going on than simple numbers when I read that 900 people on Amazon have all rated a particular camera highly.

I am swayed by the numbers because I attribute characteristics to a significant majority of those people.

I assume that a significant proportion are familiar with cameras and are level-headed and intelligent. In fact they may all be complete idiots who only take occasional happy-snaps.

I don’t read all 900 reviews, nor even a significant sample. Instead, I distill those reviewers into a mirror image of the reviewer I want to be convinced by.

Chris Anderson makes an interesting point in The Long Tail when he points out a problem that eBay has.

eBay wants to recommend products to us, but the users define their own products when they write their ads. So eBay simply does not know what it is selling. Therefore it cannot recommend the products for which it acts as middleman.

It’s a plausible explanation for why eBay has started to specify criteria and characteristics that sellers must use for certain branded products – such as cameras.

Edward Bernays
Edward Bernays set himself up as a propaganda consultant – or public relations counsel as he described himself in Propaganda, the book he wrote in 1928.

He was Freud’s nephew and because he was well connected he had access to the industrialists of the 1920s – with whom he found common ground.

Having seen the slaughter of the First World War he believed that the majority of human beings had to be controlled and that without something to divert them they would, if given any excuse, tear each other limb from limb.

He believed that men follow leaders and that their sense of identity and identification with the leaders and the groups was generally more important than the underlying truth or falsity of what they believed as individuals.

Sometimes, without the group mind the individual was lost.

Bernays believed that as a consequence, men would often rather sacrifice the truth than lose the fellowship of the group.

Therein lies the power of ratings and recommendations. The individual is not looking for the best book, film, or whatever. He or she is looking for the group.

Whoa! But not me. (say we all).

In June 2014 Tamara and I went to an exhibition at the National Gallery in London entitled ‘Making Colour’

It examined the way artists have used the distribution of colour in paintings to bring out their brilliance. It is a science; a science of the colour wheel and of primary colours and complimentary colours.

One of the exhibits that caught my eye was Turner’s paintbox. It was divided into square compartments and in each of them was what looked like a small bottle.

However, each ‘bottle’ was misshapen, as though it had been squeezed and deformed. And the neck of each container was bound with twine.

I asked the staff whether they knew what the containers were made of and left the question with them, and subsequently received an email answering my question:

Thank you for completing a Comments Form on 19 June 2014 regarding Turner’s paintbox in the Making Colour exhibition.

I have been in contact with the Director of Collections and Curator of the exhibition Ashok Roy who has provided me with the following response:

The traditional method for storing prepared oil paints before tubes were fully commercialised from 1841 was in ’pigs’ bladders’, by which is meant a bit of intestine (like a sausage casing), tied off with twine.

The paint was squeezed out through a hole made by a metal tack, and re-sealed with the tack. This is the form of the paint container in the Turner box.

In the 1980s, the then Prime Minister famously declared that there is no such thing as society. She encouraged a free-for-all so that people would claw themselves higher. Of course, it came at the expense of ordinary working people who were not very good at clawing.

They didn’t have the advantage of money or power or friends in the right places.

They were simply consigned to the rubbish heap.

How can anyone expect people to care when the society is run by self-seekers? People aren’t stupid – they know when they are being robbed blind.

And the dominance of big business doesn’t help to make anyone feel they are a meaningful member of society.

Yes, it is for each person to bear responsibility for their personal actions and to behave ethically no matter what they see around them – or at least to do so as much as possible.

But responsibility and allegiance are not the same – and people are trying to survive in the cracks left in the framework of a system that doesn’t care about them.

People will put up with a lot when they know that they share the burden with everyone. But when social and economic justice are absent – anyone will question why he or she should owe allegiance to anything.