21st Century Travel
A short one today, as I’m abroad for the day and won’t get much time to write a full entry.
I’ll be brief: recall if you will my earlier post on public transport and how a national policy – in Ireland at the very least – very rarely seems to be properly co-ordinated as well as it should.
Well, the proof is in the pudding. Right now on IrishRail.ie I can’t even find a fare to get from Dublin to Cork – but I know from experience that a return fare to Kerry is about €65 return. Last August the missus and I had to get off to a family wedding down south – so we flew. It was €45 (even including Ryanair’s rape of a handling charge) and we got there in 25 minutes. Carbon footprint, how are ya.
Overload, or How Media Is A Drug That Kills Us
Bored on the internet earlier I started going through some StumbleUpon links and came across the very useful OneTwoFiver.com. The site purports to be a kind of warm-up for writers, working the user into an eloquent mood: concentrate and write one word of text. Then write two, then five, ten, twenty, fifty. Very quickly one finds the ability to flesh out an individual thought to the point of being able to write a few hundred words – and being quite articulate in doing so. Great work, and one I’ll be often returning to.
Anyway, the site asked me for a single word. I looked around. Television. OK. Now, two words. Sky News.
The reason I’d been on StumbleUpon in the first place was because the TV was boring me. So, ten words: the endlessly repetitive assault of Sky News on my senses. And suddenly, just like that, we have a blog post on our hands.
I wonder if John Logie Baird could see us now; the role that TV has assumed as the prime shaper of first world society, influencing our politics, our humour, our tastes, our wallets. What would Baird have seen as the application of his televisor? Would it be to share events of major national or international importance? Would it be in reserve for governmental broadcast in times of national emergency, as his homeland would too regularly see in the coming decades?
It was in my Sky News-induced monotony that I realised something quite odd. Even in my humble student abode, we have NTL telly with more than a hundred channels, and high-speed wireless internet… and yet, there I was, going “Blah blah, recession, bad news, blah blah”, and reaching for a Bop-It for amusement. Whatever about the intended use of television when it started back between the two World Wars, it’s changed us – frankly we’re too numb now.
When I was only a few years old and my grandfather came back from work (as a postman, so at about 3.30pm) with a copy of that day’s The Star, I’d be thrilled at the ability to read through another two dozen pages of soccer news once homework was done. Now I don’t even have one, but three 24-hour sports news channels… and I have little compulsion to watch any of them, even though my liking for soccer hasn’t waned in the slightest since then.
But there’s too much stuff these days – there is simply too much media choice. James Joyce could write a novel. Granted, he may have needed to send it to a few different publishers before one would take it, but ultimately his work was seen as being of supreme quality and pivotal brilliance – and the work was afforded the respect it deserved as a result. (The example isn’t meant to be specific, by the way – replace Joyce’s name with any.) Now, though, if someone writes a novel, they send it in and it still lands in a slush pile of reading, competing with too many other works to get the attention it might merit. If it gets turned down, it might be sold as an ebook, or created as a blog with new extracts every day – where it has to compete with even more work for the attention of people who ordinarily have too many TV channels to amuse themselves with other matters anyway.
We have mp3 collections, hundreds of TV stations, millions of online videos and radio stations, digital TV, more books than we ever had before … and we’re bored, disaffected, disinterested. Would life have been different if we hadn’t had John Logie Baird around? Would we have nearly as much media as we now do? What would become of the twenty first century if paradox-free time travel could eliminate him and his creation from history? Would we be as bored, as violent, as liberal, as overweight, as educated, as worldly, as well-informed?
Is a short attention span the price we have to pay for circumstantial intelligence? I’d think about trying to answer that, but Dragons’ Den just came on, and I’m too distracted to think about anything else for the moment.
The Tale of Two Corks
Maybe it’s because I was in Kilkenny again for the last couple of nights, but Tom Humphries – as he tends to – struck a note with me as I read his Locker Room column from today‘s Irish Times while on the bus back to Dublin.
Let me start by making it very clear – I am a massive fan of Tom Humphries. Back in 1995 when Santa didn’t have any copies of the Buster annual left, he substituted me his book on The Legend of Jack Charlton, ably filling the void left behind by a nine year old’s intoxication from World Cup USA 1994 and his country’s failure to make the next European Championships. In 2003 the family holiday was supplemented by a copy of Laptop Dancing and the Nanny-Goat Mambo – one of the best examples of sports journalism I’ve ever had the privilege to read, unique in its ability to make me want the lifestyle of a sporting hack, even as bleak as the Irish Times‘ existence was in 2002 – even if the book was my Dad’s. His ghostwriting on Niall Quinn’s autobiography wasn’t bad either. All this, and the man one ran for sabbatical election in UCD Students’ Union. You can’t not like him.
There was something today that unsettled me, though. Tom is a staunch lover of gaelic games – you can tell from his writing that he hails the sports more than any other. His work is dripping with the staunch tribalism of GAA life – he even wrote a book on the Dublin/Kerry rivalry of the late 70’s-early 80’s. Today, though, in writing an otherwise illuminating metacolumn – 1,000 words about writing 1,000 words – on how sport is an escape from the real world (a quality I attest to it more than others; I like the thrill of going to Old Trafford but if United lose, I don’t exactly turn suicidal). In doing so, he consciously trivialised sporting institutions from all codes, including the currently striking Cork hurlers:
Public Transport and Broadband
Do Ministers actually ever talk to each other? You have to wonder. Maybe Fine Gael are doing such sniping these days that the cabinet have to divert their attention to fending off the opposition rather than managing to attend meetings, or lob each other the odd text message.
Last week, trying to capitalise on the empty news cycles, the Government launched their Sustainable Travel and Transport Action Plan, basically encouraging people to use public transport in getting to work – or better yet, get them to try and work from home as much as practicable. Not a bad idea – anything to get cars off the road surely helps the country out, and saving the inevitably arduous task of having to build another lane onto the M50 in, oh, about three weeks.
But then, as quietly as they could manage it, we had the subtle news – ironically, while people weren’t supposed to be reading the papers – that Luas ticket prices are going up by 5c, Dublin Bus are raising their fares by 10c a pop, Bus Éireann and Iarnród Éireann are hiking them by 10% – even the already ludicrously overpriced taxis are getting another 50c put on the initial fare.
Now, it doesn’t take the TK Whitakers of this world to realise that this, rather than stimulating their use, will put them off. What’s particularly irking, though, is that such moves come at a time when it’s becoming gradually cheaper to drive. Granted, cars aren’t getting cheaper, but insurance – the thing that usually stops 22-year-old males from The Pale like myself from taking to the roads – has become more realistically priced, and petrol is constantly coming down. The Esso across the road from my student gaff sold diesel for 119.5c a litre when we moved in last May – now it’s down to 93.5c, and it’s not going to get any higher for a while, no matter what swindles OPEC might try to unleash on the rest of the world.
Saturday Statement #1
“Israel clearly didn’t get what they wanted for Christmas.”
Discuss.