As is tradition at this time of the year, arguments about cyclists are starting. One says arguments; they are little more than someone going off on one, citing a particular incident and then condemning all cycle-kind as a consequence (or in reverse, i.e. the whole of car/taxi/van/lorry/bus-driver-kind being branded as devils incarnate or even devils in cars).
I was once a cyclophobe. Or rather, I was once only too glad to take the rise out of cyclists, as with a description that dates back to January 2007 of supermarkets being alive with the sound of cyclists' foot furniture - a horse-hoof, coconut-shell karaoke heading for the bananas. But since then, I have had a cycling epiphany. The ghosts of cycling past, present and future visited me in a dream, and I awoke with a broad smile and went in search of cyclists in order to bestow upon them gifts of goodwill.
And so there should be goodwill. Cyclists mean money. To all the naysayers who would have it that cyclists do only buy bananas and rarely patronise hostelries, I say you are quite wrong. I have witnessed with my own eyes entire platoons of cyclists demolishing pannier-loads of charcoaled meat at one sitting, washed down with helmet-fulls of foaming German lager.
Cyclophobia can attach itself to the seemingly most unexpected of people. Matthew Parris's infamous piano-wire stretched across roads to decapitate cyclists was strange not just because of its murderous desire but also because Parris is the sort of chap you would believe not to be a cyclophobe. Enthusiasms that he has, such as for Catalonia and the Conservative Party, mark him out as being slightly eccentric, rather like Boris Johnson, a Tory two-wheeling advocate. But sorry, sorry, there I go, forgetting my epiphany and implying that cyclists are eccentric, when of course they aren't. Well, not all of them anyway.
Another Conservative eccentric, the British Prime Minister, wants there to be greater safety for cyclists, and it was this that provoked a phone-in to Nicky Campbell on Five Live, one which proved that cyclophobia is more of a disorder in the UK than it is among users of Mallorcan roads who are other than cyclists (or skaters or runners or lunatics on those trike things or even pedestrians).
To the ranks of the celebrity cyclophobe and thus joining Matthew Parris can be added that all-Australian ocker Shane Warne. The leg-spinner fired off a flipper on Twitter, having flipped when a cyclist punched his car, and called for cyclists to ride in single file, have number plates and pay road tax. He didn't say anything about banning cyclists for taking diuretics or having had a hair transplant, but Warney may have had a point.
Put plates on a bike and if a cyclist goes through a red light ... . Hang on, not if a cyclist goes through a red light, but when a cyclist goes through a red light, and the nearest driver could take a photo with a Smartphone and upload it to a dedicated Tráfico website. Except of course the driver would then be penalised for having used a mobile.
Number plates probably aren't much of a solution. Bikes are bikes, they don't have wide bumpers onto which clearly visible plates can be mounted. Nevertheless, revengeful cyclophobes would doubtless favour some form of identification or tracking. Perhaps this is it. All cyclists should be electronically tagged. Jump a red, veer into the centre of the road, go the wrong way down a road and a vast GPS system floating in space over Mallorca would immediately clock them.
Should anything like this be necessary, though? Why can't drivers and cyclists live side by side together in perfect road-use harmony? The reasons why not, one supposes, are an irrational primeval territorialism and another instinctive human trait passed down from cavemen, that of objecting when someone seems to be taking the piss.
This is what it all boils down to, but it doesn't matter. Or only occasionally does it matter, if there is real danger involved. So, a cyclist jumps a red and a driver doesn't. Who cares? I don't, that's for sure. Though I was finally convinced there was a God when a cyclist went through a red and Tráfico were at the very junction and pulled her over.
The cyclophobia season is back with us, as it will always be with us. Hopefully, no cyclist feels inclined to punch a car, but to be honest if it were Shane Warne driving, it might be understandable. Even this, though, would be irrational.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Showing posts with label Psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Psychology. Show all posts
Friday, February 24, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
Aliens Attack Alcúdia: The end of news
Cavemen who took to carving or painting their cave walls with images of alien attacks were early forms of news broadcaster. Denied the possibility to pop out to the nearest B&Q, their efforts would have taken a fair old time, at the end of which the aliens had built their landing-strips, constructed the odd pyramid and then cleared off again.
Hierarchies being what they were and still are, it is quite possible that the carving and painting reporters acquired a degree of social status. They were the first social networkers in an epoch when news travelled slowly and when the bearer of the news could legitimately claim to have broken the news and so could rightly be honoured as its originator.
News continued to travel slowly until relatively recently. Though news agencies obscured the precise source of news, their pooling of information was a system of facilitation with only so much claim being made on origination. It was to news broadcasters and other media to make the greater claims through scoops, exclusives and so on.
The day of the scoop has not passed, but the day of news has. There is now no news because there is now no ownership. It exists in a constantly swirling vortex that grows ever larger, a vast, parameter-less black hole of increasing irrelevance that is moulded, reframed and regurgitated. News is disappearing because nothing much any longer is news; it is already known.
The best recent news that wasn't in fact news came from "WeeklyWorldNews". On 11 January, it reported that Facebook would shut down on 15 March. WWN has also reported that, following the landing in China and the Indonesia Sea of three alien craft from the Planet Gootan, there will be a full-scale alien attack this November.
Unfortunately, WWN is a spoof. There is rather more chance of an alien attack than Facebook being shut down, though if it were to be, how on earth would anyone be able to tell anyone else about the alien attack? They would have to go back to carving and painting.
The first person to do the carving would immediately receive the accolade of social networker of the millennium. He or she would stand out as a genuine passer-on of information, because at present, thanks to Facebook, all other social media, smartphones and indeed the entire internet, such an accolade cannot legitimately be claimed. Every one, every mad, last social media obsessive is at it.
News has ended, as it has been superseded by a global competition and seeking of affirmation through spreading what is already known or what is of little or absolutely no consequence. The competition is fuelled by the very nature of social networks. Sociability comes with a psychological need for affirmation, for peer-group reinforcement, recognition and identity, even if many of the peer group are unknown. The ease of the transmission of non-news or of the already known news is what keeps the finger constantly hovering over the post button on Facebook or the Twitter account.
How on earth has it come to this? To give just one example. It snowed for a brief time around Alcúdia and Pollensa yesterday. It has been snowing on Mallorca for a week or so. Snow is not actually that unusual, even at sea level. The snow didn't even settle. But this brief flurry caused Facebook to go into virtual meltdown.
The end of news, i.e. the fact that it is already known or is of minimal or no significance, has not though deterred the impulse to attempt to be cast as a driver of non-news. Quite the contrary. It is what makes that black hole so very voracious.
Media psychology has, in response to the explosion of social media, acquired a whole niche for itself in the study of human behaviour. Narcissism, group identity, establishment of positions in hierarchies, the need for affirmation; it is old psychology for a new age. And grabbing hold of news, whatever it might be, from wherever it might come, in however many forms it might already exist is an alliance between this established psychology and the maxim of information being power, the latter which is translated not so much into power as such but into an hierarchical status that the identity of the group feels compelled to affirm.
News may have ended, but there is no shortage of cavemen. If they got hold of an imminent alien attack in Alcúdia, now this would be something worth communicating.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Hierarchies being what they were and still are, it is quite possible that the carving and painting reporters acquired a degree of social status. They were the first social networkers in an epoch when news travelled slowly and when the bearer of the news could legitimately claim to have broken the news and so could rightly be honoured as its originator.
News continued to travel slowly until relatively recently. Though news agencies obscured the precise source of news, their pooling of information was a system of facilitation with only so much claim being made on origination. It was to news broadcasters and other media to make the greater claims through scoops, exclusives and so on.
The day of the scoop has not passed, but the day of news has. There is now no news because there is now no ownership. It exists in a constantly swirling vortex that grows ever larger, a vast, parameter-less black hole of increasing irrelevance that is moulded, reframed and regurgitated. News is disappearing because nothing much any longer is news; it is already known.
The best recent news that wasn't in fact news came from "WeeklyWorldNews". On 11 January, it reported that Facebook would shut down on 15 March. WWN has also reported that, following the landing in China and the Indonesia Sea of three alien craft from the Planet Gootan, there will be a full-scale alien attack this November.
Unfortunately, WWN is a spoof. There is rather more chance of an alien attack than Facebook being shut down, though if it were to be, how on earth would anyone be able to tell anyone else about the alien attack? They would have to go back to carving and painting.
The first person to do the carving would immediately receive the accolade of social networker of the millennium. He or she would stand out as a genuine passer-on of information, because at present, thanks to Facebook, all other social media, smartphones and indeed the entire internet, such an accolade cannot legitimately be claimed. Every one, every mad, last social media obsessive is at it.
News has ended, as it has been superseded by a global competition and seeking of affirmation through spreading what is already known or what is of little or absolutely no consequence. The competition is fuelled by the very nature of social networks. Sociability comes with a psychological need for affirmation, for peer-group reinforcement, recognition and identity, even if many of the peer group are unknown. The ease of the transmission of non-news or of the already known news is what keeps the finger constantly hovering over the post button on Facebook or the Twitter account.
How on earth has it come to this? To give just one example. It snowed for a brief time around Alcúdia and Pollensa yesterday. It has been snowing on Mallorca for a week or so. Snow is not actually that unusual, even at sea level. The snow didn't even settle. But this brief flurry caused Facebook to go into virtual meltdown.
The end of news, i.e. the fact that it is already known or is of minimal or no significance, has not though deterred the impulse to attempt to be cast as a driver of non-news. Quite the contrary. It is what makes that black hole so very voracious.
Media psychology has, in response to the explosion of social media, acquired a whole niche for itself in the study of human behaviour. Narcissism, group identity, establishment of positions in hierarchies, the need for affirmation; it is old psychology for a new age. And grabbing hold of news, whatever it might be, from wherever it might come, in however many forms it might already exist is an alliance between this established psychology and the maxim of information being power, the latter which is translated not so much into power as such but into an hierarchical status that the identity of the group feels compelled to affirm.
News may have ended, but there is no shortage of cavemen. If they got hold of an imminent alien attack in Alcúdia, now this would be something worth communicating.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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