Friday, 02 December 2011

Effectively censored

This lady can’t get her home village of Effin accepted on her Facebook profile page. Facebook apparently screens out some place names, claiming in this case that the village is too small to be featured as a home town on the website.

And yet the phrase ‘Effin Facebook’ seems very familiar.

 

2 Dec 2011 21:39:40 | networked neighbourhoods

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Picture this Thanks to a fascinating academic meeting this week about ‘researching contemporary communities,’ I was directed to this striking image based on shopkeepers’ countries of origin. It comes from an ethnographic study of the Walworth Road in south London, carried out by Suzanne Hall, an architect. The illustration is dated 2006. It neatly captures what Doreen Massey meant by a ‘global sense of place’. I like this particularly because of the immediacy of the story it tells. Rather like Donald Appleyard’s famous (1981) drawings of local social interactions on ‘light traffic street’ and ‘heavy traffic street,’ you get the message straight away, and it confirms what you are already likely to know, so it’s more reassuring than thought-provoking or challenging.
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Communication vignette This blog is eight years old today, but the following note predates it. I found this text among several forgotten vignettes in a dusty corner of the hard drive. A woman got on the train at Gatwick, although not particularly burdened with luggage as so many air travellers are at that station. I was wearing dark glasses as I was trying to sleep. She clattered through the door between carriages, the sound woke me from a doze. She spoke as she clattered through – “Is this the train for Brighton?” At first her words were directed at the woman closest to her, but immediately she noticed that passenger had a walkman and was not ready to receive the question, which was deflected, by the enquirer’s glance in flight, to me. By the time she had reached the question mark, I had flicked the shades up from my eyes, and genuine face-to-face interaction took place, so that I was able to reassure her. The woman sat down and to my delight, shortly after the train moved on, took out a portable typewriter, opened it up, and hammered a few keys to the rhythm of the train. June 2002

Kevin Harris

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