Wie bitte? @rodtjer - Tumblr Blog

The Sky Over San Francisco

It starts in September, sometimes even at the end of August. In July the city is still enveloped by a thick cloud of fog. ‘Summer is coming!’, I’ll mournfully concede at the end of May, after yet another cold al fresco brunch, and dig out my thick tights. ‘The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco!’, the Macy’s clerk will quip when you realize that all your old tights had holes in them. Poor Mark Twain. I often wonder whether part of the city’s seismic activity is caused by the writer spinning in his grave at being misquoted so often. ‘Wait until September’, the Peet’s barista will add as he hands you the second hot chocolate of the day, ‘that’s when it gets nice.’ It is a rare Californian understatement that does little justice to the coming shift. Because in September the sky over San Francisco is on fire.

The timing helps too. Back in London, the sun seems to have gone when you finally manage to leave the office – eager perhaps to avoid rush hour. In San Francisco, you are greeted by a pink crimson sky, like the fiery wings of a phoenix spread over the horizon. During peak September Sunset, social media is flooded with pictures of fluffy candy floss clouds and streaks of pink across the sky. Your entire Twitter stream resembles an Apple screensaver. Instagram registers 10 on the #nofilter scale.

It takes time to process. Not this photographic frenzy but the light. The light is different in San Francisco. It has the characteristic Californian golden hue mixed with the dusty haziness of the fog, giving it an unsettling wooly texture. My jetlag only lasted a week, but I felt jetlighted for much longer.

Our first month in the city was spent in a corporate apartment high up in one of the skyscrapers that have sprung up around mid Market. The feeling of dislocation was intense. I feared my feet might leave the perfectly polished parquet, my body floating, ping ponging between the walls like an astronaut. The walls – I later noted – had been designed in such way as to camouflage the lack of bookcases, each curve implemented to disguise the transient nature of the place. Bookcases ground you. But mine were in a container somewhere across the Atlantic. So I kept floating.

Every day, I’d place my laptop on the dining table, a minimalist glass circle that made me feel like an 80s art dealer, and which just added to the clinical elegance of the place. Before me stretched the city bathed in this nebulous yet strangely blinding light. I could see City Hall with its golden domes glistening in the distance. The different grey hues that composed this west coast neoclassical pastiche fascinated me. Or to be more precise, I was enthralled by this new found super power to distinguish so many different kinds of grey. It wasn’t just City Hall. Every building within my field of vision was set in an infinite spectrum of greys, browns, yellows and creams. My feet started finding the ground again, helped by lunch breaks circling the neigbourhood in a bid to create familiarity through repetition, as well as long weekend walks to other less grey parts of the city. But I never tired of the concrete.

Tourist postcards immortalise the Painted Ladies, that row of cheerfully coloured Victorian mansions. But these technicolour terraces could redeem even a bleak London sky. Such picturesque images do not eloquently convey the true power of the golden Californian light. That everything just looks good, that everyone is rendered instantly more photogenic. It is no accident that Hollywood is based in the south of the state, away from the fickle fog of the north. And once you get used the golden light, you start to miss it whenever you leave. And not just because you can add #nofilter to Instagram.

#SF San Francisco sunset September Moving

Barajas

I did not always like Madrid. For most of my childhood the city was synonymous with its old clunky airport, before Barajas was aeropuerto Adolfo Suarez, before Richard Rogers turned it into a bright tubular cathedral and it became a prime pilgrimage destination for Moleskine-thumping architecture aficionados. No city should be judged by its airports. London would have a poor ambassador in the tattered carpet of Heathrow, haunted by the jumper of a 1970s driving instructor. Not until recently did the airy Queen’s Terminal usher in a more minimalist modernity that requires industrial quantities of metal polish. Meanwhile, Berlin is still stuck with the rushed Cold War hexagon that is Tegel and that bleak shipping container known as Schonefeld. But judge Madrid by its airport I did. The 90s had just started and we were living in the north of Spain – our closest airport in Pamplona had a landing strip the size of a Weight Watchers dessert. So every summer we would hop into the Renault and make the four hour drive to the capital.

The car had air conditioning in the same way that those asthmatic contraptions hanging in hotel bedrooms dry hair. It sighed more than it blew, it could not have toppled a piggy’s straw hut. This was a problem, because Madrid is hotter than Mount Doom in summer. The closer we got, the more we felt like astronauts on an underfunded space programme propelled towards the sun in a precarious rocket. By the time we caught sight of Columbus welcoming us from the top of his pedestal on Plaza de Colón, I felt sicker than a sixteenth-century seaman, probably suffering from scurvy, having lived entirely off sugary Sugus chewing candy all day. In the beginning, my mum would make the most of our Madrid stop over. ‘We could go the Prado so you have the chance to admire the Velázquez paintings.’ And she would turn to two tired sweaty children, reaching a conclusion logical only to middle-class parents: ‘I think you would like The Meninas’.

Such enthusiasm for the national patrimony did not last. ETA kept making headlines with its bloody campaigns. It made my mother hypersensitive to any perceived slight in Madrid. ‘Did that driver just try to rear-end us because of our registration plate?’ ‘That waiter is probably ignoring us because he can hear I’m from the north!’ Mum always saw herself as a lady of the world, after all she had met her husband in Paris and was on her way to the airport to spend the summer in Scandinavia. But she had also grown up under Franco, when learning Basque was banned and any manifestation of regional identity punished. Perhaps this fight for preserving an alternative cultural identity in the face of oppression had rendered her oblivious to the suspect reasoning behind some of her beliefs. ‘I’m not sure these allergy pills will agree with me’ she would tell the pharmacist ‘my blood type is rhesus negative, which as you know is very rare’. Mum would say this as if this was a WHO guideline she was merely repeating, and not a claim that veered uncomfortably close to an underlying belief that Basques were ethnically more pure.

Our stays in Madrid became shorter. Then our parents just started dropping us off at Barajas airport, unable to escape the demands of a new business venture to come with us. ‘We can’t complain’, my mum would tell the baker ‘at least we’re keeping ourselves busy during la crisis’, and every other lady in the bakery would give a knowing sigh. Chaperon duties instead fell upon Scandinavian Airlines flight attendants, responsible for accompanying us on our summer flight to Copenhagen. Our grandparents would be anxiously waiting at the other end, waving little Danish flags (it was the only flag from my childhood that I remember not being marred by conflict, unlike the Spanish one or the Basque ikurriña). The floor at Copenhagen airport was made of wood, an endless expanse of parquet, a tapestry of warm earthly hues. I loved the airport. It felt like stepping into someone’s home – the only place where taking your shoes off was not a security requirement, but an act of courtesy. So different from the cold marble floor of Barajas and the glaring pale neon lights that reflected against it.

Just as all not all childhood summers were sunny and not all winters crisp and white, Barajas was probably no worse than any of the other anonymous concrete and marble slabs that were considered perfectly functional before Calatrava and his modernist cavalcade of architects stretched everything out into Concorde snouts and infinite curves, turning airports into ships and cathedrals. Whether this vision will age well, or it is to everyone’s taste is a different discussion. But we can all agree that improvements in air conditioning has been to everyone’s benefit.

#madrid aiports barajas childhood

Angry Girl

When I was 13, my mum got me my first sports bra. It was a rather unwelcome landmark. I was already a foot taller than most of my classmates and now I had the equivalent of an arrow following me around – like a Sims character – highlighting my gender above everything else. And I could never turn it off, no matter how small I made myself, how loose the clothing I wore or how many times I pretended to demonstratively read The Female Eunuch during break times. Every week without fail, the same boy would sit at the desk behind me during maths and pinch the sports bra. Whenever I turned my attention to the blackboard in front of me, furrowing my brows at a particular tricky equation, a sharp humiliating ping would remind me of the girl arrow hovering over my head.

I soon learned to never let my guard down, to always look over my back and scan every room and memorize all the exits like I was smuggling microfilms in east Berlin during the Cold War. I always wondered why special agents are still overwhelmingly portrayed by men. Women are born into the Bourne Identity. We are forced to become ninjas from the day our mum reluctantly drags us to a bra fitting. Because if something happens, because if you have that extra margarita, you’ll be asked if you were wearing underwear, how short your skirt was and how red your lipstick.

Mum asked me about the sports bras I was now conveniently forgetting to retrieve from the pile of clean laundry. ‘Well if you don’t want me to tell the nuns, set that classmate straight!’ Mum was indignant, as only someone who grew up under Franco and owned a yellow Atomkraft, Nein Danke! badge could be.

‘Don’t be intimidated by that boy. For a start, you’re taller than him.’ Mum had a point. Gloria Steinem would be disappointed. So would Pippi Longstocking. I had read all of Astrid Lindgren’s books and Pippi was my favourite. She was the strongest girl in the world – she could lift her own horse. I was definitely the fastest girl in the field track team but was less confident about my ability to lift either horses or bra-pinching boys in maths classes. I pondered.

And then one day I just flipped. I had arrived early for the maths class and so had, to my horror, Bra-Pinching Boy. The room was empty bar a couple of students exchanging Panini football stickers at the back. A dusty sunlight bathed the room. It smelled of chalk and the sweet putrid scent of pink gum erasers. This was my chance – I was going to set him straight! I searched for words, suddenly painfully aware that I lacked a script. None of my heroines have had their sport bra pinched in maths class. Anna Karenina was a nineteenth-century Russian aristocrat trapped in a loveless marriage and Pippi Longstocking was a Swedish orphan whose best friend was a monkey in a waistcoat. What had my mum said again? ‘You’, I defiantly addressed my brasserie tormentor, ‘Stop oppressing me. Patriarchy is a construct that harms everyone.’ He gave me a bewildered look, as if the radiator had suddenly start singing. ‘You crazy bitch’. And spotting the shiny tinfoil peeking out from my bag, he added now with a grin of self-satisfaction ‘well, at least you’ve already made me a sandwich’.

So I pushed the desk that divided us right into him. I would like to tell you that a snappy reply followed, one so good that it would be tweeted year later by Buzzfeed ‘Woah! this Girl Had The Best Reply to School Harassment’. But I didn’t. I was angry, frustrated, eroded like the Gran Canyon by a constant drip of unchecked male self-entitlement. The constant maddening drippity drop - like a leak a stingy landlord refuses to fix.

Our teacher, an old nun, had now arrived. ‘What happened here?’ She looked at me suspiciously. I was already the daughter of a Lutheran. This outburst was most unwelcome. At this rate, they would find me nailing Ninety-Five Theses to the gym door on Monday. ‘Well, why don’t you sit at the desk over there?’ she turned to me, ‘that would be less distracting to everyone’. But she only looked at me. The teacher never mentioned it to my parents. I never mentioned it. Bra-Pinching Boy stopped bothering me. I was now Angry Girl, a threat to social order. A Medusa that turns men into stone, a mad woman who stalks the attics of Victorian landowners. And that was the end of that episode. But not of my history with sexism. That, of course, was only the beginning. The hovering girl arrow has not disappeared.

#feminism #sexism #pippi longstocking

I Slept Through an Earthquake: My First Two Months in San Francisco

About two months ago I moved from London to San Francisco. Before that we lived in Berlin where I spent a couple of great years surrounded by people complaining about gentrification and how the city had become a Disneyland for the sort of people who go to secret gigs and get their fixie fixed and their flat white aeropressed at the same place. San Francisco wasn’t much of a stretch in that respect. And the cocktails were cheaper than in London.

With the San Francisco move, I can now claim to have lived on two continents and in five different countries, as I spent my early years shuttling between Denmark and Spain. Because of this geographically transient existence some people think my life resembles an Elle Travel spread, with my scarf billowing in the wind, as I take my sunglasses off and look into the distance like they do in car commercials, perhaps wistfully remembering a doomed tryst that ended with a hastily scribbled note left in the Ritz that reads ‘Mon cherie, the truth is complicated.’ The reality is of course more prosaic and involves reading far too many washing machine instructions, finding out exactly how creatively bureaucrats can spell your name, googling how your oven works, and frankly far too little gin.

These are things I learnt in no particular order during my first two months in SF, which are neither transcendental or particularly surprising to anyone who has spent some time here. I did not find myself; which is a relief really. It would imply that there is a fixed perfect version of me waiting somewhere to be discovered. And what would I do once I found her?

San Franciscans call any meal taken while the sun is in the sky “brunch”. People can invite you for brunch at four in the afternoon, after you’ve had breakfast, gone for a morning hike and grabbed a cake with your Blue Bottle coffee. The lateness could also be because brunch is a contact sport that involves getting your name on a blackboard and waiting for two hours, or an hour if you’re lucky.

You do not have to queue for brunch. San Francisco is a food-fixated city in a state that is home to some of the best produce in the country. It’s hard to get a bad meal here. You can also pick a place that takes bookings. And if you really want to visit the most Instagrammed places, go between hours. I personally find the point of eating out an opportunity to relax and enjoy good service. This means not standing line with your hands in your pockets like you’re an unemployed bank clerk during the Depression. And while I believe that it is only polite to vacate your table as soon as you’ve finished so that other diners can have it, I’m not going to hoover up my huevos rancheros to placate a surly waiter who was picked because he look good in black lycra jodhpurs.

Kale finally made sense. Back in London I would dutifully chomp on some green stringy leaves and wonder whether the trend would work in a country not burdened with a Protestant sense of obligation or riddled with Catholic guilt. But expose a vegetable to sun and it suddenly becomes fit for human consumption.

It’s sunny. South Californians will tell you it’s cold. Anyone east of the bay will tell you it’s foggy. And while all of this might be true, I spent more than a decade in London where I was exposed to less sun than an anglerfish. The only way to avoid a vitamin E deficiency was to rub myself in Jif lemon juice and lie in front of a SAD light.

You’ll need sunglasses. Back in London sunglasses were usually the prevail of people who blasted tinny music from their portable speakers on the bus, and confused-looking Italian tourists. But here there is actually sunlight and as a result I’ll use mine gratuitously and look like Bono when I’m getting milk at Target. I’ll wear them so often I look like a member of the Blues Brothers and my Instagram feed a promo for Reservoir Dogs.

Yet despite this sun everyone will tell you how August is the worst month. Friends will tell you. The barista at Starbucks will tell you. The woman behind you at Walgreens will tell you.

San Franciscans also have a burning need to point out tourists unaware of the fog that often descends upon the city in the evening and leave them freezing in their American Eagle t-shirt and Old Navy shorts. They get even more joy spotting those who have been forced to fork out for a last minute overpriced fleece at Fisherman’s Wharf. Nobody told them California could be cold.

Everyone including the guy who plays drums outside the Old Navy store on Market will tell you to avoid Fisherman’s Wharf.

Everyone you meet at a barbecue will tell you how house hunting is a complete nightmare and they’re so glad they only had to go to 30 open houses and that they only got this totally cute rent-controlled place in Bernal Heights because they have the same yoga teacher, probably the same weed dealer, and also dig Burning Man. I particularly enjoy telling these people how we found our apartment in a day.

San Francisco is not just Mission or SoMa. Although not London or New York-sized, it is a perfectly respectable sized-city not just full of people who wear Google Glass or elevator pitch you in elevators. I barely see any around my area and I live in SoMa. And that’s without counting Oakland, Berkeley or other parts of the Bay. Go out and explore. And remember, you don’t have to queue for brunch if you don’t want to.

Oh yeah, and apparently I slept through the biggest earthquake since 1989. I had almost forgotten.

#san francisco #sf #moving #travel

At the risk of turning into the Emeli Sandé of academic guestbloggers...

As part of Women's History Month, the lovely people at ACLAIIR have published my post on rebellious nuns and sixteenth-century Spanish women neurologists: https://aclaiirblog.wordpress.com/

Guest Blogging Again

Starting Your PhD: What Past Me and Present You Should Know is borne out of conversations with fellow postgraduates and other impromptu fieldwork involving much tea-based therapy and a variety of baked goods. It has modest ambitions but much empathy, a hastily assembled homage to the support network that provides much appreciated encouragement in the research marathon that is a thesis. Interested? Then check out the full post at the Woman in Portuguese and Spanish Studies webpage:

http://www.wisps.org.uk/starting-your-phd-what-past-me-and-present-you-should-know/

Podcast

Sulking in Sepia: Julia de Asensi (1859 - 1921)

One of my first papers got turned into a podcast. Marvel at my ability to say 'uhm' 150 times - I wish that was an exaggeration - and fail to casually throw in a 'Manichean Weltanschauung' and a 'Althusserian interpellation.' If you use those words in everyday conversation, then this is right up your street, although I suspect this particular urban stretch may contain a few tumbleweeds passing by. Also the podcast contains the occasional Spanish quotation, so this 'up your street' is at this point less transited than an imaginary street on Apple Maps. Is not so much the road less travelled as the non-existing one. Listen to my podcast here.

*Also I'm not Dr Rocío Rødtjer yet - I haven't been awarded my doctorate. yet.*

#Podcast #Wrongdong in Spain #Julia de Asensi

Guest Blogging

This month I'm moonlighting for the International Gothic Association as the resident postgraduate blogger thus neglecting this Tumblr even further. Seriously it's so abandoned it's starting to feel like the House of Usher (No, not the rapper, that would be the Crib of Usher). My posts are aimed at a specific audience (entries have bibliographies) but I do sneak in the occasional joke: http://www.iga.stir.ac.uk/blog.php

#Gothic #International Gothic Association #Guest Blogging

Pieta by Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1499 Vs Lana Del Rey 2011

#Pieta #Michelangelo #Lana del Rey

Favourite Slide from Today's Presentation 'Death and the Maiden'

#Lana del Rey #Vestal Virgin #Louis David #Laurence Bulleid #Classicism #Symbolism

blech

Some patient academic of the future will, on seeing “Transformers 2,” doubtless find patterns of local topical meaning—portents of the Arab Spring in the fight over the pyramids, evidence of the debate over the future of the automobile industry, and a hundred other things. But people just like violent otherworldly stuff, and give it a lot of non-allegorical license to do its thing.

Adam Gopnik, in his review of Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation in The New Yorker. (via blech)

LOLcats and Victorian Serialized Novels

How We Become Familiar With New Technology

‘Memes don’t exist, tell your friends’ read one of the many novelty t-shirts my boyfriend owned when we first met. This was more than a decade ago and back then I associated the word ‘meme’ with evolutionary biology and the work of Richard Dawkins. I also thought that Java was just a type of coffee. This has changed with the advent of social media, and memes are now linked with spelling-challenged cats, which is probably not the evolution Dawkins had in mind. But LOLcats are definitely a step up from those HILARIOUS chain letters with which an elderly relative used to spam your hotmail account. And those of his coworkers, because back then if you wanted to share something, you had to know people’s email addresses. Crazy, I know. There was no ‘like’ button, no ‘retweet’ icon that allowed you to share it with your nearest and dearest and the 300 other people that had accumulated like layers of sediment in your account. And because it is so easy and fast to share the latest meme, LOLcats are positively fossils in the many Ages of the Internet. In the last couple of years, moving memes - animated GIFs - have become increasingly popular as pithy little replies that encapsulate a specific mood. They are like the internet equivalent of representing our feelings through the Medium of Dance.

‘What’s the point of memes? You could spend that time reading a book’. This is true, but everybody is familiar with the book as a medium, less so with the internet. Of course, this has not always been the case, and for most of human history the 1% referred to those people who could read, and the 99% were the ones who couldn’t. This all changed in the 19th century when education increasingly became the priority it is today and literacy rates started growing significantly. Additionally the Industrial Revolution saw the introduction of new technologies that made printing cheaper and more efficient, as well as new modes of transport that made distribution faster. Add a confident and burgeoning middle class perennially on the lookout for new business opportunities and you have the boom of the publishing industry that characterises the first decades of the nineteenth century. Suddenly books meant serious money, in that they were still considered a luxury item for most people, but newspapers and magazines were accessible and this became the golden age of the serialized novel. These were stories aimed to thrill their readers and the cliffhanger endings of each chapter were a hook that would guarantee the purchase of the next issue.

As literacy was becoming less of a sign of social distinction, some cultivated minds, particularly budding authors interested in exerting social influence, started to actively demarcate the line between art and commerce. The distinction between high and low culture thus became deeply entrenched in social discourse. Because more people could read, aspiring writers in the second half of the century became increasingly eager to present themselves as producers of original stimulating works as opposed to the mass-produced expressions such as the shilling-shockers and penny-dreadfuls that were by now being so enthusiastically churned out. Influential literary critics and other arbiters of taste accused serialized novels of being conventional, stereotypical, cliché-laden. And so they were, but this was not a flaw, this was the aim. Authors, publishers and readers were initially not interested in aesthetic innovation because there was frankly very little to innovate on. The novel was still a relatively new genre, shown in the confusion of terminologythat surrounded it. How long was a novel meant to be? Was it just a very long tale in print? Most potential readers had no genre expectations because being able to decipher printed symbols on a page was a relatively new business to begin with. The aim of all those archetypes, conventions and repetitions that populate these early forays into mass media can be viewed as a grammar with which people gradually became familiar. After some exposure, readers would get a thrill from spotting patterns, from recognizing clichés and feeling part of community, a growing community that had got to grips with these new - frankly intimidating - things called printed words.

All new technologies are scary and people are generally averse to change. That is, until you show them the basics and then they will latch onto it like crazed marmosets onto a banana cargo. Which brings me to this new scary technology called the internet. When I met my boyfriend he was part of the (internet) 1% and I was part of the 99%. He is of course still more technologically literate than me, but now even my 91-year-old granddad has a Facebook account and emails me enormous multi-megabyte photos of his holidays. And who am I to lecture about file compression? When he was born, ‘talkies’ was common term, not just one employed by people doing Film Studies. Now I can talk to him in Denmark from this little square that also carries all my music and can take pictures, even record videos that I can instantly zap to him. For all I know magic pixies riding on invisible unicorns are carrying these moving images up to Copenhagen. It somehow works, but I have no idea how. And it’s changing all time. The internet is still a pretty daunting place and most of us have this nagging feeling that we are bluffing, that we deep down have no idea what’s going on. It’s still a new technology and we don’t know what to expect in much the same way that our newly-literate ancestors didn’t know what to expect from the printed media or its future possibilities. Memes in this way can be seen as the internet equivalent of serialized novels. Memes are meant to be repetitive, archetypal and easily reproducible and remixable. New memes build on or reference this archive that we have accumulated over the years. Recognizing the patterns gives us a sense of belonging, that we belong to a growing community that feels comfortable sharing cat pictures with captions, even moving pictures, like GIFs. Or uploading talkies to YouTube. It’s a way of easing us into this new world and familiarizing us with intimidatingly sophisticated technology (magic pixies!) in a seemingly trite and simplified manner. The future is bright, the future is scary but Nyan cat will help us.

And no, this should not be read as a particular wordy excuse for my undying love of kitten videos.

#Memes #The Internet #Serialized Novels #New Technology #Literacy #LOLcats

inspiredbyapple

I figured that what we probably needed for Wednesday is a scorecard for Apple Keynote Bingo. We hope you like it. We’d like to show it to you. So here it is.

Don’t forget to read the rules. And - why not - a hashtag, #AppleKeynoteBingo.

Thanks, as before, to David Moss...

Tumblr collaborations

It's been a while since I have posted anything on this blog. I will get round it, particularly this week when I have a couple of deadlines looming and I'm being lulled by the sweet siren calls of procrastination. In the meantime I've been moonlighting for ...Wins The Internet, a site cowritten with two far wittier friends. If anything you should check out their posts.

#Tumblr collaborations #Wins The Internet

winstheinternet

As Grace Dent put it on Twitter, “the strongest reason to have kids I’ve ever seen”. In noway is the not fantastically amazing.

Frankly, The Internet, you can close for the day, sit on the sofa and read the papers. This Wins The Interent.

inspiredbyapple

There once was an bill called SOPA; which resulted in blackouts all over. Wikipedia went down*, making school kids frown in the US, Oz and Europa.

The bill’s meant to target “rogue sites” but it’s drafted so widely it might catch others which play by the rules so they may be closed in the dead of...

Hashtag Dystopia

Few things can make me as misanthropic as the recurrent popularity of doomsday druids. These days, it seems, slapping “dystopia” on anything automatically furnishes every old rant with deep social commentary and perennial fears towards ongoing technological progress masquerades as shocking incisive reflections. And the more apocalyptic their visions, the shallower they become. I call it "nihilistic porn". No character development, no plot, just the money shot.

Which brings me to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a veritable hashtag stew of tweetable nihilism, wherein the viewer is spoon-fed Brooker’s trademark hyperbolic grumbling like an unsuspecting French goose. There’s no food for thought, only despairing dyspepsia, because everything is broken in Black Mirror. Every episode is a bleak yet hollow void with an almost complete lack of sympathetic characters taking part in this pantomime dystopia. It is the Daily Mail’s much ridiculed Broken Society but repackaged for Guardian readers by covering it with a shiny new coat of New Media buzzwords. In the first episode, in which the Prime Minister is forced to copulate with a sow live on TV to save the nation’s royal sweetheart, characters are unable to articulate any thought without wedging Youtube, Twitter or Facebook into every remark. Brooker’s version of Newspeak has replaced full stops and commas with hashtags as punctuation marks. What is initially amusing soon reaches saturation point, illustrated by an armed soldier who mistakenly aims at a journalist believing her to be the princess's abductor. Instead of apologizing or ensuring she is not wounded, he shoots at her mobile and quips “There’s your RTS award!". At this point I was expecting a ham-fisted Abu Ghraib reference to round it off.

The second episode set its sights on reality TV, so all us viewers who have Ocado on speed dial can sit and quaff about the plebe who watches The X Factor sans the required ironic hat. Then we can all make disparaging and completely original remarks about wheat products and circuses. The story is set in a nightmarish panopticon where the 99% are forced to pedal bikes all day - the reason is never given - and sedated through forced exposure to pornography. That's right, by now we have come to understand that ‘subtle’ is not part of Hashtag Dystopia’s vocabulary.

The third and final part of the arc has been concocted by Jesse Armstrong, best known for the Peep Show and for being one of the writers for the brilliant political satire The Thick of It. It reworks the Perfect Recall trope familiar to science fiction and comic readers, and famously addressed in the Jorge Luis Borges short story Funes the Memorious (1942). In the Black Mirror version, a new technology allows people to carry a chip that records everything and can be played back on demand, with the possibility of sharing it on those -you guessed it! - omniscient menacing screens that rule our lives. Nobody else seems to have a particular good memory because the story very quickly descends into the classic alarmist ‘New Technology Ruins People’s Lives. And This Time We Mean It!’ Yes, there is the atomic bomb and countless other horrific examples. But take the internet - What would people have imagined 10 years ago if they knew we would all have portable devices that let us access and broadcast repository of information. I’m sure no forecast would have included lolcats. I will leave the Arab Spring to more respectable bloggers.

For somebody so seemingly intimate with new technology and who still - rightly so - extolls the creative possibilities of video games, Charlie Brooker sure takes an unnecessarily paranoid attitude towards progress more characteristic of somebody eligible for a Freedom Pass. Particularly when he occupies a privileged position from where he should be showing a more nuanced picture. This tirade is borne out of a sense of disappointment from somebody who loved TVGoHome and Screenwipe, but the misanthropic coat Brooke is fond of wearing has barely been changed and it is starting to exude a faint whiff of the reactionary.

#Dystopia #Charlie Brooker #Black Mirror #Technology #Television

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