Namesakes are problematic. If you have the same name as another person, you somehow get linked to them in people’s minds, even though you probably have nothing in common. My name is Eric and that causes untold hilarity for people who associate the name with the Viking explorer Erik the Red and various other Viking Erik’s and Eric’s, historical and fictional. Needless to say, this usually leaves me at a loss, as I do not have much to say about Vikings, never having been one. I imagine the problem of namesake association is much worse for people with the same name as prominent politicians. Politics is a topic where most intelligent people are expected to have an opinion and be able to talk about it (although others might insist on not discussing politics for the sake of preserving friendships.) Thankfully for me, there are not many Eric’s in politics, and most of those have been pretty minor. I feel for Americans called Clinton, McCain or even Obama, especially if they disagree with their namesake’s views.

How many people are so opposed to their political namesakes that they make donations to their opponents? Thanks to the US Federal Election Commission I was able to find out the totals (at 31st March) for donations made by people called Clinton, McCain or Obama to the three remaining US Presidential hopefuls. Here are the results:

What can we tell from all this? Not much, of course! Of all the groups, the people called Clinton are the closest match to the American populous. Their donations ranked Obama first, Clinton second and McCain third. This is in line with the overall fund-raising. In total, Obama who has raised a remarkable $233,823,614 from individual donors. That is not much less than the combined total raised by Clinton, $171,647,510, and McCain, $70,945,412, from individual donations. The McCains, in contrast, obviously tend to stick with their namesake. They contributed a handsome $32,981 to John McCain. Maybe he has a lot of family. I do not imagine Obama is a very common name, but Obama’s still found $2,699 for their namesake, but not a penny for his rivals. Pity poor Hilary, who did not get a cent from a single McCain or Obama! However, she has compensated by putting $5m of her own money into the election kitty.

Of course, all of these figures are tiny compared to the staggering $42,363,736 that Mitt Romney paid into his own unsuccessful campaign. Nobody can say Romney did not put his money where his mouth is. He was not the only Romney to back his campaign either. People with the surname Romney contributed $82,725 to Mitt Romney’s failed bid. At the other end of the scale, Democrat Mike Gravel, the former US Senator from Alaska, also picked up a very large share - 10% - of his own campaign’s finance. He put his hand in his pocket for $47,616, not bad when your supporters only raised a mere $447,379. The total from Gravel’s supporters equates to 0.2% of what Obama’s followers have given so far. Gravel’s campaign also managed to spend more than it raised, which makes me think that Gravel will also be left to cover the $2,733 overdraft. Gravel was not bottom of the fundraising race, though. That distinction went to Jim Gilmore, the former Virginia governor who raised $349,736 from individuals before dropping out of the Republican nomination battle. At least he had $16,455 left in the bank when he gave up, which could be used to pay for a nice meal for every one of the 220 people who donated to his campaign. That might help console Buddy Gilmore of Colorado Springs who coughed up $2,300 in the hope of seeing Jim in the White House.

You should be able to rely on family for backing. Obama’s wife, Michelle, gave $399 to her husband’s campaign. However, a certain Bill Clinton, who lists his occupation as Former President of the USA, last made a campaign donation back in 2001, and that was not to support Hilary!

Words. Sounds. Language. How and why do some words become taboo, and why should mere words ever be taboo?

There is something wrong with me, at least according to some people. I have an odd affliction that threatens to make me a pariah in polite company. I am not offended by bad language, not even a little. Bad language does not hurt my ears or cause my heart to flutter. Insult me and I will be upset, but I am indifferent as to whether the words of abuse are profanities, swearwords, blasphemies, or not. I am no fan of abusive behaviour, but it is equally possible to abuse people without using bad language, and to use bad language without abusing anybody. As a consequence, the use of profanity does not, of itself, greatly concern me, no matter what context it is used in. In turn, I do not feel greatly compelled to censor myself from using profanity. Of course, I do censor, but only because life would be even more tedious if I was subjected to the protestations of the easily offended. Unfortunately for me, I know plenty of intelligent people who seem to get unreasonably unhappy, angry or upset when a taboo word is used their presence. What is this power these swearwords have, like the magic spells of a sorcerer, to shock and bemuse?

I have been reading Don Quixote for what seems like an age. The storytelling is robust, with lots of falling off of horses and bashing of people around the head and ribs. However, I was surprised when I read the following lines in Part II, Chapter XIII of my English translation, which begin with Sancho Panza talking about his daughter:

‘She’s fifteen, give or take a couple of years,’ Sancho replied, ‘but she’s as tall as a lance, and as fresh as an April morning, and as strong as a market porter.’
‘With those assets,’ replied the Squire of the Forest, ’she could be not just a countess but a very nymph of the greenwood. Oh the little whore, what muscles the little bastard must have on her!’

Part II of Don Quixote was published in 1615. The use of the words “whore” and “bastard” do not trouble me in general, and I am sure people were saying plenty worse back then. However, even I was a little taken aback. These lines are introduced without any forewarning, in the midst of an amiable conversation between the two characters. In the story, Sancho reacts by being peeved at the way his daughter is described by the Squire of the Forest. The Squire nevertheless wins Sancho over:

‘How little you know,’ replied the Squire of the Forest, ‘about the language of compliments… when one of the horsemen of the bullring deals the bull a good lance-thrust, or when anyone does something with great skill, people say: “He’s a clever bastard, look how well the bugger did that!” and what might seem like insults are, in this setting, high praise? And you should disown, my dear sir, any sons and daughters who don’t do deeds that earn praise like that for their parents.’

By the argument of the Squire of the Forest, foul language can be used to convey esteem and awe. This argument, fictional or not, is about four hundred years old. To my mind it still has a ring of truth to it. Whereas implying Sancho’s daughter was an illegitimate child who turned to prostitution may not seem like the wisest way to express praise, it does seem correct to argue that swearwords are reserved for the expression of intense emotions, and these emotions may be positive as well as negative. You do hear people use swearwords to express favour as well as well as disdain. If swearing is sometimes a positive form of communication, the objection to swearwords cannot be based on their being solely deprecating. We must look for the objections elsewhere.

In my experience, most people complain about swearing because of the supposed meaning of the words. That is a striking argument, because, in practice, the meanings of swearwords are often irrelevant to their use. The meaning and purpose of words is very frequently determined by context. For example, if I hammer my thumb instead of the intended nail, the words I am likely to utter are probably not meant to be a succinct observation about my disappointingly poor aim. They are rather a signal I hurt myself, that I am in pain, and somewhat unhappy. The actual meanings of the words I cry could hardly matter less. However, that is perhaps part of the problem. The source of discomfort for some people is that my outburst must borrow from the profane in order to express my own emotions at that moment. Yet, at that moment, borrowing from the profane is exactly the right thing to do if my communication is to succeed. The profane allows me to succinctly convey the right level of gravity. At that point, there is no aspiration to intellectual conversation; the very reason for the utterance is primitive.

The funny thing about swearwords is that there will tend to be perfectly acceptable synonyms which we may use in polite society. Masturbation. Faeces. Testicles. Vagina. They are not swear words. They mean the same thing as some very common swearwords. Meaning alone, therefore, is not the reason why swearwords are considered bad or impolite. If you look at the words I have just listed, and consider their profane substitutes, the most obvious difference is that the swearwords at easier to pronounce with gusto and relish. They sound vulgar. Is it my imagination, or do swear words have a tendency to different vowels? They seem to contain a lot more o’s and u’s, instead of a’s and e’s. Is it just that words with deep sounds are considered more coarse than synonyms that have to be pronounced in higher pitch? The phrase “four letter word” also gives us a clue to the nature of swearwords. They tend to be short, and to the point. They often consist of just one syllable, and rarely more than two. They can be said quickly, brusquely. The same meanings, but expressed slowly, are permitted in polite language. Why is that? There is an old joke that goes something like the following:

A farmer’s wife is sat at the kitchen table, sharing a cup of tea with her neighbour, who has come round for a chat. The farmer walks in, smelling awful, and announces he has just finished tilling the fields with manure and wants to go upstairs and have a bath. When he leaves the room, the neighbour says ‘can’t you get him to say fertilizer instead? Manure sounds so coarse’. The farmer’s wife responds: ‘I wish! It took me ten years to get him to use the word manure!

Sounds, divorced of meaning, are perfectly harmless. The sound of a swearword cannot be the cause of pain in some listeners. Even the most sensitive people are going to struggle to object to swearwords if they are said in a language they do not happen to understand. I could ride up and down the Tokyo subway all day long, but I would have no way of ever being offended by the choice of words of my fellow commuters, because I do not understand Japanese. Whatever they may say, I only hear unintelligible sounds. Those sounds have no good or bad meaning without the knowledge of the language. Sounds have something to do with why people dislike swearing, but for people to be offended they must also learn that the words are taboo. For the same reason, I have no right to be offended if foreigners are sometimes unaware of the niceties of the English language. I can remember verbatim the words of the following. Beijing is a city where you usually pay to use the public restrooms. These words were found on a neatly printed sign inside the free public toilet of a Beijing park:

This toilet is free of cleaning,
So please hold off from pissing and shitting.

None of us are born knowing which words are good and which are bad. That is why dramatists can invent new swearwords without anyone complaining. The words they invent sound coarse and may be similar to swear words. We could even work out what the analogous swearwords, and hence meanings, would be in the real world. Dramatists do this out of the necessity to satisfy the censor. It is strange that such obvious workarounds are an acceptable way to depict aspects of behaviour we are meant to recognize from real life. Truly realistic depictions are not considered seemly, but recognizable contrivances are tolerated. They are seemingly tolerated because, despite the clear associations, these invented words fall outside of any currently established prescriptions. To illustrate, here are a few examples drawn from television from around the world:

• “Scrot” - a derogatory term of reference from the classic British prison comedy Porridge
• “Rack off” - forceful instruction to leave from Australian soap Neighbours
• “Frack” and “Frak” - respectively from the original and new versions of the US science fiction show Battlestar Galactica

The funny thing is, these bowdlerized versions of real swearwords work in drama because we already know the meaning. We may not know what a “scrot” is (although the word is highly suggestive) or how to “rack”, but we do not need to know the true ‘meaning’ of these words. The meaning in use is determined by the dramatic context. “Scrot” will refer to some person, and not in a particularly complimentary way, but not in an especially deprecating way either. “Rack off” means “go away” except conveys more emotion. The ability to infer meaning from context makes it all the more peculiar that make-believe swearwords are acceptable to an audience, when actual swearwords would not. However, we cannot follow this rationale too far. The similarity between the make-believe word “frack” in Battlestar Galactica and the real word “fuck” caused the makers to substitute the alternative nonsense word “felgercarb” in episodes shown in earlier timeslots!

The people most likely to be chastised for swearing are the people least likely to understand the true meanings of swearwords: children. Perhaps that is the reason why a rational analysis of the profane is impossible. The essence of swearing is that it is taboo, and hence not allowed to be subjected to rational analysis. Children are trained to believe certain words are prohibited. As adults, they may continue to conform to their training. In time, they will condition their own children’s behaviour. However, the reasons for why a word becomes taboo may be forgotten over time. When communities separate and their language traditions evolve separately, what is considered a swear word for one community may be considered inoffensive or mild in the other. In the US “fanny” is relatively harmless, being synonymous with buttocks, but in the UK it is impolite and means vagina. Similarly, nobody in America would have objected to the movie title “Free Willy” or to Will Smith’s album called “Big Willie Stylee”, though any British schoolchild would have had a naughty chuckle about the inadvertent use of the slang word for penis. The strength of prescription over words depends on the strength of reinforcement in subsequent generations. If those generations take an alternate view, then the rules about what words are forbidden will also change. Take a look at this very readable history of British swearwords and you get the sense of how meanings and attitudes change over time. Also take a look at this sketch from Armstrong and Miller, which highlights in a humorous way just how language, including swearing, must change with the times:

Dictionaries contain words based on how people use them, not on how they should they use them. People often think it is the other way round, but dictionaries ultimately base their definitions on observation of how language is really used. That is why there is a recognized vernacular for textspeak, reflecting how mobile phone use is changing our language. Dictionaries may seek to highlight what is rude or vulgar, but that of itself does not deny people the legitimacy of using a word that is rude or vulgar. It is only proper all words be acknowledged as having their respective meanings, even if some would prefer those words were never used. I could keep on writing, but the attitude of society is better expressed by observing how people really behave than by what I or anyone else writes. Take a look at this clip from the television word game Countdown. In the show, it is part of the art of host Richard Whiteley to effortless fill for a few seconds whenever words need to be looked up in the dictionary. Notice how he retains just the right level of gravity to keep the show amiably moving along, without encouraging or discouraging the mirth of the audience. Not bad going for a host who must be very aware they are making home entertainment to be broadcast in the late afternoon when children have returned home from school.

At present, the current obsession of society is to protect children, a somewhat strange idea given that children will inevitably grow up and have to learn what taboo words mean anyway. Many taboo words represent bodily actions and parts of the anatomy that even children must be familiar with anyhow. The failure to teach a child, at the appropriate juncture in their development, about the underpinnings of taboos may ultimately be a hindrance to their development. As adults they will encounter taboo words, and ignorance may deepen their embarrassment or limit their options for how to respond.

Profanity is a matter of fashion as well as meaning and sounds. Blasphemy used to be considered a very serious sin, and people would invent mixed oaths to avoid taking the Lord’s name in vain. Examples of mixed oaths include golly or dickens or Jiminy Cricket. On the Watergate tapes, the most common phrase to be replaced by the infamous “expletive deleted” was “God damn”. To modern ears that curse sounds pretty tame, but blaspheming would have done nothing to boost Nixon’s popularity with his god-fearing core voters. In general, blasphemy is taken far less seriously today. At the same time, the Bible can be interpreted to have its share of rude words. The King James version has this at Kings 2, Chapter 18:

hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?

In contrast to blasphemy, words that have a strong sexual or especially a racial context seem to have far stronger prohibitions than ever before. This has also resulted in some particularly strange conflicts about how and when it is acceptable and unacceptable to use certain words with connotations of race and sexual orientation. The term “queer”, which at base just means to be different to the norm, became an increasingly derogatory way of referring to homosexuals. It came to be considered a form of abuse that was increasingly frowned upon in polite society. Eventually, though, the word has been taken back and inverted by the gay community. The word “queer” is now used as a signature of gay empowerment. A similar thing has happened to the word “nigger”, derived from the word “negro”. The debate about when this word can be used is particularly thorny, with some inconsistent standards applied in different communities. A good example of the debate was prompted by Spike Lee’s uproar about the use of the word “nigger” by fellow movie director Quentin Tarantino. In turn, black actor Samuel Jackson intervened to defend white director Tarantino’s use of the word and to criticize Lee for trying to reserve it solely for use by black artists. Trying to differentiate usage between the different spellings of “nigger” and “nigga”, or setting different standards for when a black person uses the word as opposed to a white person, has only added to the confusion over what society considers taboo. In the ultimate inversion, the positive use of the word “nigger” by a segment of the black community was turned on its head yet again in a controversial (but very funny) comedy routine by American comedian Chris Rock. Rock, a black comedian, translated the badge of pride associated with the word “nigger” and linked it to stereotypes of behaviour he wanted to disassociate from the wider black community. Take a look:

There is no doubt that some swear to shock and to get attention. This brief history of British public swearing, however, contains equally as many counter-examples as examples of the theory that people do it to draw attention to themselves. Comics like Viz, which has a ‘Profanisaurus’ and television shows like South Park very obviously aim to amuse by flirting with the forbidden, and swearing is a big part of that. However, I have no time for the argument that using swearwords will somehow lead to diminishing powers of expression over time. I am not offended by swearwords and I use them sometimes, but I cannot see how that would prevent me from learning or using other words. Words are words. You learn how to use them by using them. One word cannot sap power from another. If I use the word “rhinoceros” that does not cause me to forget the word “rhubarb”. A fair few people have responded to my requests for tolerance towards bad language with a counter-argument about the loss of expressive ability. Each time I have wondered whether my interlocutor really believes they have a superior vocabulary as a consequence of abstaining from swearing. If so, they certainly failed to demonstrate any superior ability to articulate their argument whilst they were making it. I imagine the belief that profanity leads to diminished linguistic skill is really a closeted way of propounding outmoded snobbish values about class and social rank. I am sure there are some snobs who hate foul language, but there are plenty of very well-educated and cultured people who not only tolerate it but embrace it too.

As intimated, I have lenient attitude to swearing, because I usually struggle to see what harm is really being done. It is not that I am endlessly liberal in my opinions. There is certainly a segment of the entertainment industry that feeds upon the base in an unhealthy way. I worry that movie after movie depicts teenagers being remorselessly hacked to death. I do not worry about hearing an endless stream of cuss words in a movie, not that anyone would dare to make a movie with an endless stream of cuss words, because even teenage slasher films avoid bad language. However, my point of view is not shared by all. In practice, casual profanity tends to attract far more opprobrium than the fictionalized and fantastic cruelty which has entered the mainstream of entertainment. Of greater concern is the tendency for the prohibition of one word to lead to the prohibition of another. Consider the use of the word “fuck” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The acceptability of its use was keenly debated in the obscenity trail that followed publication. Consider also its use in the poem This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin, which begins:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.

Replacing the word “fuck” with gentle euphemisms simply will not do. These works, and others, would be nothing without the right to use the word “fuck”. The word “fuck” has a meaning and an intensity borne of its actual use by real people; insisting it should never be used is to insist on a fantasy be presented instead of life as we know it to be. The comedian Lenny Bruce summed it up when he said: “Life is a four-letter word.” None of this means that every creative work which uses the word “fuck” will automatically have merit, but nor does it mean they automatically lack merit either. Living in an edited fiction would be the real diminution of our language, as surely as if the words were erased and our language were replaced with some kind of Orwellian Newspeak. Shocking and vulgar things happen in life; it cannot be all high-minded ideals and cool reflection stated in full sentences with words of four syllables or more. Sometimes our modes of expression need to be intense, emotional and immediate, like when I hit my thumb with a hammer, or when somebody suffers from irrational hatred, or somebody else is taken over by sexual desire. Constraining our language will not modify our souls. We need words that reflect those more primitive aspects of our being as well. To tackle the problems of life, we sometimes have to face them head-on, and that includes the problems with the language we use in life. Bruce pointed out the cachet of profanity depends upon prohibition. Click below to hear what Bruce, a Jew, had to say about the use of racially offensive words:

If we follow Bruce’s logic to its ultimate logic, then prohibition only gives words a power over us. Yes, some people will succumb to prohibition. However, others will profit from breaking the rules, and the stricter the rules, the greater the profit. No matter how well enforced, there will always be reason to break those rules. The enforcement would have to be pretty severe to put people off. In 1965, When critic Kenneth Tynan became the first person to use the word “fuck” on British television, one Member of Parliament called for him to be executed! Now, the worst that can happen is a broadcaster will be censured and made to say sorry. Take the recent example where the BBC broadcast the Live Earth concerts. As the event was billed “Live Earth” the corporation understandably broadcast the event live. Yet British regulator Ofcom took umbrage at the fact this allowed some of the participant’s swearing to also be broadcast live, well before the watershed hours for children. Ofcom made the BBC transmit its findings, and hence its rebuke. How ironic that the broadcaster gets blamed for airing the unedited content of a live show, because the regulator feels the content would have appealed to children. What then of any children in the live audience? Or of the participants responsible for swearing at this charity event? All that censorship serves to do is to keep some people ignorant of what others learn about life, and it is not clear to me that the ignorant are better off.

Mark Twain admired the use of obscene language, a skill which he learned from the steamboatmen of the Mississippi river. In time, he became a proficient expert in the art of cursing. His devotion to the art was so great, he once said:

If I cannot swear in heaven I shall not stay there.

We should not be surprised that intelligent people can take joy from the earthiest forms of self-expression. They are just as valid as any other way to communicate, and may have the virtue of attaining their ends far more directly than the finest-worded plea or most logical of arguments. Twain took great joy from seeing real life at first hand. William Shakespeare also understood the natures, lives and desires of people all around him, and in his audience. He knew very well how to accommodate the baser instincts amidst his iambic pentameter. His artistry is so lost to most modern audiences, that when you see his plays performed today, you will typically see his graphic puns needing to be visually reinforced by the gestures of the actors. I lose track of how many times I have seen the upward pointing of a sword, or the raising of a wine bottle or similar object, in order to highlight a Shakespearean sexual play on words. In Romeo and Juliet, The Bard makes the philosophical observation:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

A word is just a word. Words name the things we find around us. It is a fluke of linguistic evolution that the word “rose” is associated with a certain kind of flower and not with some basic bodily function. Perhaps, over time, its meaning will change and the association will change. Can the word, once good, become bad? I do not see how. Even if we dislike its associations, a word is just a word and we could substitute any other label at any time without having changed anything of substance. Shakespeare’s philosophical depth and artistry with words was matched by his understanding of the darker recesses of the human soul, including the taboo. Note this passage in Hamlet:

Hamlet: Lady shall I lie in your lap? [He lies at Ophelia's feet]
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?

The same genius that ruminated on the meaning of the word “rose” also gave us a ribald pun on the word “country”. There is truth in humour and wordplay, and I would much rather live in a world where we are all at liberty to use and exchange words as we please, irrespective of taboos. For taboos to have power, we must respect them. For words to have power, we must use them. That is why I will always use any and every word I want, to express my meaning, and leave it somebody else to worry about taboos.

Why did so many people get worked up when there was a mandatory “is” included in Facebook status updates? It is a strange thing to get upset about. One hundred thousand people joined the group to get rid of the “is”. After all, when you read the status of people on Facebook it is usually something like “…is very happy to have cooked a really good spagbol” or “…is inconsolable following the defeat of Arsenal in the Cup” or “…is documenting the minutiae of my life in excruciating detail so data historians in the future can wonder at what an idle feckless spoiled bunch we all are.” Before the internet there was no easy way for people to share such detail on a regular basis, so the burden of complying with the Facebook “is” seems like small beans. It is not as if anyone is sharing any genuine information of value (or are they?) If I know you support Arsenal football club, then chances are I can infer your state of mind about their last performance without needing a reference source to look it up. Similarly, I am very happy for most people to be doing what they are doing, but I do not need to know about it. What possible advantage do they get from running a news ticker-tape of the events in their life? You can imagine the string of status updates from the moment that somebody opens their eyes in the morning:

“… is in bed but awake”
“… is having a scratch and contemplating getting out of bed”
“… is just getting out of bed”
“… is thinking it is cold and time to turn the heating up”
“… is walking to the bathroom”
“… is wondering where the slippers are because the floor is cold”
“… is getting into the shower”
“… is freezing! quick turn the hot water up!”
“… is too hot! turn it down again!”
“… is scrubbing in the shower”
“… is getting shampoo in the eye”
“… is rinsing shampoo out of the eye”

Geez. Enough already. The thing that beguiles is not that people want to share - that is perfectly understandable - but that presumably there is the belief, and maybe even the actual fact, that others want to find out this information. That would imply some people should sometimes write “… is reading other people’s Facebook status updates” as their status update. [Good idea - I think I will do that myself now.] In this context, where people share the utter triviality of everything that they happen to do, or that happens to them, or of how they feel from one day to the next, you would think that the “is” is a benefit. Why so, you ask? Well, the “is” adds creative tension. Like Shakespeare writing in iambic pentameter, or haikus having a specific structure and number of syllables on each line, or Spielberg filming “Schindler’s List” in black and white, or musicians that record straight to tape without subsequent mixing, or artists creating a work for a specific space… you get the idea. Without the “is” then the variety of mind-numbing options for how to describe your status is endless. Imagine that… endless triviality. And people get worked up about their freedom to enjoy it unfettered. I dread the day when everyone knows what pants you put on in the morning thanks to Facebook PantsNotification^TM.

A few months ago some friends of mine announced, via Facebook’s status update, their own engagement. That was a good way to rebuff my theory about the triviality of Facebook status updates. I do not know if it was the intention that this should become the preferred mode of letting people know, but it was the way I found out. Unless you have a considered communications strategy for such things, where the Facebook status update is the very last vehicle you use to share the news, then it is inevitable that some people will read it first on Facebook before you get the chance to write or speak to them. Then again, others will never find out any news through Facebook. They logout of Facebook and go and do something less boring instead. But Facebook status updates for serious things can still beg the question of whether these are the last days of society announcements in the pages of newspapers. There may come a time where all “news” about ourselves is routinely announced via the internet. That has some implications that most Facebook fans have failed to anticipate. Most people who use Facebook are young. The news people have to share may be a little less light and chirpy as they get older. If you announce births and marraiges via Facebook, should you also announce divorces and deaths the same way?

My Member of Parliament, Grant Shapps, the Conversative MP for Welwyn Hatfield, regularly twitters. At first I thought this was the most ridiculous thing ever. Then again, he made his money running an internet marketing business, so it is not that surprising that he levers any and every internet tool to promote himself. I was unsettled by the thought that my MP was using a tool so readily associated with banal updates of people as they walk from the bedroom to the bathroom for their morning shower, wishing they had put their slippers on. A friend put it into context: people might actually want to know what an MP is doing. Making speeches, running campaigns, attending publicity events, meeting constituents… it can make sense for a public person to broadcast what he is up to. At first, I agreed. Twitter makes as much sense for Grant Shapps, shadow minister for housing in the UK, as much as it does for Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama as they fight their duel for the Democratic nomination for the US Presidential Election. But that does not mean it makes sense. Unless you are a journalist, looking for a cheap alternative to doing proper research, Twitter is just so much boring dross. In a way, the content is even worse with high-profile public people, because at least the ordinary folks tell you some of the truth of their lives without too much sophistication in the writing and editing. Sure, we do not find out the completely unedited truth of anyone’s life - when they masturbate, go to the toilet, pick their nose and all the things they are ashamed of - but there is still a kind of honesty in the banal. When an aide of Barack Obama updates twitter, writing in the guise of his boss, what he writes about getting America “back to work”, changing the nation and all that guff, it is just another outlet for propaganda. Twittering politicians is a continuation of the same theme that saw Punch magazine print cartoons mocking Disraeli for naming Victoria “Empress of India” (see this one from the Victorian Web) or Leni Riefenstahl make films that glorified Hitler.

Politicized Twitter shares no spontaneous truth, despite the continuous nature of its updates. Twitter, like use of the internet in general, is just another front in the publicity war cum popularity contest that underpins our modern governments of the people by the people.

The strange thing about the internet is not that it works particularly well for distributing information. There have always been ways to distribute information, and misinformation, from word of mouth, copying books by hand through to the printing press, radio and television. The easier it is to spread information, the easier it is to spread misinformation too. The strange thing is that so many people occupy themselves with forwarding content from one person to another. If your own life is too trivial to say anything about, then just find some fluff that somebody else has created and share that instead. Hoaxers must have laughed themselves silly at the thought that people would waste their time forwarding their dire warnings about make-believe viruses. Yet well-intentioned people would feel obliged to do it. The real bane of Facebook is the “forward to friends” element of every halfwit application. Yet lots of people feel the need to share. Why? There are lots of sites which take all the best of the trivia on the internet and put them in one place. But lots of people want to forward. They push to you, to save you the trouble of finding it for yourself. Forwarding is the ultimate in trivial publishing. Take a humorous picture of an elephant sticking its trunk up its own butt, and send it to everyone you know. They are bound to value the instant improvement to their quality of life…

On the home page of Twitter there is a quote from Wired: “incredibly useful”. Hmm. Not just useful, but incredibly useful. Yeah, right. For who and what for? Useful for people who need a way to fill the hours between the morning shower and going to bed, and find sitting next to a fishing pole a little too racy. Useful for people too lazy to do their own research. And this is the nub. People do not do their own research. If people checked out those hoax virus warnings before they circulated them, they would find out they were nonsense. If journalists checked the facts then the news might be more than just a series of staged announcements from people in power. If people actively looked for pictures of elephants with trunks up their butt then nobody would clog email servers by sending them on to their friends. Even though the internet is an extremely powerful tool for the researcher, most people use it to disseminate rubbish. Much of what is communicated is pointless. Much of the rest relies upon an absolute and uncritical trust that it does not deserve. We need more than status updates for everybody on the internet, we need editors too - people or machines who can pick out the important messages from the rest. The challenge is that the values of these editors must and should mirror the needs as well as the wishes of society as a whole, whilst remaining truthful and avoiding elitism. For the first time, the human race has the potential to publish and distribute more information than it can read and absorb. Like cholesterol in our blood, the trivial and unreliable may clog our systems, making us unhealthy. Update your Facebook status today: logout and go and do something worth telling people about.

The music industry really is turning completely bonkers. First, Radiohead sell an entire album for whatever people fancy paying, from UK£0.00 to UK£99.99 (US$200). Then it turned out that fifteen people actually paid UK£99.99 to download the aforementioned In Rainbows (though it is safe to assume that a lot more paid zilch). Now Radiohead are separately selling bits of one song, with each bit selling for a decidedly fixed price. And the song, called Nude, is one they already sold on the very same In Rainbows. The proper parlance is “stems” rather than bits, though given you buy them as downloads from iTunes, then maybe bits is right after all. The band even calls them “bits” on the website. There are five bits on sale: bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums. The idea is that fans, or more probably wannabe Mark Ronsons, can remix the track, upload their version to Radiohead’s dedicated site, and people can vote for which they like most. This being internet voting, people can also cut and paste a widget to their own website, Facebook or MySpace page that will let their friends merrily click away and add to their votes.

Writing the first half of this blog was easy enough. The first half is just the facts. Here comes the tricky second half: the commentary. What are we supposed to make of this? Is it the democratization of music, or super-slick commercial exploitation? Radiohead held out for a long time before allowing their music to be sold on Apple’s iTunes, but now they are selling one song for the price of five. Each stem costs the same as a typical single, meaning that Radiohead can expect to make five times what they usually make from selling a single. I say five times, but that could be six times because the individual stems may be bought as a bundle with the integrated song, making six tracks in total. Given the price per track remains the standard US$0.99 (UK£0.49) on one side of the Atlantic, and is UK£0.79 (US$1.60) on the other, it is hardly like they are striking a blow for fair treatment of customers either. The promotion also insists that lots of different software can be used to remix the tracks, but the customer is very deliberately pushed towards using Apple’s GarageBand software. With a deal like that, you could almost imagine that Radiohead have become Apple’s house band. Of course, the widget on people’s webpages, the publicity in the traditional media resulting from the novelty of the offer, and the publicity that stems from friends recommending their own remixes to other friends, will all help to boost sales of the single… But this is still a song that people could have got for free if they downloaded the album and decided to pay nothing. For that reason, maybe it is too harsh to judge this as utterly cynical by Radiohead. However, this is certainly not an act of charity or intended to bring music to the masses. That much is made very clear by this message, which was certainly not in the fine print:

(If you wish to commercially exploit [the stems] you’d need permission from us. You don’t have any legal ownership of this music simply by cutting it up or whatever.)

Hmmm. Radiohead also say they “will listen to the best remixes” which must be an impossible promise to keep unless they intend to listen to all of them or they know which are best before listening to them. Maybe the impossibility of that promise sums up what is going on here. There appears to be some thought processes behind this innovation, but nobody can be sure what they are or if they ever reached a conclusion. If you thought Radiohead had an agenda for the future of music, you may be sorely disappointed. There are some piecemeal ideas, but like the song, they could benefit from being rearranged.