Coming soon on Nintendo DS…

Conversation Training – Want to wow the guests at your boss’s dinner party? Want to avoid embarrassing silences on your next first date? Or do you just want to be up with the latest water-cooler conversations? Conversation Training can help you deal with all of these social situations and more. Choose from thousands of conversation topics, jokes and anecdotes, each tailored precisely to your defined situation. Just 10 minutes of preparation can provide you with a whole evening of sparkling conversation. Keep in touch with latest events, and always have witty responses ready for whatever is in the news with the downloadable update feature. Quiz yourself on acceptable opinions and behaviour to avoid social embarrassment. Conversation Training is an invaluable tool for coping with busy modern lifestyles and hectic social lives.

My Career Coach - My Career Coach can help you to succeed in achieving your aspirations and getting the job that you have always dreamed of. Whether you are just setting out in the job market or are an established professional looking to advance, My Career Coach can help to steer you along your career path by giving you short, medium and long range targets alongside daily tips and challenges based upon your personal profile. Games, tests and challenges help you to develop the right skills and personality traits for success. An added incentive is that all your efforts and achievements are translated into your personal earning potential figure, ensuring that you get everything you deserve.

These games don’t actually exist, I’ve just made them up. However, given the appetite amongst the general public for allowing a computer to tell them how old their brain is, what to do to lose weight or what to eat, whilst also training their eyesight, arithmetic and word-power (in a range of languages), surely things like this are right this moment being brainstormed, or plucked from the sessions of blue-sky thought of some software developer out there.

Probably the biggest success so far in the genre of the aspirational, quasi-educational training game has been Dr Kawshima’s Brain Training, which still sits at the top of Amazon’s Nintendo DS bestseller chart two years after its release. It promises, through a series of games and puzzles, to calculate the age of your brain. Now, I’m no neuroscientist, but isn’t your brain going to be, well, the same age as the rest of you? And how exactly is 20 minutes of puzzles or fucking sudoku a day likely to make a major difference?

Surely, in fact, an older brain would actually be an advantage in that having had more experience and more opportunity for learning, it might have gathered a greater range and depth of knowledge. Which makes the whole thing readily apparent as just another factor in the whole biopower construct that so much of modern society seems to revolve around: health=youth=attractiveness, all of which are within your reach if you put in the requisite hours in the gym, fork out for the latest miracle skin cream/cosmetic surgical procedure. So, therefore, it is little surprise that the brain gets treated like just another muscle that, given regular workouts, will remain in shape. In itself, this attitude is not necessarily harmful, but surely reading a book would be just as effective a mental workout. However, knowledge is not so readily ranked as performance in puzzles, and our economic system seems to have incubated a love of targets, objectives, grades, scores and the easy psychic reward they offer in completion. Therefore, just as a significant proportion of our society prefer pounding a treadmill in a shiny chrome and glass gym to a long rambling walk in terms of physical exercise, so Brain Training will be preferred by many to the act of actually thinking about something.

All of which seems to fit the whole phenomenon into the same capacity-over-content way of thinking as Infinite Thought’s fantastically ominous portrait of ‘Studies Studies’ as the future of education, keeping brains ticking over without ever attempting to fill them.

Footnote - Honourable mention in terms of horrendousness for this:

&

“There are two versions of the game – one for boys and one for girls. The two versions have a different selection of minigames designed to appeal to sons and daughters alike, with the boy version featuring games like “toy train” or “drive the car,” and the girl version offering games like “colour the animals” or “little kitchen.” I Did It Mum offers simple but fun challenges for this age group, which they can enjoy completing with a parent. Additional feature allowing a voice recording option for Mum to encourage their child when completing the minigames.”

Win your Mum’s (because Dad is no doubt out earning a wage, or watching sport or something far more important than spending time with their child) approval by conforming to gender stereotypes. Fantastic.

Question Time Schools Edition

Being ever-interested in what young people make of the political process, I sat through the majority of the above programme the other night. Probably with the aim of getting the Yoof reconnected with politics, they produce one of these programmes each series: the usual QT format (audience members pose questions (screened in advance by the producers) to a panel typically comprised of one figure from each of the major parties plus a couple of other vaguely relevant figures) except the audience is made up of people 18 or under and the panel is tailored to the supposed concerns of the audience. In this case, this was done by including ‘businesswoman’ (although far more likely to remembered as a gobby also-ran on a previous series of The Apprentice) Saira Khan and 18 year old Michael Heaver, who won a competition to be a ‘people’s panelist’ on the show.

For the most part, this proceeded in the manner of other QT shows: question; bland party-politicking answers from Tory, Labour and Lib Dem panelists; responses from the other panelists that, whilst more interesting due to not having to be ‘on message’, may lack intricate knowledge of the issues in question; contributions from the audience ranging from populist ranting to ultra-considered rambling from more studious types, keen to make the most of their moment in the spotlight to show how intelligent and knowledgeable they are (probably the type of people who blog on politics in their spare time…)

What caught my attention was the fact that two (of five or six in total) of the main questions, were explicitly premised upon the notion of a gulf between politicians and what is typically referred to as ‘the real world’. Firstly, whether it was acceptable for the G8 leaders to sit down to a “lavish” eight course banquet at a summit that had global food shortages at the top of its agenda. Secondly, on the topic of MP’s expenses and whether they have contributed to a loss of respect for politics. Without getting drawn into a debate on such issues, or denying that there are questions that have to be answered, what strikes me is the glee with which such points are seized upon, firstly in the media, and then in the electorate at large. We have an instinctive dislike of politicians, and regard them all as greedy, incompetent careerists keen only to line their own nests, while climbing greasy poles, riding on gravy trains and multiple other metaphorical accusations. The problem is that such sniping creates an attitude to politics as a whole whereby we prefer to rant from the sidelines rather than engage in any political issues. Therefore, in shifting the blame onto a few figures in government, we absolve ourselves completely of responsibility for the state we are in, whilst the structural factors that distort our politics go ignored: an electoral system that privileges votes in a few key swing seats; a need for politicians to cosy up to established interests in big business for party funding, and the media to try to ensure a good press.

In his answer to the question regarding MP’s expenses, Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory member of the panel, made a comparison of politicians to estate agents or journalists as the most disliked, and least trusted, professions within society. I think such a comparison is quite telling: yes, we (quite rightly) dislike and mistrust estate agents, but we don’t withdraw completely from an involvement in the housing market (far from it, in fact); similarly, for all we profess a distrust of journalists, we’re happy to keep reading and absorbing the opinions they churn out. Yet, our dislike of politicians becomes a ready-made excuse for us to abandon any sort of political involvement or engagement, creating a situation in which the self-righteous rant is one of the defining features of our political discourse, forever demanding, with a tone of wronged belligerence simmering constantly just below the surface. This was certainly the approach favoured by Saira Khan on the programme, with her high-volume input often warmly received by the assembled audience.

The problem is that once a tone of constant haranguing becomes the political norm, it makes it easier for policy to ignore legitimate concerns (of which there are many) and for the political classes to pick and choose which bits of mainstream public opinion they wish to listen to. Equally, the friction-free nature of political speech – spun so fine it can never be properly pinned down – is a direct attempt to avoid being an easy subject for attacks from press or public, as can be seen from some of the comments regarding Thursday night’s programme: the insipid pronouncements of IDS, Labour’s Douglas Alexander and Julia Goldsworthy of the Lib Dems receive nowhere near as much ire from viewers (even young viewers) as the contributions of Heaver and Khan. So it seems that, for all we dislike the slippery pronouncements of politicians and their attempts to talk without ever really saying anything, we still jump on anything that does not measure up to our expectations in terms of the manner and level of informed content within political speech.

All this is not to follow Tony Blair in suggesting the press are like feral beasts and that there is a need for us to be less demanding of politicians. We should, if anything, be more demanding of our representatives, but should refuse to accept the generalised, scattergun critique of our political figures peddled by many parts of the press. Breaking out of the viscious circle we have got ourselves into requires that we are always focussed and informed in our demands. Withdrawing from the political sphere, then moaning that it fails to meet our expectations is more likely to continue to deplete the standard of political debate.

A Brief Preamble

“In what is given to us as universal,necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?” Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment.

In case the above quote isn’t enough of a clue, I’ll provide a confirmation: yes, this blog is going to feature plenty of academically inclined, theoretically influenced, left-leaning scribblings with the loose theme of trying to find points at which the logic of a world presented to us as natural and inevitable begins to break down (I have no doubt that, on many occasions, it will actually involve me spouting rubbish with regard to far more mundane concerns). Hopefully, as well as providing me with a reason for getting my thoughts down and organised in writing, it may also provide the odd moment of interest for anyone else looking in.