Robot

This is another migration of a piece I wrote for The ACRE FourThoughts blog, this time on the subject of 'Robot'.  For the pieces of the other contributors on the same subject click on this bit of text here.

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The Softly Spoken Robot.

The softly spoken robot was often taken advantage of because he was so polite, and softly spoken.  He became frustrated on these occasions, but remained philosophical about them.

The softly spoken robot was well liked by his colleagues, but he was, sometimes fundamentally, misunderstood; he had few real friends.  Seeing that he was being taken advantage of by unscrupulous, brash robots, his colleagues sympathised, but did nothing.  Theories abounded when it came to the softly spoken robot: he was just shy, he was meek, he was secretly a zen master, there were as many opinions as there were robots to hold them.  They all dovetailed on one point however.  He was, indeed, a very softly spoken robot.

The softly spoken robot took some time off work during the summer, a modest amount, and travelled somewhere cultured and mature, there were museums and poets and complicated food in small portions.  The softly spoken robot enjoyed himself quietly, smiling gently and expressing his enjoyment in a restrained, dignified manner.  At the end of his holiday, he came home.

Back in work he quickly, and without complaint, slotted back into the routine.  The softly spoken robot assumed his cog-like function, and began whirring in the machine, stoicly.

A lot of extra work had been allotted to him, because, in his absence, the other, less softly spoken robots, had sluiced off a portion of their own workload and allowed it to accrue under the duties of the softly spoken robot.  They knew that he, being so softly spoken, would not complain.  And he didn’t.

The softly spoken robot was a good worker.

During his holiday, a new member of staff had been hired.  She was a young, eager, outgoing robot, bubbling over with ideals and ambition.  Still wet behind the audio inputs, it was left to the softly spoken robot to show her the ports.  During this mentoring process, the softly spoken robot came to enjoy the company of his energised colleague.  He observed her methods and interactions and came to question his softly spoken nature, which he had previously, unquestioningly, held as a virtue.

There was no grand overnight transformation, of course.  The change was a slow process, as changes of this kind always are.

As the outspoken robot acclimatised with the workplace, she slowly came to recognise the clandestine foisting of work on her softly spoken friend.  She was outraged.  She had come to be very fond of the softly spoken robot, finding his quiet nature charming and his stoic ethic admirable.  Seeing such good thoughts and deeds rewarded only with opportunistic laziness riled her at the very core.

She decided she would discuss this with the softly spoken robot.  Considering beforehand, she opted against an energetic confrontation, knowing that this would upset him in his gentle nature, and understanding that explicit confrontation is never desirable, and seldom effective.

Broaching the subject tactfully, softly but directly, she asked the softly spoken robot why he accepted the unfair situation without fuss.  The softly spoken robot’s eyes lost a little of their glow, evoking a quiet sadness where usually mellow content radiated.

“I do the best I can”, said the robot, softly.

The outspoken, but well-meaning, robot frowned, still frustrated by the inherent injustice in the situation.  Seeing that she was unsatisfied the softly spoken robot continued.

“When a situation is presented to me, I do the good thing.  I always try to conduct myself in the best way I can.  I try to do the good thing on every occasion, in every situation.  I can’t be held accountable if others conduct themselves otherwise.”

Feeling that he had made his point to the best of his abilities, the softly spoken robot clocked out, it was the end of his shift, said goodnight and went home.

It would take a little while for the outspoken robot to come to terms with the softly spoken robots black and white mindset, these processes always take time; thinking about things, really considering them, is a slow, thorough engagement.  She never fully reconciled herself with the injustice of the situation, and rightly so.

Over months, years, the two robots came to enjoy each others company more and more, and eventually they became a couple, leapfrogging the distasteful institution of dating, and opting not to get married since it was so clearly a redundant tradition, and because they lived in a society which did not allot special exemptions and privileges on those who are married.

The two robots learned a lot from each other, and were duly promoted to more prestigious positions due to their pleasant manners and their admirable work ethics.

They opted not to have children, since the robot population had become over-saturated and was having an adverse affect on their environment.  Though it was the sensible decision, it was something of a pity as less considerate robots spawned thoughtlessly, which resulted in more brash, lazy robots.

Together, the two robots worked hard, and enjoyed themselves.  The softly spoken robot learned the use of being a little more outspoken, and the outspoken robot learned the value of being a little more softly spoken.  They were content a large portion of the time, and they didn’t expect, nor did they ask, for more.

Walking up the Mountain

In line with the last entry, this is another recycle of a piece I wrote for The ACRE FourThought.  The other guys contributions on the subject can be found here.


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Uppa Mountain

I don't often walk up the mountain, but it is an activity I have come to value highly, and is something I always come back to.  There are many reasons I've gone walking up the mountain, and many things I hoped to get out of it when I did so.  I plan on muddling my way through a clumsy explanation of some of these occasions and outcomes.

As a child I lived on a street that sat on a hill, with numerous pathways surrounding that led up the mountain.  From the age that I was allowed out to play on the street we, myself and friends, would extend our play up the mountain.  I grew up clambering up grassy slopes, weaving through tress, getting muddy and covering myself in bruises.  I knew the mountain.

Taking a walk alone, I would explain the aim as escapism.  Finding some time alone.  The slow work of walking up a mountain is the perfect backdrop for a change of pace, the perfect context for working through problems that are playing upon your mind.  Sat or lying idle, the mind is a maudlin thing, obsessing over the negative, allowing mood to fester.  If you're in a bad place; frustrated, depressed, angry or similar, idleness rarely helps.  Swimming or exercising are often used to the same ends as I use walking up the mountain, I suppose, I just happened to have a mountain up which to walk.

It was probably when exams started seeming more important that I first started walking the mountain alone.  GCSEs most likely.  They let you off school when the exams are near, and I'd been driven to meltdown due to day after day of housebound revision.  It's a type of academic claustrophobia that I imagine a large number of people go through.  So when I couldn't stomach any more, I walked up the mountain.

I wouldn't consider myself a very visual person; I find that though I look at things, I hardly ever really see them, I'm not being attentive in that way.  When I walk a mountain, my eyes tend to stick to the path, watching for where my feet are going, so that I don't slip on loose stones, or set off a trap, or startle a cave bear.  It's only when I stop and actually explicitly take a look around that I see much of anything.  I'd assume to some extent we are all awed by a huge sweeping perspective view from on high, and that's always a part of a walk that I find hugely satisfying.  The rest of the walk tends to remain in my mind as a blur of colour or texture; vivid, warm and green in sunlight, cold, abstracted and desaturised in the rain.

I tend not to have much in the way of exercise in my life, I suppose I value the mental over the physical and that has manifested itself in the way my day to day activities unfold.  This was particularly true for me as a teenager.  I read, played games and watched television, I'd fallen out of any sport.  Walking up the mountain was possibly the first case of me wilfully putting myself through, and enjoying, an experience that was physically arduous.  There's a different kind of sweat that comes from effort, as opposed to the sweat of being a greasy pudge eating chocolate and playing Vigilante 8 in an overheated bedroom.  I suppose I learnt that relatively late on, unfortunately.

My worldview is fairly ego-centric generally, and I suppose it's time I widened the scope here to include other people in my mountain walk reminiscences.

One of my fondest mountain memories is a ramble I took with a good friend on a scorching day on the eve of an exam (History A-Level, if I remember correctly).  We were both jaded from the exam period, and pointedly anxious about our place in the world, as all people (teenagers particularly so, I would argue) are.  On our way back down the mountain we stopped and sat on a ruin of a small old building, a corner of brick that jutted out from the hillside.  With the sun raging down on us, we sat philosophising and righted the wrong of the world, a friendship, already strong, forged yet stronger in the cloying heat of the hillside.  The next day, at our desks in the neat examination rows, we squirmed with sunburn.

In the summer post-school and pre-Uni, a group of four of us went for a walk up the mountain, reached the top, and carried on.  The usual pathways we walked were clearly defined, yet we reached any number of turn-back points and we found ourselves just carrying on.  Paths ran out, we ran into walls, fences and thick tree-lines, and we simply found our way around, over or through.  A casual walk become something more, and finding ourselves on the opposite side of the mountain, we guessed this was the effort of our entire day.  We hit paths again, and eventually found ourselves in a town at the foot of the opposite side of the mountain.  There's a lot to be said for the daft excitement of finding yourself in a town where you've never been before, a joy that would be ruined by even rudimentary knowledge of local geography.  You never notice how few signposts actually exist until you don't know where you are.  We came home around the base of the mountain rather than going up and back over, and by the time we'd returned, it was dark and we were exhausted through and through.  It was excellent.

The only time I've been comparably exhausted from a walk up the mountain was on a day trip, again as a group of four, to the Brecon Beacons.  We got there early, trudging up the, for me, gruelling first slope, wrapped in a morning mist that turned sunlight to a blinding, all-encompassing blur, was a thoroughly satisfying experience.  I don't feel we made particularly good time, but neither were we lagging.  It is somewhat dispiriting, on some level, to see other walkers passing you, but when they passed us again going the other way, we realised they were playing a very different game.  We didn't go particularly fast, but we kept going, and only realised the folly ambitionamazingness of our approach when we turned around and saw the size and sweep of the path back to the car.  I think it's safe to say I was wiped out at the end of that expedition in a way I've been few times in my life.  Struggling excruciatingly up the last slope before the final descent I unhelpfully made my friends laugh by forcing out the curse "Jesus fuck!" as I ploughed, aching, upward.  It was boiling that day, too.

Though I have these stories of walking up the mountain in which funny things happened, the actual benefit of walking with friends is the one I touched upon in the sunburn story.  Recently I went walking with a good friend on a whim.  Having reached a turn-back point we decided to take a side trail and check out a small forest we'd never been into.  Until that point the weather had been pleasant, and our unconsidered clothing choices reflected this.  It started raining, and we carried on.  We were in the middle of a discussion, a chat, a debate, there are so many ways to label the action of talking.  I was with a friend, up a mountain, having a walk and sharing my thoughts, my problems and sharing in his.  There's very few things I would consider being better than that in the entire world, it is a delightful pastime.  I would even go so far as to suggest that, very possibly, it is the best way to fulfil intellectual and emotional aspirations, swelling yourself in good humour and good company.

Walking up the mountain with friends is by no means the only way you can achieve this, but it is a very good way, I have found.  The views are at the very least interesting, and even if the company sours, at least you had a bit of exercise.

Everyone should make a point of walking a bit more, I think.  Unless they walk a lot already.

Social Networking

I haven't written here for ages, and so I am cheating by recycling this piece I wrote for something else.  I, along with my colleagues at The ACRE, have started a monthly project entitled The ACRE FourThought where we pick a topic and all write a piece on it.  We figured it would be interesting to see how similar/dissimilar our takes upon each subject would be.  I think they've been interesting so far.


This first piece was for the subject 'Social Networking'.


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Human Interaction Devoid of Real Context

I’m going to narrow this topic down to Facebook, because myspace is now a music website and I am no good at twitter.

Social networking is all things to all people; this is my broad, vague theory.  Some people believe it is for noting their every movement, some believe it is for posting sexy pictures of themselves, some believe it is for plugging their gigs/blogs/videos/podcasts/business/products/etceteras, some believe it is for eulogising the dead, some believe it is for farming, some believe it is evil.  They are all correct.

Social networking is the spectrum of human interaction rendered in digital form.  It is human interaction devoid of real context, which enables people to interact near-autistically, freed from the constraint of manner and socially recognised appropriate behaviour.  Most people are au fait with this for the most part, a quick glance at my most recent news feed shows a plug for a cancer charity, a video of a BBC Jimi Hendrix session, someone thanking their friends for birthday messages, an uploaded picture of a psychotic-looking iguana named Penny, and someone who’s posted her entire night’s plans for all to see, enabling them to conveniently set an ambush for her.  All fairly innocuous, though when you log on wanting attention, it is dispiriting to simply find a stream of people peacocking in much the same way you did the last time you were on there, leaving forced witticisms and chirpy open-ended eagerness in the hopes that people will come on board the comment train.

The main problem, as I see it, with social networking is the same problem to be had by instant messaging.  This form of communication is far removed from what I will refer to as full interaction; the face to face, all-nuance and gurning meat, the classic old-school style of actually talking to someone.  It is widely accepted that a large proportion of our interaction is interpreted through body language, to say nothing of the inflection and tone when speaking, all of which is lost through internet/purely text based communication.  It is possible to write in a very colourful, engaging, descriptive way, it is not a foregone conclusion that shades of subtlety will be lost when communicating textually.  But so few of us are writers, so few of us have the verbosity, the written skills that can be summoned off-the-cuff to flavour a running text-based conversation in a way which doesn’t fall short of what could be managed face to face.  Obviously, I am a writer, and I do have the peerless ability to pour forth beautiful text conversation, but that just succeeds in accentuating my frustration with the paucity of everyone else’s capabilities.  I know it’s not their fault they aren’t as brilliant as myself, but some amount of nuisance creeps in nevertheless.

Ironic arrogant hyperbole aside, the amount of confusion, misunderstanding and misinference that occurs due to the ambiguity of how text communication can be interpreted is a right royal pain in the arsehole and no fucking mistake.  When arguments occur in the social networking arena, you are even denied the cathartic shouting match that would give the pathetic disagreement a degree of drama in the real world.  This was fine back in the day when computer monitors were great big hefty devices, and you could launch a solid, rewarding headbutt on one, but now in the era of the flatscreen and the laptop such outbursts are far too financially taxing.

At the time of writing I have 324 friends on Facebook.  These range from people I knew from school, comedians I met on the stand-up circuit, colleagues and people met briefly on random nights out.  I perhaps communicate with 7 of them with any regularity, and only 3 of them with any depth.  These are the same 3 people I will often see in person.  And in fact, the same 3 people whose words appear on this blog.  I would suggest this says more about my social interactions rather than the medium of social networking per se, but I think it certainly amplifies my habits, or perhaps the right phrase would be that it concentrates them.

Very few who use Facebook with any regularity will have fewer than, at the very least, 100 friends, and perhaps this is an outcome of a generation who grew up aspiring to be Pokemon masters, intent on catching them all.  Facebook isn’t used to chat to your friends, it is used to keep track of them, like a nosy bastard peering over the garden fence.  As they say, keep your friends close, and your enemies on Facebook.

It is ridiculous to what extent you can actually keep track of people using social networking.  There are acquaintances I haven't seen since school whose day to day lives I am familiar with because of it, which, again, can be a good or a bad thing.  In most cases it would be considered inappropriate and downright intrusive to have such a clear view into people's lives.  So why isn't it online?  Because they let us see it.  They put it up for us to see.  So have I.  You probably have as well.  This is the same reason we don’t feel weird scrolling through the 1000+ photos of those people we knew in school but haven't seen for years: it's because they put the pictures up there themselves, and allowed us access to them, wittingly or not.

I have genuinely mixed feelings about social networking.  In writing this piece I toyed with the idea of closing my accounts a couple of times.  Logging in and goggling down the newsfeed has become an unrewarding digital tic of mine.  I'm not really reading the messages, I don't really know the people on there, and for the most part I won't in any way interact with what they post.  And if I did I'd end up fussing over whether my comment was appropriate or not, whether they would understand where I was coming from.

The problem with social networking is that it isn't inherently good or bad.  Nothing really is.  It is an ever-changing chameleon beast; it can be a torrent of jokes, banal updates, bullying, publicly inappropriate photos, links, plugs, self-promotion, publicly inappropriate soppy love messages, publicly inappropriate arguments, empty token 'happy birthdays', arbitrary lying lols or infinitely unfolding comment pile-ups which result in an infinitely filled e-mail inbox notifications.

Social networking is too big a beast to fully get hold of, it wriggles and jiggles and shiggles all over the shop, depending which of the chimpanzees happens to be at the typewriter at that moment.  Once you're connected, it's much harder to disconnect.  Much like life, I often find social networking a largely unrewarding habit in which patience is occasionally rewarded with something pleasing, amusing or of interest, but those instances require a lot of sifting through valueless brown water.

I think I must just hate people.  Or dislike them, at the very least.  And with social networking, rather than in actual interaction on the physical plane, I can be playing a game and watching a show instead of listening to people.  But even then it can drag you back in.  In person, randomly chosen acquaintance A has no knowledge of Jon Irenicus, more fool them, but on Facebook there are a million Irenicus groups to choose from; "Like if you remember this banished elven cunt" (picture of Jon Irenicus), "Jon Irenicus is a mad cunt" or the spot on "Jon Irenicus is NOT a top fucking guy".

Of course none of those groups exist, but the point I was making still stands.  My life is empty, and while social networking is not singularly to blame, it isn't fucking helping.  I'm going for a sleep and complete life re-evaluation.

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To see the pieces of the other ACREs click on this bit here.