Looking In From Outside

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"It is often the case that observers from other countries or cultures notice things about our behaviour that we do not because we are so accustomed to the behaviour that we cannot recognise its significance."

Arthur Asa Berger, (2009), What Objects Mean: An Introduction to Material Culture, Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press.

Ethical News Reporting

"If you don't want to propagate more mass murders...

Don't start the story with sirens blaring.

Don't have photographs of the killer.

Don't make this 24/7 coverage.

Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story.

Not to make the killer some kind of anti-hero.

Do localise this story to the affected community and as boring as possible in every other market." - from Newswipe by Charlie Brooker.

The Significance Of Our Belongings

"People do not necessarily understand the importance and significance of the things they own."

"It is often the case that observers from other countries or cultures notice things about our behaviour that we do not see because we are so accustomed to the behaviour that we cannot recognise its significance."

 - Arthur Asa Berger, (2009), What Objects Mean: An Introduction to Material Culture, Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press.

Pic - Cabinet of Curiosities of Bonnier de la Mosson, Library of the Museum of Natural History, Paris

"The essence of fashion consists in the fact that it should always be exercised by only part of a given group, the great majority of whom are merely on the road to adopting it. As soon as a fashion has become universally adopted, that is, as soon as anything that was originally done only by a few has really come to be practised by all - as is the case in certain elements of clothing and in various forms of social conduct - we no longer characterize it is fashion. Every growth of a fashion drives it to its doom, because it thereby cancels out its distinctiveness." - Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Fashion, The Consumption Reader, (2003) Clarke DB and Doel MA (eds), Routledge.

What We Own Controls Us

Max Weber

"Material goods have gained an increasing an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period of history." - Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 2002 translation by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells, Penguin Books.

"...we are locked into a situation in which we can never stop yearning for new and better things because we are always comparing ourselves with others who have more than we do." - Arthur Asa Berger, (2009), What Objects Mean: An Introduction to Material Culture, Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press.

Conspicuous Consumption

"As fast as a person makes new acquisitions, and becomes accustomed to the new standard of wealth, the new standard forthwith ceases to afford greater satisfaction than the earlier standard did." - Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)

Advertising and Marxist Economic Theory

"Advertising's immediate goal is to sell artefacts and various kinds of products, but its long range goal is to turn people's attention away from their exploitation and justify the existence of a capitalist economic system." - Arthur Asa Berger, (2009), What Objects Mean: An Introduction to Material Culture, Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press.

Pic - Statue of Karl Marx in Addis Ababa.

Berger's Methods of Gratification Provided by Artefacts

To have beautiful things.

To find diversion and distraction.

To imitate models we respect.

To affirm aesthetic values.

Arthur Asa Berger, (2009), What Objects Mean: An Introduction to Material Culture, Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press.

How History Teaches Us

"History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process." Margaret MacMillan, (2009) The Uses And Abuses Of History, London, Profile Books.

"Lost golden ages can be very effective tools for motivating people in the present."

Language As a Self-Contained System

Ferdinand De Saussure

"De Saussure was among the first to see that language is a self-contained system whose interdependent parts function and acquire value through their relationship to the whole." - Wade Boskin, translator of De Saussure's books.

Obama at the UN

"At the UN, President Obama called on other countries to help us track down and eliminate radicals and extremists. But they told Obama, 'Hey, the Tea Party is your problem buddy' " - Jay Leno.

On Nationalism, A Rebuttal

"A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours." - Karl Deutsch (1912-1992), Czech political and social scientist.

On Nationalism

"A nation is a great solidarity created by the sentiment of the sacrifices which have been made and those which one is prepared to make in the future." - Ernest Renan (1823-1892), French writer, philosopher and political theorist.

Using History

"If history is the judge to which we appeal, then it can also find against us. It can highlight our mistakes by reminding us of those who, at other times, faced similar problems but who made different, perhaps better decisions" - Margaret MacMillan, (2009) The Uses And Abuses Of History, London, Profile Books.

"A cockroach in the concrete, courthouse tan and beady eyes
A slouch with fallen arches, purging truths into great lies
A little man with a big eraser, changing history
Procedures that he's programmed to, all he hears and sees
Altering the facts and figures, events and every issue
Make a person disappear, and no one will ever miss you

Rewrites every story, every poem that ever was
Eliminates incompetence, and those who break the laws
Follow the instructions of the New Way's Evil Book of Rules
Replacing rights with wrongs, the files and records in the schools" - Lyrcis to Hook In Mouth by Megadeth, written by Dave Mustaine.

"The word [classical] carries the implication that the works of art and literature produced in Graeco-Roman antiquity possess an absolute value, that they form the standard by which all others are to be judged." - Griffen, J., in Boardman, J., Griffin, J., and Murray, O., (1986) The Oxford History of the Classical World, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Objectivity

"Some scholars are doubtful of the usefulness of distinguishing between subjective and objective, arguing that even apparently objective observations are dependant on the judgement of the observer who makes them, or on the accuracy of their observations, and that objective facts which are independent of someone observing them cannot exist" - Phil Perkins in Hughes, J. and Perkins, P., Approaches A151 Book 1, The Open University, 2012.

A Poverty Of Contemplative Thought ?

"Over the last 100 years or so the loss of the religious as a reputable discourse in common life has led to a poverty of language, and thus to a poverty of contemplative thought and feeling about what we are, and what we need. We need some inner stuff, scaffolding to help us get around our inner space, something to help us map, explore and even settle those places where we are still primitive." - Jane Davis in the essay The Reading Revolutiuon in Vintage Books' Stop What You're Doing And Read This, London, 2011.

The Reader Organisation

Defining Islam

"Defining Islam is far from a simple matter. Using Western categories that may be alien to Muslim perceptions, we may state from the start that Islam may be both a religious faith and a political ideology; it is also, in some contexts, a mark of personal and group identity. These three definitions neither exclude nor include each other." - Malise Ruthwen, A Very Short Introduction To Islam, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Literally - actually; without exaggeration or inaccuracy

"He's literally left Ben Haim for dead there." - football pundit and buffoon Jamie Redknapp witnesses an on-pitch murder during a Liverpool - Chelsea match.

Ben Haim - not dead, just slightly gormless looking.

The Petty Officer of Fucking About

""TODAY THE God Of Fuck is merely the Petty Officer Of Fucking About; the Local Ombudsman Of Mildly Irritating Behaviour. He's locked in his suitably grand room at a Park Lane hotel with plenty of absinthe and 'a young lady friend'. A wide-eyed reporter from a London free title eventually comes down the stairs declaring him to be "leathered"; saying that the lanky industro-goth was striding round his room with the girl tossed over his shoulder chatting bare nonsense."

- Journalist John Doran reaches the end of his tether while waiting for Marilyn Manson to turn up for a scheduled interview, 2009.