Wonderful Things

I’m bumping into a lot of wonderful things that seem to be sprouting up all over the place.

To keep track of them and share them, I have made a wonderful-things tag on delicious.

Enjoy!

Life’s Ironies: Prizes, Success, Points-of-View

On winning a Best Actor award at the Golden Globes, Bill Nighy commented:

I used to think that prizes were demeaning and divisive, until I got one, and now they seem sort of meaningful and real.

Also today, we got the news that Bob Dylan has apparently bought a mansion in the Scottish Highlands. Which somehow I think the young Bob Dylan would never have imagined that he would ever do. Probably he’d have associated buying mansions with selling out. I don’t know, I’m not that knowledgeable about him, but that’s my guess, based on what he sang about, and what I saw in No Direction Home.

And the greatest irony of all – John Lennon sang:

… Imagine no possesions… I wonder if you can…

And Yoko Ono is still collecting truckloads of royalties from that.

My point?

People are rotten judges on what their point-of-view will be in the future. They think their point-of-view represents some unchanging essence of who they are. But the view you have on life just depends on where you happen to be, and which way you’re looking. The same as the view out of a window depends on where that particular window is.

If you’re poor, you imagine that if you got rich, you wouldn’t behave like rich people do. (And maybe you have unprintable names that you call them.)

If you’re a success, you imagine that if you’d been born in different circumstances, you’d have been just as dynamic. That you wouldn’t give in to hopelessness and despair unlike the sad cases you see on the streets, and either pity or look down on.

If you’re blissfully in love, you imagine that your relationship will never descend into the squabbles and pettiness and stupidity that you’ve seen in other people’s marriages.

And you imagine that if you’d been born in a village in southern Afghanistan, or Victorian London, or a slave-owning Roman family, you somehow would have the same thoughts and values and personality that you do now, not the thoughts and values and personalities that people there have and had.

All of which makes you, and me, and all of us, far too ready to pass judgement on others, thinking that in their shoes we’d do something different than they do.

What We Talk About, And What We Don’t

The BBC gives an interesting insight into what people talk about, at least when it comes to news and current affairs of all kinds. As they say about their “Have Your Say” feature:

It is a powerful body of opinion, one larger than any focus group and one which can be viewed anywhere in the world.

It speaks volumes about people trying to make sense of the new world order post 9/11, trying to work through the relations between different religions and cultures and shed some light on what is increasingly a complex and difficult world.

The BBC’s analysis of what people read and commented on in 2006 shows that 5 of the top 10 topics were about the Middle East or relationships with the Islamic world.

(And another two topics of those top ten were reactions to the death and near-death of two celebrities, Steve Irwin and Richard Hammond.)

This comes in a week when the Archbishop of Canterbury and other religious leaders have been telling us that the world musn’t ignore the issue of Middle East peace.

Ignore? All my life the world has obsessed about it. And never more so than in the last five years. But there is a world of difference between not ignoring something, and having the slightest idea of what to do that will work.

The Archbishop’s answer, of course, is to promote reconciliation and understanding and goodwill between men. Perhaps grounded in the injunction to love your enemies, and others.

And this is obviously wise and good. And just as obviously, it has been said many times before, and saying it one more time is unlikely to make any difference at all.

Loving your enemies hasn’t become popular these two thousand years. As John’s Gospel would have it: “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.”

So if just repeating it one more time will have little effect, what will?

I don’t have the answers, I’m asking the question.

Maybe what it will take is a Gandhi, a Mandela, or a Martin Luther King to emerge in the Middle East. And that is not something any of us can make happen, except the one out there that takes that task upon themselves.

. . .

Meanwhile, notice what the world is not talking about.

As I pointed out in my discussion of terrorism, in the UK during 2006, precisely zero people were killed by terrorism. While in the same year three thousand people were killed in road accidents.

We talk about what is dramatic, new and visceral, and forget what is chronic and ongoing.

We love stories with villains and heroes, where we can get worked up in righteous indignation about the evildoers, whoever we decide they are.

And if 3,000 people died in the UK in road accidents in one year, by comparison 3,000 people die of malaria in Africa every single day, most of them children. Of course, Africa is a big place, and we need to get a sense of the numbers in terms we can relate to. In a population the size of London or New York, that would be 30-35 deaths from malaria every day, or roughly 12,000 in a year.

And that’s just a fraction of the deaths every day associated with extreme poverty.

But the world doesn’t talk a lot about that. Except when there’s a rock concert or a tsunami to bring it momentarily back into public discussion.

I don’t think it’s that the world doesn’t care – just look at the outpourings after the tsunami.

I think it’s that the world has collective attention deficit disorder.

Breaking through poverty with microfinance

There’s some very good material on YouTube about microfinance.

If you know little about this powerful approach to tackling poverty, the first video below “Breaking through poverty with microfinance” is an excellent place to start.

It is, of course, a sales pitch for the Grameen Foundation. But it captures what is inspiring about microfinance, and the spirit of the people working in this field.

If you’re already knowledgeable, the later videos below will be stimulating.

Internet Dating More Successful Than Thought

I’m not surprised by this now…

A study by the University of Bath shows that internet dating and online relationships work for many people, and the likelihood of success for relationships that start online is as great as for relationships that start face-to-face.

Before I got involved with online communities a year and a bit ago, I’d have been very surprised by that. But I’ve found that you can get as close to people online as offline, and what happens in those relationships is much the same too. The same ups and downs, the same fun, the same thrill, the same happiness and misunderstandings and arguments, and making up.

It does seems strange when you haven’t experienced it yourself, but that’s how it is.

Microfinance Funds Universe!

We knew microfinance was powerful, but funding the universe…?

But on a more serious note, this site seems to be a good source of microfinance news, especially for those looking to get some return on their investment, and wanting to judge the performance of commercial funds.

Their stated aim is this:

Since microfinance is currently dominated by governments and charities, objective information with a business orientation is scarce and buried under academic jargon. We seek to provide honest, candid information on microfinance as an emerging investment class.

If you have no idea what microfinance is, you can learn something about it in these places:

• Microfinance: An Effective Poverty Reduction Strategy
• Why an International Year of Microfinance?

There is an excellent in-depth introduction and survey of the field by the Economist, available here. Non-subscribers can currently get it as a PDF from the ACCION website.

Online World as Important to Users as the Real World?

A major study by the Center for the Digital Future highlights the importance of online communities to those who use them.

Some key findings are that:

• 43% of members of online communities feel as strongly about those communities as their real-world communities
• More than 20% take real-world actions connected with these online communities, such as meeting people face-to-face
• Online participation leads to social activism, with large numbers of people both participating in causes that they would otherwise not know about, and being more active in causes than they otherwise would have been
• Almost all users say that online time does not reduce the amount of time they spend with friends and family in person

All of this suggests that it is time to stop talking about online versus real-world. Online life has become a significant part of real life for many people, and the number of such people is growing rapidly.

To me, the findings about activism are particularly interesting. Online life is often portrayed as the domain of the very young, and as rather insubstantial and superficial. My experience is that it can certainly be a light-hearted medium, full of fun, but it can also be serious and powerful. Often it’s both of those at the same time, as with Vasco’s Journal.

The serious/frivolous distinction is as simplistic as the online/real-world distinction. It’s time to recognise that each of us travels back and forth through all these spaces all the time.

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Related Links

Report Summary in PDF
BBC News – Virtual Pals Soar In Importance

School Reunion

A cracking episode of Doctor Who, with one of the most beautiful lines ever:

Some things are worth getting your heart broken for.

Scott Matthewman has written a great review of School Reunion.

The reasons he likes it are mostly the same ones I do, though I get the impression he'd rate it 11/10 rather than 8/10 as I do! (Though on my rating scale 8/10 is very good, and not many things get higher!)

As he says, the reasons can be put in four words.

Sarah Jane Smith. K9.

BTW – do check the links to the Deffrey Vale High School site and others. Probably the most funny and detailed collection of fake websites so far!

I may add more of my own thoughts on School Reunion later.

For now – just to note there was another Torchwood sighting, as Mickey got a "Torchwood: Access Denied" message as he hunted for UFO info on the defence website he'd hacked into.

And the theme of Godlike power was touched on again.

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