This weekend I went to visit the Eden Project with my family. For those of you in the US and other parts of the World The Eden Project is a fantastic arboretum consisting of two huge bio-domes full of trees and plants from all over the world; you can see it all on the website. It is a truly fantastic place and was even used in a Bond film but you know when I walk around it I can’t get that Joni Mitchell song out of my head. You know the one – Big Yellow Taxi where she sings:
They took all the trees
Put ’em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see ’em
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
That’s just what I feel like as I walk around the place it’s a tree museum and Joni, let me tell you they charge a lot more than a dollar and a half just to see em! I feel slightly uncomfortable in places like this. To me it's just another example and reminder of how we're messing up this world - maybe thats the whole point, but what if we didn't do these things in the first place? I know that naive and simplistic but I just feel that while these trees and plants are nice they are out of context. Its wrong.
I feel the same way about zoos. My wife wants to visit a zoo. She genuinely loves animals and wants to see them in the zoo. But zoos always strike me as unhappy places. The glum animals pacing around their gaols or lying bored out of their skulls on concrete representations of the savannah. All of them, to me, exhibiting various symptoms of psychological damage, its not a happy day out for me. My wife tells me that the animals in Western Zoos must be happy when compared to the zoos in Ukraine where the keepers probably not only eat the lion’s share of the meat but probably the lions too!
I guess this might be because as a Sociologist I enjoy seeing human beings in their natural surroundings – the shopping mall, the coffee shop, on the High St! There are many more interesting sights on the High St than in any zoo. And I think I might have come across the next stage in human evolution this weekend. I was sitting idly, in a coffee shop, if you ask, contemplating the people around me, one of my favourite activities when I spied a group of young women. Yes I know ones eyes are always inexorably drawn to groups of young women, but on this occasion I was fascinated, not by their bodies, but by their use of the mobile phone.
There seems to be a certain addiction to these machines as they cannot leave them on the table or in their bags for more than 30 seconds at a time, without having to look at them or pinging off some txt message to someone. And it was the txt messaging that enthralled me. These young women seem to have evolved thumbs that are disjointed from the rest of their bodies so that they can hit the txt buttons of the phone at remarkable speeds.
It reminded me of badly made kung fu film where all the choreography is done slowly and then the film is speeded up to make the action look fast. This is what their thumbs looked like to me, like they had been dubbed onto their bodies, a fantastic animation of some sort of cyber thumb not a human movement at all, it was a bit spooky.
I am sure that as technology advances phone technology will be integrated into our bodies and we won’t even have to have digitally active thumbs, we’ll just have to think of the message and think of who we want it to go to. Then all interaction between humans will start to become more electronic than vocal – if its not already, I mean this communication between us is electronic after all.
Hmmmmm?
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Thanks Joni!
They took all the trees
Put ’em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see ’em
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
That’s just what I feel like as I walk around the place it’s a tree museum and Joni, let me tell you they charge a lot more than a dollar and a half just to see em! I feel slightly uncomfortable in places like this. To me it's just another example and reminder of how we're messing up this world - maybe thats the whole point, but what if we didn't do these things in the first place? I know that naive and simplistic but I just feel that while these trees and plants are nice they are out of context. Its wrong.
I feel the same way about zoos. My wife wants to visit a zoo. She genuinely loves animals and wants to see them in the zoo. But zoos always strike me as unhappy places. The glum animals pacing around their gaols or lying bored out of their skulls on concrete representations of the savannah. All of them, to me, exhibiting various symptoms of psychological damage, its not a happy day out for me. My wife tells me that the animals in Western Zoos must be happy when compared to the zoos in Ukraine where the keepers probably not only eat the lion’s share of the meat but probably the lions too!
I guess this might be because as a Sociologist I enjoy seeing human beings in their natural surroundings – the shopping mall, the coffee shop, on the High St! There are many more interesting sights on the High St than in any zoo. And I think I might have come across the next stage in human evolution this weekend. I was sitting idly, in a coffee shop, if you ask, contemplating the people around me, one of my favourite activities when I spied a group of young women. Yes I know ones eyes are always inexorably drawn to groups of young women, but on this occasion I was fascinated, not by their bodies, but by their use of the mobile phone.
There seems to be a certain addiction to these machines as they cannot leave them on the table or in their bags for more than 30 seconds at a time, without having to look at them or pinging off some txt message to someone. And it was the txt messaging that enthralled me. These young women seem to have evolved thumbs that are disjointed from the rest of their bodies so that they can hit the txt buttons of the phone at remarkable speeds.
It reminded me of badly made kung fu film where all the choreography is done slowly and then the film is speeded up to make the action look fast. This is what their thumbs looked like to me, like they had been dubbed onto their bodies, a fantastic animation of some sort of cyber thumb not a human movement at all, it was a bit spooky.
I am sure that as technology advances phone technology will be integrated into our bodies and we won’t even have to have digitally active thumbs, we’ll just have to think of the message and think of who we want it to go to. Then all interaction between humans will start to become more electronic than vocal – if its not already, I mean this communication between us is electronic after all.
Hmmmmm?
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Thanks Joni!
Posts
2 comments:
Oh man Dr. Rob what an excellent post. And now I have that song going over and over and over in my brain. I would love to see that Eden Project. It looks very interesting and the architecture behind it all looks so futuristic. I garp what you said, and what Joni sings, about the feeling you had about those trees and such being in a museum. Perhaps someday that sort of display will be the only place we do get see what trees once looked like. I hope not in my lifetime. I can hear it now, “Come on in folks. You can even take off your breathing apparatuses in here. That’s right folks, what you are breathing is real, honest to goodness, oxygen from real living trees.”
Oh progress.
I would love to visit The Eden Project. I spent many holidays in the past in the area before it was built.... but it's one helluva journey now :o(
Godamn....I can't get that song out of my head now!
Post a Comment