Our changing relationship with information- or why more isn't always better

On the top deck of the W3 today I watched a group of teenage girls photographing themselves on their phones- leaning in together with their best group-selfie poses, presumably prior to posting the resultant images on some social media site. I don't think there was any particular special occasion- it was lunchtime and they weren't especially dressed up- but they were obviously all well used to being photographed in this way. I was reminded of what photography meant to me when I was that age- how infrequently one was photographed and how awkward and embarrassed one felt when it happened. Most of my generation have kept hold of this self-consciousness in front of a camera, but I suspect our children's generation will be very different when they are our age.

I have written about the notion of the selfie as an existential act here but the point of this post is a much broader one, about our relationship with information about ourselves (and those we know) as a whole. The amount of information about those around us that is readily available has grown exponentially of recent years. When I was young, once someone was out of sight one knew virtually nothing about them until they returned. Phone contact was theoretically possible but generally extraordinarily infrequent by modern standards- you had to either be at home or find a payphone and have the required change. The person you phoned had to be there (no answerphones for most) and you had to rely on no one else wanting to make a long phone call at the same time. Photos were expensive and unreliable and anyway took days to develop (assuming you remembered to send them off). Letters were something of a palaver and far from instant. It is only twenty years or so since one used to hear announcements on Radio 4 inviting Fred Bloggs, last seen in the Winchester area, to contact their family about their mother who was 'dangerously ill.'

We knew next to nothing about each other's whereabouts or activities in real time and never questioned that lack of knowledge, because that was how it had always been. Our children's generation have grown up in a very different world. They expect to be kept informed in quite extraordinary detail about everything that is happening to virtually anyone they know and we (their parents) expect it of them too.

One's first reaction is that such ready and complete information about one's loved ones must be immensely reassuring. In the old days, when I set off to hitch from the Isle of Mull to Reading none of my family would have the faintest clue where I was until (if I remembered) I phoned them from my destination. Now our children would travel by train rather than hitching, and if that train was delayed by 20 minutes we would probably know about it instantly.

So has this led to greater levels of reassurance? OF COURSE NOT! Whoever coined the phrase 'ignorance is bliss' knew that well enough. Because if such detailed real-time information is theoretically available about those we know then when it fails to appear we immediately start to worry. If that child was due in to Reading at 18.15 and they haven't texted us by 18.35 to say they have arrived, well... Whereas in the old days if they set off on Monday you wouldn't start getting anxious about not hearing from them until at least Wednesday (or maybe that was just me).

The same thing applies more broadly to our social networks, I believe. It was not uncommon in the past to lose contact completely with people, simply because one changed schools or jobs, or moved out of the area. That is why Friends Reunited (remember them?) was formed. I can't see that happening in the same way to our children's generation though. They have come to expect extraordinarily frequent status updates- reminders and reinforcements of their friendships. And such low-grade social contact reinforces social bonds to a much greater and more disparate degree than ever happened in my day. So they are, to some extent at least, in touch with literally anyone whom they have ever met and still want to stay in touch with. Which means of course that people can't just 'lose touch' in the old way. So if someone hasn't made any contact of any sort (liking a Facebook post, tagging you, sending you a pm) in a period as short as say six months, then that must mean they simply don't want to be your friend anymore.

There is a connecting theme here, I believe. Information has come to be seen as a commodity- a need as basic as food and drink. Someone has even amended Maslow's heirarchy of human needs to include WiFi. However just because something is a basic need doesn't mean that the more of it you get the better. Take food for instance, and our current Western society's troubled relationship with it. And whilst lack of information leads to disempowerment and alienation from society, more information (after a certain point) emphatically does not lead to the opposite. Because information, like chocolate, can become psychologically addictive so that we binge on it and make ourselves unwell.

Perhaps that is an exaggeration, as things stand, but project forward just a little into the future. I can envisage a time when implantable sub-miniature sensors can provide us with a constant stream of real-time data about every important function of our body- blood pressure, heart-rate, blood sugar levels, even the levels of stress hormones. They will be popular I imagine, and sold as invaluable aids to maintaining a truly healthy lifestyle (on a minute-to-minute basis!) But can you imagine how unhealthily addictive such information might be? There are plenty in our society who are becoming neurotically health-obsessed as it is and this would take it to an entirely new level. And imagine if one of the implantable sensors failed- the blood pressure one for instance. What would that do to one's actual blood pressure?

And if that isn't a nightmarish enough thought, what about going one step further? What if implantable sensors could assess and feed back information about the functioning of one's brain itself? The state of one's mood; how negative one was feeling; whether one was falling prey to irrational thoughts. Ludicrous? Certainly. Impossible? Probably not.

The thing is of course that information once it exists cannot be destroyed. Not really. Not as long as someone wants to retain it. What can happen to it though is that it can be ignored. It seems a basic human desire to know more about the world around us. We are an inquisitive species- it is probably that as much as anything else that has led to our rapid development- but we can choose occasionally not to be inquisitive. Not to ask. Maybe even not to to want to know. It is getting increasingly hard, but it is possible. There are those in our children's generation who quite deliberately go "off grid." Who close their social media accounts, throw away their smartphones and resort to those ancient and inefficient means of gathering information about the world: their five senses.

And maybe they've got it right.

How you can watch a film without seeing it

Here's an odd thing. I watched Cool Hand Luke the other night and it was as if I had never seen it before. Not that I had forgotten it, just that I don't think I ever really saw it properly the first time I watched it. In my memory it was one of those 60s/70s all-American movies about a maverick hero, somewhere on the continuum between One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I recalled two specific scenes from it- the egg-eating bet and Paul Newman singing "Plastic Jesus." Both of these I remembered as sort of absurdist and anti-heroic in the best traditions of these sorts of films- Paul Newman as the ultimately unknowable Man With No Name.

And then when I watched it again all these decades later it had become a film all about faith and the loss of faith, with an almost didactically precise relationship to the key themes and concepts of Christianity. For a start, Luke (the central character) is much exercised by his own loss of faith. That is what the scene of him singing "Plastic Jesus" is all about. He has just heard that his mother has died, and sits alone on his bunk bed with the banjo that is his only physical reminder of his home life singing a song about the absurdity of religious faith- or at least the sort of faith that means that "going ninety I ain't scary/So long as I got the Virgin Mary/Assuring me that I won't go to hell." Newman's last scene takes place in a church where he has gone to confront God, addressing him as "Old Man" and concluding that he is a "bit of a hard-ass too." It is there that he is shot and killed.

The film is not just about Luke's loss of faith either- it is about the process by which we all construct and abandon figures on who we fasten our faith. Luke is a quite explicitly Messianic figure in the film- achieving victory through physical suffering and performing a variety of miracles which turn him into an object of bemused veneration amongst the other men. Miracles? Well, yes. There is the miracle of the fight with Dragline, in which Luke wins by means of being beaten so severely and relentlessly yet refusing to give up that Dragline eventually walks away, subsequently becoming Luke's greatest disciple. There is the miracle of the poker game when Luke transforms a collection of "nothing" into the "cool hand" that gives him his name. Then there is the miracle of the road, when Luke transforms the attitude of the work gang and changes the unending task of tarring the road into a joyous celebration that makes the road (in the men's own words) disappear.

Finally of course there is the miracle of the eggs. To win a bet, Luke eats fifty hard boiled eggs. It is an intensely unpleasant physical trial, in which his stomach becomes distended and taught as a drum and he is left virtually comatose. Yet even though the effect of his actions in the short term is to deprive most of his fellow inmates of their hard earned cash it is pretty clear that this act of near-martyrdom is in a sense done for the benefit of the other men. The number fifty is hardly accidental- we are frequently reminded that there are fifty inmates in total in the block- and the image of Luke at the end is explicitly Messianic- lying on his back, his legs crossed at the ankles and his arms stretched to either side.

The film is not so much about Luke as Messiah though (whatever some presumably Christian websites would have you believe). It is about the other men's faith and loss of faith in him. From early on they see him as different to them, and particularly once he has successfully escaped (before being betrayed and recaptured) they begin to venerate him. Dragline receives a photo of Luke on the outside, with two girls, and it becomes almost a religious icon- another inmate paying Dragline an entire bottle of soda for it. When Luke returns he is exasperated by the other men's idolising of the symbol he has come to represent and tells them that the picture is a "phoney" but it makes no difference until the guards' relentless sadism eventually breaks him and he hangs onto their legs and begs for mercy.

Here we see the bitter loss of the other men's faith, symbolised by the tearing up of the iconic photo. They become dispirited and lost as Luke toadies to the guards, as if the breaking of his spirit has broken something profound in them too. Eventually Luke escapes again, and it is in the penultimate scene that the Messianic parallels become most explicit. In the aforementioned church, and as Luke is communing with his "old man" he is betrayed by Dragline (as Judas), who brings the police and prison guards to him, leading to his shooting by "the man with no eyes", an enigmatic symbol of relentless oppression. Our last sight of Luke is in the back of the prison officers' car. He is alive, but clearly not for long, and an enigmatic smile plays on his lips. And as the car pulls away the "man with no eyes" mirror sunglasses are crushed under a wheel, symbolising Luke's eventual and paradoxical victory over death itself.

The last scene though is, in a sense, the most telling. Here Dragline is regaling other inmates with an account of Luke's life and death and here, it is clear, the process of mythologising him reaches its conclusion. Lukehas been transformed in death from a fellow-inmate to a symbol of death and resurrection and we are left, thanks to Dragline, with a series of still images of the strange and distant smile that defines his character throughout the movie.

So why didn't see all this the first time I watched the movie? It seems almost painfully obvious now, but maybe I just wasn't experienced enough at stepping back from a story and seeing it in the light of this sort of symbolism. The fact is I enjoyed it then- recommended it to friends and remembered the lyrics of the Plastic Jesus song almost perfectly. So what does that show?well maybe that it is indeed perfectly possible to watch and enjoy a film without really seeing it.

Something sad is happening to schools

Having left the schools sector three years ago I have had little direct contact with it until just recently. Over the last few weeks though I have met a number of people who are still, or were until just recently, teachers. Their stories are all different but the overall impression I have got from them has been sadness, and to some extent regret at having given over their lives to teaching.

This is not a post about how hard-working and stressed teachers are. I think for decades we overplayed that hand, without understanding the stresses and difficulties other professionals face and with insufficient appreciation of the 11 weeks of annual holiday. However it is interesting that British teachers have always had that sense of themselves. It is, I think, no coincidence that of all the countries I know anything about Britain is the one in which teachers are given the least automatic respect by the rest of society. So perhaps it has been in response to this that British teachers have long defined themselves instead by their masochistic insistence on their own levels of hard work and stress.

I freely admit that banging on like this has probably not, over the decades, won teachers a great deal of sympathy and I do not want to re-enter the old and pointless debate about just how comparatively hard teachers work compared to other professionals. The fact is though that teachers are (and throughout human history always have been) crucial to the future of society, so it matters how they feel about their jobs, because how they feel about them partly determines how well they do them, and how well teachers do their jobs affects an entire generation.

The problem is, if the current and recently ex-teachers I have met recently are anything to go on, then how teachers feel about their jobs at the moment is not encouraging. Of course there are people in all sorts of jobs who are pissed off, bored, over-stressed or just knackered, and negativity about your work is far from confined to teachers. What I am talking about though is something different. The staff I have talked to weren't so much whingeing about how hard they were (or had been) working or complaining about the pace and scale of change, or even bemoaning the lack of recognition for their hard work. What they seemed to be saying, and what marked these conversations as different to me, was that it all seemed such a shame. They weren't so much angry or frustrated or bored or exhausted. The only word for how they seemed to me to feel was the one I used at the start of this post: sad. They were variously sad that the job just didn't have the sense of purpose it used to, sad that skill and effort seemed no longer to be recognised and sad that children no longer seemed to be at the heart of what they did.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise. Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, once memorably told a group of headteachers that "If anyone says to you that 'staff morale is at an all-time low' you know you are doing something right," and Michael Gove expressed his antagonism towards the teaching profession (the core of what he called 'the Blob') even more directly: "As long as there are people in education making excuses for failure, cursing future generations with a culture of low expectations, denying children access to the best that has been thought and written, because Nemo and the Mister Men are more relevant, the battle needs to be joined."

It is not just denigration from the powers that be that has saddened teachers though. The near-universal academisation of schools has stripped out many of the extended learning communities that teachers relied on to validate their practice and their sense of themselves as valued and valuable contributors to the fund of human understanding. Curricula that teachers have committed to and helped to shape over decades were swept away by Michael Gove in favour of anti-intellectual 'traditional' structures in which rote-learning again has a place and teachers reduced to transmitters of static knowledge.

The best and most successful private sector companies have learned that the path to innovation and improvement lies with empowering and listening to ordinary employees, thus securing their buy-in to the ethos of the organisation, and also learning from their on-the-ground expertise. Programmes like Undercover Boss may be artificial constructs but the thinking behind them is what lies at the heart of any properly forward-looking company.

Yet in schools there seems to have been a relentless effort of recent years to push in the other direction. Heads have been encouraged to become more draconian with their staff, to stamp out 'merely satisfactory' performance (and performers). Teachers' innovative and thoughtful ways of supporting students into and through their GCSEs have been denounced as virtually cheating and the target culture, which has been so widely derided elsewhere, has become the be-all and end-all of everything in teachers' professional lives. Teacher communities of various sorts (Local Authority based, exam syllabus based, curriculum development based) have been demolished as the unprecedented centralisation of both curriculum development and school organisation has taken hold.

And where in all this is the scope for individuality, for creative thinking and for active commitment to the school, the local community and the children with all their varied needs? No doubt there is still excellent teaching going on and no doubt there are staff who live full and rewarding professional lives. The thing is though, if I were still a teacher in the schools sector I might well be tempted to do as many of those I have recently met have started doing- put my head down, keep quiet and hope nobody noticed me too much. That way I might be able to make it to retirement and the still reasonably generous teachers' pension without my job taking an excessive toll on me.

The thing is, is that what we want the nation's teachers to be doing? Maybe it isn't too late to reverse what I suspect may be a catastrophic collapse in ordinary teachers' sense of playing a crucial role in the massive project of finding the best way to educate the nation's children. What would be needed though would be a Secretary of State for Education whose starting point was not that Britain's school system is broken and needs radical reform or that the means to do so was principally about disempowering the entire education establishment and taking the reins entirely into his or her own hands.

What we would need instead is someone who is prepared to listen to teachers again, to give them a voice and the fora in which to develop and express it. We need someone who can convince teachers once again that what they are doing is important and worthwhile and valued- that they can and should want to learn how to do it even better, but that the best people to help them do that will inevitably be colleagues in their and other schools. We need someone who sees exams and assessment as something that teachers should be central in shaping, rather than, as now, something to catch both students and teachers out and discover their inadequacies.

What we need is someone whose commitment is to the development of education in this country rather than the development of their own career through taking on the education establishment.