Life through a lens

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I'm left with a bit of a dilemma. I don't want to spend the next six months travelling and having to think about communications and work type stuff but I also don't want to leave this blog (and my brains) lying dormant. So I have come up with the following idea...

It's a bit like a personal photography ethnography for want of a better expression. I'm going to hone my photographic skills by asking the question: 'Who cares about big advertising budgets when there is this in the world?'......insert image

I don't know where it's going to go. But I'm hoping it will vary from the irreverence to the deep and meaningful. This should keep me on my toes.

The world has gone mad I tell thee!

At the moment I’m about half way through my Open University Ethnography course and throughout the study material they always use the possessive adjective, ‘her or his’ instead of ‘his or her’, which incidentally should be replaced by ‘their’ in order to avoid any suggestion of sexism – which is fine by me. Now my spelling and grammar is distinctively average, so I’m not preaching about being grammatically correct. But when political correctness starts making the English language sound ugly I get annoyed. Try reading or writing a sentence using ‘her or his’ in it. It just sounds and feels weird.

"A student studying for their first degree". Sounds normal to me
"A student studying for his or her first degree". Sounds a bit too formal
"A student studying for her or his first degree". Sounds like a man hating, bra burning women wants to make a point.

I’m all for moving away from sexist or discriminative language, but please get a grip.

What do people do with their lottery winnings?

What do people do with their lottery winnings? I don't mean the big life changing amounts. Just the £10 here or the £20 there. I've tried to find out how much prize money this equates to every week but no luck as of yet. I'm thinking about this because I was on the train the other day and I overheard a lady telling a friend she voted 5 times for the winner of that irritating Joseph programme after winning a tenner on the lottery. I imagine there are loads of little micro-economies that benefit from these winnings. Things like takeaways and off licenses are the obvious ones, but I thought this example of lottery winnings funding reality TV voting interesting.

Ethnography

I’ve probably just made another educational mistake. After all my marketing communications degree from Bournemouth University obviously wasn’t that appealing when I was looking for my first job in planning. Marketing communications is so cliché apparently. Perhaps Universities should start adding ‘interesting’ units to their courses with the aim of proving how interesting a student is. Things like Zoology, French History and Biochemistry being my favourites.

Anywhooo. The controversial words are; Open University and Ethnography. I start my course next month and I’ve been racking my brains trying to come up with an idea for my practical work. So far I have only come up with a couple of ideas.

The creative development process. I’m interested in how the dynamics of groups solve problems.

Something on fandom. My work is full of Southampton fans and they must be the most pessimistic bunch in the world. I’d like to know why.

Over at the Plannersphere I’ve also been given a couple more ideas. One from John Grant relating to how the planning community manage social and professional identities and another from Michael Johnston on moving research in web 2.0.

Always look on the bright side of life

I’ve been working on a few campaigns over the last year aimed at what I’ll call young working class people, who like a good time, but they're often referred to as chavs as soon as the brief comes through the door. I’m sure that’s the same in many agencies full of proper folk. Now I love this post about liking your audience. I think it’s too easy to be cynical. We’re quick to make assumptions about people and the first thing we naturally do is to look at the bad side of people rather than the good side.

As a single parent bringing up two boys, if my Dad wanted a couple of pints down the local after football, he didn’t have much choice other than to take my brother and me with him. I remember nearly every Saturday afternoon being dragged down the pub, until I, well, wanted to go myself. This was a great experience, although I remember finding it boring at the time (my hair being ruffled was also quite annoying). And the reason being is you see the fun, jovial, good spirited side of a diverse group of people. The rough diamonds if you like. From now on if the cynic in me raises its ugly head I’ll be sure to remember the good old days.