Tag: observations

Future Shock! – How popular culture views the future

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8J38ElzbAM]

The future is coming, or so they say. And as it approaches us head-on, we can do little to avoid collision with its impending certainty. I for one am looking forward to the invention of hoverboards in 2015, but am still nervous every time I turn on my computer of the day when robots rule the earth.

There are various artistic visions of how the future will pan out. In films and books we have been shown everything from sleek space-age technological dreams to dark, zombie-infested post-apocalyptic worlds, from grim cyberpunk metropolises Continue reading “Future Shock! – How popular culture views the future”

“I Want to Get Out!” – Supermarkets as Non-Places

While browsing a shopping aisle in a Tesco supermarket some time back I witnessed a young child sat in the constrictive rear-facing child seat of a shopping trolley. I would have passed little notice of this regular occurrence had the child not been in some consternation as to its current predicament. The young fair-haired boy wailed repeatedly at the top of his voice, to the pained facial expression demonstrating his busy mother’s exacerbated patience “I want to get out!”

It may have been the fact that I was on the way to the Electric Picnic music festival with my girlfriend, full of anticipation for impending youthful whimsy and unsolicited feelings of freedom from the rat-race for a weekend at least, but the repetition of the phrase, and in particular the context of uttering “I want to get out!” repeatedly in the anti-labyrinthine supermarket geography made me turn and muse whimsically to my better half, “Is that not the perfect social statement?” Continue reading ““I Want to Get Out!” – Supermarkets as Non-Places”