The rise of the celebrity wedding

Last week, I did not attend a family wedding. To be more accurate, I drove my mother (who is almost 90) to the venue and picked her up afterwards, but was not invited as a guest. The wedding took place in a splendid castle rather than a church, lasted most of the day, and (according to my mother) was like a long enjoyable party. Many of the men wore kilts, while the bride had no need to blush since she has lived with the groom for several years. My mother had a wonderful time.

This kind of wedding is increasingly popular, and is modelled on the celebrity example. As social relationships within communities weaken because of commuting (for both men and women) and the domination of television, people take their guidance on how to live their lives from the examples of celebrities. Tradition, religion and morality become less important than an outward display of mimicry. The greatest celebrity events are weddings, held in private so that exclusive rights for photography can be sold to Hello or OK magazines. The event is therefore staged with the care that would be expected of a film or a play in the West End.

The celebrity example means that many people now regard a wedding as an opportunity to star in their own theatrical event. This has inflated the cost of weddings, which have become the largest single item of expenditure for many couples apart from buying their house. People can not usually afford such an event when they first live together, and so weddings are postponed for many years. This has a profound effect on the meaning of the event. A wedding of this kind is no longer a commitment by a man and a woman to live together and support each other through life, but is instead a party to celebrate several years of sustained cohabitation. It is no longer a union of two families celebrated in their presence, or for that matter in the presence of the public.

So church bells will ring less often across the fields of my village on a Saturday, and weddings will become private fancy dress parties for ageing couples.

The Laws of Information No. 2

Staff in offices, universities, schools and almost everywhere else are communication victims. The management in my own university is excellent at communicating to its staff. There are attractive magazines full of good news, regular staff meetings in which college heads present their challenges and achievements, all backed up by daily emails from an array of administrators to guide staff about their business. Yet a recent survey of staff has found dissatisfaction with ‘communication’. What could be the solution? More attractive magazines? More meetings? One answer that has not been considered is less (but more useful) information. As I noted in my posting on the First Law of Information, information is costly. Staff believe that all information emerging from senior management must be important, and therefore it must be read and understood. They do not have the time to do this in addition to all the other emails they receive daily, so messages accumulate in inboxes unread.

The cost of information is felt most acutely by staff when it is required from them. There are routine statistics to be completed, forms to be filled on staff and student progress (including one for every single meeting with a research student!), surveys of staff satisfaction, and one-off requests for information which have descended the management line (usually with shorter and shorter deadlines at each stage of transmission). Staff usually see these requests as a chore to be completed quickly, and do not therefore strive tirelessly for accuracy in collecting and recording the required data. This leads to the second law of information:

2. Data is always less reliable than you think.
Scientific texts emphasise the potential pitfalls in gathering data, and careful scientists have standard routines for checking its validity and reliability. Gathering research data from people is particularly troublesome because of their capacity to fabricate, to rationalise, to forget, and even to avoid telling the truth as an act of politeness. Even in a world where people did none of these things, there would still be lag between events occurring and data being collected, inconsistent application of rules for categorising data, and missing data. Yet these limitations are usually ignored when organisations collect and process information from their staff or from the public. Instead of using wide confidence intervals when reporting the information they have collected, organisations glibly report data to an exact percentage point. There are earnest debates about small changes in statistics from one reporting period to another, even though these are probably within confidence intervals.

Interpreting data would be difficult enough if it was simply a matter of general unreliability, but there is the far bigger problem of biassed unreliability. This is the third law of information:

3. Data that is collected to measure performance loses validity.
I will deal with this in the next posting.

The Laws of Information No. 1

After finishing my first degree, I worked for a summer in a typewriter factory. Typewriters are now so obsolete that it is usually necessary to explain to younger people what they were for. But this experience taught me a lot about information and how it is used in organisations. This was because I worked on what was then called ‘O&M’, reporting to a rather odd but very clever Welshman. The first law of information that I learnt was:

1. Information is costly. Back in 1968, there were no photocopiers, office computers, or emails. If you wanted a copy of a letter, the typist had to insert carbons and additional sheets of paper when she typed. There was a limit of about three or four copies that could be made this way. If you needed more, then a different process was required. The typist would type the report on specially-waxed ‘skins’, which were attached to the drum of a machine we called a ‘Gestetner’. The drum would contain thick black ink, which you always got on your hands. Both methods of copying were costly and time-consuming, and a major O&M task was therefore to reduce the amount of unnecessary information circulating round the factory. We did this by creating a flow diagram for all the routine reports generated by staff, and asking their recipients whether they found them useful. We found that many reports had begun as one-off requests by management to meet a specific need, but had then become routinised. Some reports went straight from the envelope to the waste paper bin.

This seems a lost world now because photocopiers, word-processing and emailing have successively made the production of multiple copies much easier. But this has had the effect of shifting the cost of information to the reader. People in offices now spend hours a week sifting through emails, most of which come from their seniors but are irrelevant to their work. Emails accumulate in inboxes, and the ones which require rapid attention are missed. Because the idea has taken root that information is cheap to reproduce, staff are required, often at short notice, to produce data and statistics for senior management. As in the past, these requests can become routinised even when the original need for the information has passed.

This indicates that organisations should revert to the O&M principle of reducing the flow of unnecessary information, to release staff time and speed up their response to the information that really matters. Without this, problems develop with the data we do have, which I will look at in a later posting.

Life as a palimpsest

Before printing on paper was invented, texts were written on parchment made from animal hides. Parchment was durable but expensive, and so it wasn’t wasted. If you had something to write, you took an existing parchment with writing on it, rubbed out a line of old text, and wrote in the space you had made. After this had happened several times, the piece of parchment contained multiple erasures and bits of text which, if read in sequence, made no sense at all. This type of parchment is called a 'palimpsest'.

The word ‘palimpsest’ has been used metaphorically to describe cities. Bits are knocked down and replaced by many different architects and builders, all with different aims in mind. This is particularly true of the sort of European cities in which the streets are not laid out in grids and where no king or emperor has been able to impose an overall plan. Palimpsest cities may make no sense (particularly to a visitor), but can be pleasant to discover: alleys and streets wind in mysterious directions; streets suddenly open out into hidden squares; churches and other imposing buildings occupy sites next to houses and office blocks.

‘Palimpsest’ can also be used to describe organisations. An example is the National Health Service in England, which has had numerous organisational changes and endless new initiatives, each with a new set of organisations to implement them. The resulting organisational structure makes the sort of sense familiar to readers of palimpsests. But the NHS keeps on functioning because the real work is done by doctors, nurses, paramedics and other people who know what they are doing. Chaos only intrudes when politicians, the Department of Health or some part of the senior management interfere. Living in an organisational palimpsest, they naturally speak a higher form of management gibberish (‘targeting the deliverables’ etc). In fact, the decay of language into this kind of gibberish is probably an indication that those who speak it live in a world of meaningless procedures and incomprehensible systems for evading responsibility.

Human life itself could be seen as a palimpsest. As you get older, your memory gets over-written by random experiences, different skills and knowledge. You make off-the-cuff decisions which have major implications for the rest of your life, and make sudden and unexpected changes to what you had intended to be an orderly and planned life. Of course, you don’t see it that way when you look back. Human beings have a marvellous ability to rationalise their actions and to see stories (and even conspiracies) where there are only random events.

New gods for old

Michael Jackson is the latest of our gods to die. Mortal gods are nothing new - many of the Roman emperors declared themselves to be gods. But they seem feeble compared with the immortal gods (favoured by Christians, Muslims and others) who can be imagined as infinitely powerful, wise and just. Those who spend their lives worshipping immortal gods therefore have an ideal set of behaviours to which they can, however imperfectly, aspire. But immortal gods lack personality and presence, particularly if their religions discourage their representation in pictures or statues. Living gods overcome these problems. They become gods because they are ever-present, not in the theoretical sense, but by being on television screens every night. Being on television places them in the special realm of true reality, of which our own lives are but a grey, flickering and imperfect reflection.

Living gods are created by their worshippers, but do not usually require any other forms of special behaviour. Their worshippers are not required to forego particular types of food or wear a special set of clothes or be more moral than the rest of us. The latter is particularly convenient because the people chosen as gods rarely lead exemplary lives. However, a true worshipper will deny any reports of their god’s wrongdoing (even pederasty and drug abuse), or regard it as a sign of the trials inflicted on the god to attain his or her status. Worship therefore involves idealising as well as idolising, and the worshipper passionately follows the lives of the god and creates special shrines in their homes of various icons of him or her. When the god dies, death is denied, symbolically and sometimes literally. The god dies in both senses when their last worshipper has passed away. Many years ago, I have met an old woman who still worshipped Rudolph Valentino and another who worshipped Mario Lanza. None surely are left alive who worship these mortal gods now, and Michael Jackson’s worshippers too will pass away over the next decades. People might still go on singing his songs though.