Tony Blair says the recent spate of shootings in South London (which have continued in Hackney and Manchester overnight) are ‘not a metaphor for contemporary Britain’. Maybe gambling, binge drinking and nonentity celebrity are then.

Shootings aren’t just about culture (’gang culture’ and so on)- but culture does have an impact on the way people live their lives.

And as our ‘digital culture’ develops and converges it is increasingly about advertising, gambling and celebrities. Poor Robbie Williams - £90 million in the bank and he’s addicted to Red Bull of all things. Don’t bother reading this tosh from the Guardian - http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/fashion/story/0,,2014867,00.html - ‘How Colleen became an Icon’. No she didn’t - the media made her into one. Presumably to take our attention off the carnage in Iraq.

People don’t live in isolation or quarantine from these relentless messages. And don’t for a moment imagine that ‘the internet’ or ‘blogging’ or YouTube or Myspace or anything else has the remotest chance of changing or challenging these power relationships

But really, none of this is new, and not unique to the development of telecommunications in the past 20 years or so.

It’s always great reading JB Priestly, not just for the characters, the stories and the general poking of fun at those who deserve it. He always sprinkles his work with marvellous political vignettes. I came across this last night while reading ‘Angel Pavement’

” Miss Matfield went into the lounge, to smoke a cigarette, and spent an envious ten minutes glancing through one of those illustrated weeklies that seem to be produced to glorify that small section of society which works only to keep itself amused. It showed her photographs of these demigods and goddesses racing and hunting in the cold places, bathing and lounging in the warm places, and eating and drinking and swaggering in places of every temperature. By the time she had finished her cigarette, Miss Matfield quite understood the tempation to start a revolution, and told herself that these papers simply asked for one”.

angelpavement.jpg

As Priestly says elsewhere - we suffer from a lot of ‘amusement’ which doesn’t amuse us.