So today me and Sari went to Monument station and interviewed people around the city of London specifically dressed in suits. We found firstly that:
1. Shannon Howard is very annoying and doesn't check that the on button on the mic is fully switched on
2. Most people were rushing around/waiting for business lunches/about to leave for a meeting
3. It was a lot of white dudes in suits
4. We are both very shy when it comes to vandalism/penraging
5. Most of the suits were very friendly, especially two guys in a pub we were told to find by another man who had to rush off who ended up talking to us for ages and offering to get us a drink
Interestingly as well, and what I wanted to talk more about is the homogeneity in the answers given by the archetypal successful people we spoke to today and other people we have interviewed who are arguably in a more precarious situation, ie students, cleaners at Goldsmiths. A lot of the answers today centred around contentment and happiness being as a result of surrounding yourself with family and friends which has been a common theme throughout the interviews. The interesting thing about the similarities in these answers is that the people we are interesting have very different financial situations, social situations and working conditions. Although this is interesting I don't think it is surprising. A lot of people spoke about pressures around being young in such industries when they were younger to do with success and money, which one guy said took a back seat once he settled down, and as the majority of the people we interviewed were 40+ men it would have been interesting to see the responses of younger people.
I think it's do with the idea of contentment, or the myth of it that creates such homogeneous responses. Everyone interviewed has said that family, friends and stability are the key to contentment but the people in the city have better material conditions than others interviewed. Even when we talked about stress and working hours, people said that 80% or above work 9-5 jobs in the insurance industry, or at least the 12 hours days are rare in their field. Such contentment means that the factors that appease city workers and those that appease cleaners or students are the same, meaning that self reflection on your own material condition/those of others becomes very difficult because you become less able to evaluate your own advantages/points of oppression (sorry not sorry for the Marxist tone guys xxx). Also I don't mean this to be demeaning or insulting to students or cleaners, and i really hope it hasn't come across as that, but from a lot of the work/stuff I've learnt to do with social reform, it's the same sort of appeasement that comes as a result of social welfare. In Germany in the early 20th Century, to protect the stability of the Crown a lot of piecemeal social reform was created to stop people revolting and killing their factory owners, because of this, a sort of acceptance came on the part of the workers who were appeased due to their conditions being improved but arguably not in a positive way because it meant factory owners/capitalists were still able to exploit their labour. I would go in more detail about this but this is form A Level history which was a v v v long time ago. Anyway, yeah, I think that contentment acts as a set of rose tinted glasses that can dramatically change the way you view your own situation, which isn't surprising because I doubt a lot of people would readily admit that their labour is exploited, but definitely something to bear in mind in terms of our project.
I hope this made a little bit of sense,
Shannon xxx
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