Are we becomming too Insular ?

[Steamport Southport]

1 minute ago, TheQ said:

That must be ancient, Dixons / Currys moved out to the sweet briar estate donkeys years ago..

PS they are digging up St Stephens again after spending a fortune on it only a very few years ago...

 

it is ancient. It was a running joke on Alan Partridge about twenty five years ago! 

 

A pastiche of all the old BBC DJs and presenters that were past their sell by date and had ended up on local radio. In this case the fictional Radio Norwich.

 

[Michael Hodgson]

I had to replace my MBNA card the other day because it had broken in half.  So I went onto their website and treied to order  a replacement online.  It accepted all the details and asked me to key in my password again to confirm, the same one i had used to log on with.  It refused that saying my password was incorrect despite my being logged on at the time!  So I thought there's nothing for it, I'm going to have to use the dreaded call centre, waiting for ages while it rambled through irrelevant recorded messages passing me from pillar to post before connecting to somebody who probably works in the wrong department.. 

 

Not a bit of it!.  Yes, I got through to a machine, but it asked me to specify what I was calling about and I said "replacement card".  The machine understood the request first time and after confirmation that it was broken rather lost/stolen it asked for the 3 digit number on the back as confirmation then said I would get a new one within 5 days.  It didn't even ask me my name, adderess or account number - it must have used my mobile phone number to identify me.  Perfectly reasoanble, as there is no real risk in sending a replacement card to my known address.  At last !  A voice controlled system that is efficient, doesn't ask for your granny's inside leg measurement and take all day to get through.  What's more the new card arrived the following morning.  Congratlations to the IT team at MBNA.

[AyJay]

I would like to add my particular grumpy rant into this general despair of modern life.

Last week, I had to ring our Council to try and sort out a problem with not receiving our £150 energy rebate. It’s all my fault, I play the bank switching game.

Having rung them, I was first given a 90s recording, then the press button x options. I chose the best fit and this led to the second level of options, then the third, then the fourth. Finally, I was met with a recording of something that was nowhere near my query, it referred me to the council website, then it hung up! I tried this several times, choosing different options, all with the same result, before I finally found the route to a real person. After 53 mins of being subjected to appalling distorted Muzak and constantly hearing “your call is important to us”, someone finally picked up the phone. Well we are still waiting for a resolution. I did send an email to this person, thanking her for her efforts and asking that she forward my criticism of theCouncils telephone system. I politely pointed out that it was not fit for purpose because it was unreasonable to expect someone to waste an hour of their time and run up a big phone bill that they could not afford in this time of financial hardship. The least they could do would be to offer a ring back service. She replied that she would forward my comments.

[Nearholmer]

Based on how I act, I must quite like self-service checkouts and paying by card, because if that option is there for any “utility shopping”, I choose it. In fact, I avoid Tesco partly because their self-service system is so bl@@dy annoying, obviously biased to distrust customers so forever needing human intervention to OK things (I also avoid Tesco because I remember Dame Shirley Porter, but that’s rather irrelevant to this discussion). I certainly don’t miss queuing up  for ages to pay for one of two items.

 

For less utilitarian shopping, hobby shopping etc, I prefer to deal with a person, because in specialist shops most staff are genuinely interested in what they sell, knowledgeable, and helpful. But that doesn’t apply to Halfords, where only c30% of the staff are on the ball!

 

Most on-line services I find OK, but using a phone service is a lottery. Some are well designed, and the call-centre staff knowledgeable and helpful; some are a nightmare of annoyance and frustration. The randomness of phone services cuts across public and private sector too - you can encounter excellent or execrable in either.

 

Too insular? I think it is easy to become isolated, and I know my mother has found the past two and a bit years a real challenge on that score. Even I sometimes begin to feel that way in winter.

[Ozexpatriate]

Rather than ranting about self-service tills or automated telephone call handling on corporate support help centres, I responded differently to this topic: Are we becoming too Insular?

 

My answer is we certainly are becoming more insular, and not necessarily where we have little choice - like when presented with automation. Every minute we spend online, here and online places like Facebook, or even reading the news online is time we are not spending interacting with someone in person and we do this expressly by personal choice.

 

Electronic connections with people are not a substitute for real connections and yet everyone who has posted in this thread has chosen to use an electronic connection over using that time to interact with someone in person.

 

A specific example might be British 'pub culture' which (I am informed, since I do not live in the UK) is declining. There might be many causes - real estate prices driving the owners of pub premises to sell out, or people watching sports on a bigger screen at home (with the advantage of not being jostled and having beer spilt on you) than there might be in a 'sports'-oriented pub, or the unfriendliness of a cliquéy pub that goes silent when a stranger darkens the threshold. It might be a good thing health-wise to consume less alcohol, but I would suggest that a decline in pub culture and resulting decrease in conviviality is a measure of increased insularity.

 

Then of course there is the pandemic/endemic, where for our better health, we were all instructed that the healthiest thing we could do was to all we could to avoid close interaction with other humans not in our immediate household. Does that make us more insular? 

 

Yes.

 

We are certainly more insular. Are we too insular? That's a different question.

[Michael Hodgson]

37 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

A specific example might be British 'pub culture' which (I am informed, since I do not live in the UK) is declining. There might be many causes - real estate prices driving the owners of pub premises to sell out, or people watching sports on a bigger screen at home (with the advantage of not being jostled and having beer spilt on you) than there might be in a 'sports'-oriented pub, or the unfriendliness of a cliquéy pub that goes silent when a stranger darkens the threshold. It might be a good thing health-wise to consume less alcohol, but I would suggest that a decline in pub culture and resulting decrease in conviviality is a measure of increased insularity.

Pub culture (or at least pub economics) is certainly in decline and hs been since well before covid.

Several of the pubs round here have closed in the last few  years and the buildings or the site used for new housing.  The Railway Inn/The Talisman is now a Tesco.

 

It's not necessarily linked to reduced alcoholism, more to the price of beer.  People are now drinking at home instead, some of them more than they did before as they lose inhibition when there's nobody to witness inbriation.  Covid and the pressure on household budgets can only have exacerbated the problem faced by publicans.   But for several years past the pub trade has been losing business thanks to Goverrnment dictats affecting social behaviour  - the ban on smoking indoors, and the much earlier tightening of penalties for driving whilst "under affluence of incohol".  If you want to smoke at home, that's still just about legal.

 

Whilst steam loco firemen needed beer as a food and to replace the fluids they lost through sweat, the modern railwayman knows his job is at grat risk if he's caught in a spot drug & alochol check.  The same is true of other industries - there is relatively little need for strenuous manual labour.

[Steamport Southport]

Pubs are packed though. As are all the night clubs. Try a major city on a weekend they are absolutely heaving.

 

Those that have closed have usually closed for a reason. Often ones that haven't moved with the times or have been closed down by the police/council due to violence or drug dealing. That's what has died. The pubs on estates that were dodgy. Those type of people usually just get drinks from the supermarket and stay at home.

 

You've also lost those pubs that often had a couple of old blokes sitting there all day nursing a half pint of awful beer whilst waiting for the racing results. Usually with the plumes of smoke from cigarettes. 

 

 

Now you've got massive pubs that have hundreds of people in them. Decent beer, reasonable food, safe, just as many females as males, good service, clean, etc. Also lots of more traditional pubs selling real and craft beers.

 

Since longer opening times came in you also don't have everyone leaving at the same time and having arguments/fights at the bus stops, taxi ranks, takeaways, etc.

 

 

[Ozexpatriate]

6 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

... the pub trade has been losing business thanks to Goverrnment dictats affecting social behaviour  - the ban on smoking indoors

Having experienced English pubs before the ban on smoking, that is one thing that would encourage me to frequent a pub.

 

The brew-pub scene here has only been positively impacted by the ban on smoking. At one point restaurants here had smoking and non-smoking sections which worked somewhat but was something that was laughably implemented, (based on my experience), in English pubs. Brew-pubs here have, of course, been hit hard by the pandemic.

[Hobby]

Pubs? The decline in the old traditional type of pub I suspect was more down to the rise in the TV and video games than virtually anything else, it's interesting watching old sitcoms where in the 60s and 70s the pub would often be used but has gradually declined since then. I don't think the price of the booze in the pub is necessarily the issue, it's more the price in the shops that's the issue, when you can buy the stuff at half the pub price and be able to choose what you watch/play why go out? Having said that I've noticed locally a rise in small, shop sized, craft (I hate that word!!) beer pubs which seem to be thriving, round here the rest of the pubs are either the larger "food" pubs like Steamport mentioned or older traditional small backstreet pubs of which a few remain, perhaps things are now starting to stabilise?

 

I'm surprised no-ones mentioned housing as well as a cause of becoming insular, the decline of the old terraces started it and the newer flats and housing that's being built don't seem to encourage social mixing?

[Nearholmer]

2 hours ago, Hobby said:

the decline of the old terraces started it

I think that depends a great deal on where you are talking about, because “the old terraces” were never anything like universal. I grew up in a small town in the country, and there were only a few scattered terraces, odd bits of Victorian speculative development, yet there was still a strong feeling of “connectedness”.

 

I think part of it was that everyone shopped in the same shops, belonged to at least one of an interlocking series of ‘clubs’ (golf, tennis, scouts, st John’s ambulance, various churches, a multitude of fete committees, the parish council, the bonfire society, ATC, etc etc), a high proportion of men worked locally, schools brought us kids and our parents together, so that the same faces cropped up in multiple different contexts. Most people spent most of their time within the compass of the town, maybe a four mile radius, and certainly in half-decent weather were ‘out and about’ a fair bit. And, there was a great deal of continuity: the headmistress at our infants school had been  the young, new teacher of the entry class when my father started.

 

The things that seem to have eroded some (by no means all) of that are greater mobility, so that people travel much further to shop, to work, and for ‘entertainment’, and first TV (already a force when I was a kid of course), then “the internet”, which again ‘put people somewhere else’, if mentally rather than physically. People tend to have ‘networks’ over a wider geography now, and get isolated if, for one reason or another, they can’t be mobile enough to interact with those networks.

 

”Pub culture” was always a mixed bag, in that by no means everyone went to pubs, certainly not regularly, and women less than men. It was vital for some, but irrelevant to many, and that is probably still true, although the ‘some’ are fewer. And now we have ‘cafe culture’ in a much bigger way than was the case in the past.

 

In short, it isn’t simple to ‘pin down’ the change, and I suspect that many young people are a bit baffled by older people banging-on about it, because young people do interact, socialise etc, they just do it differently from N years ago.

Edited May 27, 2022 by Nearholmer

[Steamport Southport]

That's why I can't take "soaps" seriously. They are like some mythical throwback to the 1950s.

 

Everyone knows everybody else, they don't have friends from outside their street/square/close/etc, they marry the girl next door then have an affair with the girl on the other side who is her best friend, when someone new turns up it's a relative of someone already living there, they never go to the nearest town/city, they do all their shopping in the local shop where half of the people work, the rest of the people work in the local pub where they all drink, etc.

 

I can't remember the last time I even talked to anyone living near me let alone socialise with them. 

[Michael Hodgson]

53 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

I can't remember the last time I even talked to anyone living near me let alone socialise with them. 

I spoke to my next door neighbour only yesterday.

 

Mind that was only because the bloke from the water board was about to turn off her supply for a few minutes to check something.

[petethemole]

The economics of running pubs has had a major effect which hasn't been mentioned.  The effect of the Beer Orders of 1989, intended to increase 'choice' in the pub trade was to break up the tied estates of the Big Six and place them in the hands of 'Pubcos', which rapidly morphed into property companies that leased pubs.  Long-term tenancies were replaced by leases that you paid up front for, often with a requirement to cover repairs and maintenance, previously covered by the brewery, and with rents regularly increased.  In addition leaseholders were normally require to buy their alcohol, and frequently most of their other stock, from a supplier contracted by the pubco.  Hence many leaseholders struggle to break even.  The properties are regarded as an asset to be realised, so are often sold to developers or shop chains even when they aren't failing.  Three pubs near here were bought up by the University and demolished for expansion (of car parks, mainly), another became a Co-op and another a Macdonalds, leaving a huge residential area served by one pub at its periphery.  Two bars have opened up in former shops to serve the area.

 

Pubs still owned by breweries seem to be surviving better although some have gone.  Free houses that can arrange their own deals with breweries are generally doing well; micro-pubs and bars of all sizes converted from shops have replaced the locals but you often have to travel a bit, especially for a good ale.

[eastglosmog]

9 hours ago, Steamport Southport said:

I can't remember the last time I even talked to anyone living near me let alone socialise with them. 

Round here, we speak to each other nearly every day, chatting over the fence or in the street outside.

[pH]

In the supermarket this morning, a guy asked me to read the ‘best by’ date on a carton of oat milk for him. He’d left his glasses in the car, and I had mine on a cord round my neck.

Does this count as a chat?

[AndrueC]

24 minutes ago, eastglosmog said:

Round here, we speak to each other nearly every day, chatting over the fence or in the street outside.

I will happily have a five minute chat with my neighbours if our paths cross but I don't actively seek them out.

[Chris M]

9 hours ago, eastglosmog said:

Round here, we speak to each other nearly every day, chatting over the fence or in the street outside.

I think this little statement highlights a bigger problem than lack of humans at the other end of a phone. Most folks gardens these days have 6 ft high fencing. This provides privacy but precludes friendly chats between neighbors in their back gardens. We quite deliberately have some low sections of fencing near the house in ours and neighbouring gardens. This has two very useful benefits. Most importantly we see our neighbours most days and can have a little chat and update of each others lives. I see this as a very good thing and it helps to keep us all on friendly terms. A second benefit is that we can see the backs of each others houses which makes our houses less desirable for would be thieves. Our neighbour's burglar alarm went off only a couple of days ago and I was able to check that nothing looked wrong at the back of his house from my garden which was re-assuring.

 

There is a down side however. I have a garden railway and my one neighbour insists on saying "I haven't seen that loco before - is it a new one?" It usually isn't a new one but we just don't need anyone asking that sort of question when the other half may be within hearing range. 

[woodenhead]

Another thing on gardens and houses - a lot of houses these days have their general living space at the back - be it designed that way like ours or developed that way through living space extensions to kitchens.

 

The back of my house faces a wood, so if I am in the living room or kitchen I don't see anyone, the only time I see what's going on in the street is from the second floor window in my home office/railway room, even our main bedroom is at the back.  Things can happen in our street we don't even see.

[Fenman]

3 hours ago, Chris M said:

...Most folks gardens these days have 6 ft high fencing. This provides privacy but precludes friendly chats between neighbors in their back gardens. ...

 

Equally, as the poet had it, "good fences make good neighbours".

 

There is some academic urban theorising about home zones. The road is obviously public space; the front garden is a semi-private transitional zone; while the house and rear garden are private space. I hadn't thought about that particularly, but my own home mirrors it -- the rear garden is surrounded by a 2m hedge, and assorted trees block most overlooking even from upper storeys. Despite that I've never had friendlier neighbours -- putting my wheely bin out if I'm away; and only yesterday while they are away on a mini-break I let myself into their house to close an upper window that had blown open in the recent strong winds (we each have keys for the other's house), that a neighbour on the other side texted me to say was banging open. And once a month or so I'll have dinner in my neighbours' house, or they in mine, so it's not as if we don't also have concentrated together time.

 

Another big factor is dogs: those of us who dog walk in our neighbourhood are constantly meeting at least those of our neighbours who also have a dog or who like gardening. Lots of accidental casual social interaction there. While most of us no longer queue every morning at the local bakery, or in the butcher's shop, chatting to our neighbours, there are other forms of interaction which are possibly even more meaningful?

 

There was a big shift in 18th century Britain when the rich -- who until then had regarded their houses as a form of public display of their status and wealth -- retreated into remote private parkland, often moving any villagers away from the vicinity, so that their home was completely isolated from the world. The only status display left on public view would be a lodge house or two and some massive gates, the Big House nestled out of sight at the end of a long drive. Maybe some of us poorer people are finally catching up with the rich?

 

Paul

[Nearholmer]

1 hour ago, Fenman said:

the front garden is a semi-private transitional zone;

Which can be a double-edged sword.

Our previous house was on a corner, and had quite a big front garden with only token hedges to separate it from the street, and I’m sure some people thought it was public ground, it sort of looked as if it was, and people would walk across the grass. It was actually of no real use to us, but a fair old job to maintain, so I was quite delighted when we moved to a house that has a very narrow “front strip” and a bigger back garden - much more sensible positioning of a house on a plot.

 

That big front garden was good for meeting people though, because when I was out there mowing, clipping, raking etc, everyone who came by would stop for a gossip.

[The Johnster]

'Are we becoming too insular'?

 

No.

 

Yes.

 

Probably.

 

Who cares?

 

Go away and leave me alone.

 

 

 

There, just explained modern society for you, you're welcome...

Edited May 28, 2022 by The Johnster

[The White Rabbit]

9 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

'Are we becoming too insular'?

 

No.

 

Yes.

 

Probably.

 

Who cares?

 

Go away and leave me alone.

 

9 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

There, just explained modern society for you, you're welcome...

 

Shouldn't there be a 'all of the above' option? Over time I could honestly respond with all of your options, depending what mood I'm in. Or is that just me...? 😉

[Steamport Southport]

On 27/05/2022 at 13:08, Michael Hodgson said:

I spoke to my next door neighbour only yesterday.

 

Mind that was only because the bloke from the water board was about to turn off her supply for a few minutes to check something.

 

The only thing I know about my neighbours is they like milk.

 

Loads of it on the doorstep....

 

 

[Michael Hodgson]

2 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

The only thing I know about my neighbours is they like milk.

 

Loads of it on the doorstep....

 

 

If there's even more of it there tomorrow morning perhaps you'd better call the emergency services.

[petethemole]

Why, are they short of milk?