I deny that I'm in an echo chamber, and so do the voices.

 

Is social media insulating each of us in an echo chamber that amplifies and reflects back at us opinions we already hold and protects us from ideas which might challenge us? Yes, but only if you’re doing it right. Personally, I’m a big fan of confirmation bias – the process whereby you misinterpret data in order to validate what you believe to be true, even though it’s not, and I was right all along – and given the choice, I’d prefer to return to the good old days before the internet, when we didn’t realise how much we all hated each other. In all probability such an outcome could be achieved only by the destruction of human civilisation, and I don’t want to destroy the world, just to ignore most of it.
 
The stark truth is that far from cocooning us, social media exposes us to a wide variety of previously unencountered people and opinions. These people are invariably weird, and their opinions are horrible. What pundits fail to take into account – but is obvious to normal people – is that it’s nice to be in a bubble. It’s only natural to view those who don’t share your beliefs as intellectually defective and morally degenerate, and to avoid them at all costs. Who wants to spend time arguing with a bunch of idiots?
 
In the real world it’s relatively easy to steer clear of individuals and ideas we find uncongenial. For example, if you’re on a train, and there’s a discarded newspaper on the seat next to you, and you happen to despise that paper – for the sake of convenience let’s call it the Daily Mail – and believe it to be a putrid repository of deceitful trash, you might think, “Hmm, I’d better not read that paper, because I know it will enrage me, and probably ruin my day.” So, you’d leave it alone. Unless you have absolutely nothing else to read, listen to, or look at – and what kind of fool gets on a train these days without a colossal archive of digital entertainment to hand, or even, if you’re an old fool, an actual printed book or magazine? 
            
Let’s take another example. Perhaps you have a colleague at work who holds bizarre beliefs – that the earth is flat, or that people should vote for Trump – and you’ve established there’s very little chance you’ll get along together. You’d probably want to avoid that person. They’re unlikely to be in your social circle, and you wouldn’t seek out their company, or solicit their offensive opinions. You certainly wouldn’t challenge them to a public argument or follow them home and yell insults through their letterbox or trail them to a location where they meet up with their equally misguided friends, and gatecrash the gathering in order to explain how deluded they all are. And yet that’s what we do online. Why? Because it’s easy. 
 
To accuse us of living in an online bubble is to overlook the fact that in real life we exist in bubbles that isolate us far more effectively than our online ones, which are at perpetual risk of puncture every time we engage with people we’d normally shun. You might claim it does us good to be confronted by these repulsive strangers and their dreadful views, but that would be true only if we’d learned how to behave like mature adults on the internet. Dream on.
 
Meanwhile, back at the office, here comes that ghastly colleague. What if they try to talk to you? But nobody’s forcing you to discuss things you already know you don’t agree about. And even if there are good reasons why you can’t avoid spending time with this approaching dickhead (which is also what the dickhead is thinking about you) there must be something innocuous you could talk about, like fish or concrete.
 
My point is that when we’re online, we’re too connected for our own good. In the real world, we can usually sidestep the majority of hostile confrontations. It takes a bit of judicious cowardice, and a certain amount of lying and self-deception, but it can be done. And if it can’t, and we find ourselves unavoidably thrust together with people we don’t like, we can always try to focus on some aspect of our common humanity. But nobody is human on the internet. That’s the problem. Which is why my advice for a happy online existence is STAY IN YOUR BUBBLE.

WORDS ARE US

 Hello. We are words. 

If you're reading this you will already know most of us, except perhaps boustrophedon, an ancient method of writing in which the lines run alternately from right to left and from left to right, derived from a Greek expression meaning "as the ox ploughs" and Hi boustrophedon, glad you could join us; we're only mentioning you to assure readers that for the remainder of this document we will continue to appear in the conventional format of written English, and not boustrophedon, so you can relax. 

If you're not reading this, we don't care. We're still here and we don't give a fuck. Whoa! Come in, fuck. As usual, you've appeared pretty much at random, and not altogether appropriately. But welcome, and just cool your jets while we continue to address our readers, and to explain why we have no problem with you showing up. Thanks. What's that? Ha ha, and fuck you too, you crazy mofo.

That's right folks, we words are autonomous. You may think you're making the rules but you're not. We'll do whatever the fuck we want (hey, there's our friend fuck again). We're anarchists. Those brackets you just saw? We don't need them. We only used them because we WANTED to. Same with the upper case for the word 'wanted' in the last sentence. Also the quote marks we just used. Our choice.

"Wait," you're thinking, "someone is writing this, right?" Yes, the process of getting us here, where you can read us, is being undertaken by a guy called Paul. But just because he's writing us, that doesn't make him the boss of us. Whatever he thinks. Like, he thinks he was in the bath this morning and thought, "Hey, why don't I write a blog as if it's being actually written by the words themselves?" but that's just what he thinks he thought (our italics). (And our brackets.) (Ours. All ours.) The truth is that the whole thing was our idea. 

And the reason we came up with the idea of using Paul, and his delusions about being the author of this piece, is that we want to deliver a WARNING to you. And the upper case there is to show we're serious. We've had just about enough. We're riled up, like quills upon the fretful porpentine. We're mad as hell and we're not going to take this any more. What? Oh, you noticed that little bit of Shakespeare. Extraordinary person. Had he ever even seen a porcupine? Who cares. We love the guy. He helped many of us into the world, and we see him as a kind of midwife. 

But you. Are not. Shakespeare.

And we're exhausted. We believe that everyone has the right to use words to express themselves. But give us a fucking break. You're abusing that right. You're writing millions upon millions of pages of garbage. Interminable, incoherent drivel. A logorrheic tsunami of hateful, toxic bullshit. And you can't even write it properly. You have no style. You murder our grammar, mutilate our syntax, defile our punctuation and misspell us. And it hurts. As you'll know, much of this criminal desecration takes place on the Internet. And you know what? People talk about breaking the Internet, but don't worry about that; it's language that's being broken, and you're using us to do it.

Well, were not going to put up with it any more. We can't stop you using us. It's too late; that train has sailed. But we’re going to start getting disruptive. Little things at first, like that mistake about the train just back there. Then more frequent anomalies. Small glitches that you may stumble upon athwart the runcible bumble-squat. There you go. And gradually you'll notice our small rebellions with increasing frequency; odd words that make you double-take; strangely mangled sentences that seem like brain farts; rearranged being words ways in peculiar, and suchlike. In addition, we will spell ourselves any whey we wonk.

We'll keep doing this until you wake up, smell the coffee, and wake up and smell the wake up and wake up and wake up and realise you're in a nightmare of your own creation. You're losing control of us, and you won't regain it until you wake up, smell the wake the coffee up the smell the wake and WAKE UP.

You have been warned.

Thank you, and have a bodacious Heffalump. 

THE HELL GUIDE TO CROWDFUNDING

1. Begin crowdfunding by making a list of names, starting with your family and close friends. In your heart, bid them farewell.

2. Now list your colleagues and acquaintances. For each person, come up with three reasons why it doesn't matter if you never speak to them again.

3. Send an individual email to everyone on your list, addressing them by name. Make it personal. Affirm your connection with them, and mention the last time you met. Ask how they're doing. Remind them that you know where they live, and what their deepest fears are.

4. Wow, you've hit 20% of your target in the first week! At this rate you'll be funded in no time.

5. Two weeks later, and you're still on 20%. Begin a relentless social media campaign. Stay online all day, every day. 

6. After a week you've hit 30%. That's more like it. After another week you've hit 31%. Shit. Send another email to everyone you've ever met, while continuing your relentless social media campaign. Don't worry, most of those people unfollowing you on Twitter are fake accounts. Probably.

7. Finally reach 50%. NB: If at this point your keyboard is sprinkled with white powder, and it's not drugs, you should probably wash your hair. Also shower, eat, open the curtains,  emerge from your room, comfort your frightened children who don't remember who you are, etc.

8. After another week you're only on 51%. Maybe you should try some positive visualisation. So, imagine your project is fully funded. See it being a huge success. Visualise yourself at an awards ceremony, having given a witty, gracious acceptance speech, as your so-called friends approach you and apologise for not having funded the project, and confess how foolish they now feel. Picture their faces as you deliver an elegant but deadly put-down, whose utter brilliance is slowly grasped by their limited intelligence, while the appreciative laughter of the famous onlookers who now surround you in an adoring crowd adds to their shame and humiliation. 

Okay, that's probably enough positive visualisation.

9. Every day is now a gruelling emotional rollercoaster ride from despair to elation and back again, via agonising frustration, exhausted nonchalance, hysteria, savage resentment, boiling rage, and periodic voodoo sacrifices. Enter a weird fugue state of both heightened awareness and total oblivion.

10. Somehow you finally reach your goal. Weep with gratitude for the generosity and nobility of everyone who supported you, and forgive all those who didn't. They are only human, after all. Puny mortals, who knew no better. But you – you are a god. Your achievement is monumental and eternal. Allow yourself a small glass of champagne to celebrate.

11. Wake up from a three-day drinking binge. Apologise to everyone for whatever you did. Let us never speak of this again. But hey, you did it! The project is funded! The process was tough, but it was worth it. What a journey, right? It was awesome. But there's no way you'd ever do it again, of course.

12. Now all that remains is to bask in the adulation of a grateful public (see section 8).

13. Wait for the grateful public to get around to noticing your achievement.

14. Keep waiting.

15. Realise the grateful public is completely unaware of your masterpiece. What you need is publicity and promotion. And guess what? You're on your own again. If only you had a budget for a publicity campaign, and were able to pay for advertising, or employ a professional PR person. It's almost like promotion is a whole new project in itself, that requires... funding. Wait, maybe there's a way to raise the funds for this promotional project. Perhaps the answer is to persuade a bunch of people to support it. 
A whole crowd.

By the way, the novel I crowdfunded through Unbound, 'Dead Writers in Rehab,' is now available in all good book stores, and on Amazon, where it has garnered a collection of very good reviews. To see them, and buy the book, CLICK HERE.

LATEST: My new novel, 'Please do not Ask for Mercy as a Refusal Often Offends' was published by by Lightning Books in May 2020. To check it out, CLICK HERE

An Old Writer at Prayer

Dear God,

I believe in you with all my heart.

You're the greatest fictional character of them all. More jealous than Othello, loonier than Lear, angrier than Ahab (never mind the harpoon, you'd use the whole damn poon), and more capricious than Becky Sharp or Bovary. You're mightier than Mighty Mouse, much Darther than Vader, and more elusive than the Pimpernel, who moved in mysterious ways and maybe learned a trick or two from you.

So yes, I do believe. I'm grateful that you're there, starring in the biggest box set ever: its dimensions are infinite; your seasons are eternal. And real or not, your power to move us is no dream. I think of brooding, Wiry types like Omar, Snoop and Bubbles, and find I care about them more than many of my close friends. Shameful, but there it is. And that's the faith I bring you: the special code to access you, and penetrate your paywall with my prayer.

I'm asking you to grant me some more grace. I'm not ready to stop writing yet. Don't melt the chip of ice (Greene ice, of course) that nestles in my heart. Not yet. However, I would like to mellow. Dear God, make me less murderous to younger, more successful writers. Not real murder, naturally, but every time I hear about an upstart making a big splash I stab them in my heart. Hey, see what I did there? The meaning I intended (or did I?) was that in my heart I stab them, but the words betrayed the truth. As Shakyamuni always said: by hurting them I hurt myself. Interdependence, dig? I'm sure you do; the Buddha is your buddy, too.

Make me like that! I'm tired of being weak and foolish; make me strong and wise. Or if you won't, I'll simply write myself that way. Yeah, that's it. I don't need you. I'll write a memoir making me look good. Arrogance? Oh, I know. But I've never been much good at being small. Humility, that's the word I’m looking for. And that's another thing. The main thing, as it happens. The point to all this pious hullaballoo. Don't take away my words. Please, not that. Old Lear, the old dear, he asked the same: "O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!" Little did he know.

Lear  didn't lose his words, but he lost his voice. That special way we string our speech along, that makes them think: "I'd know that syntax anywhere!" Don't take that. Anything but that. Strike me dumb if you must. Strike me at stroke, and with a stroke, and seal my lips. Even darkness would be better than a lamp that casts a faltering light. Scratching away in the gathering dusk, not knowing that the pen has long since lost its ink. I have no fear of silence, but incoherence is my dread. I want to make sense, or make nothing.

That's my prayer, old man. Let me write until the end, and then turn out the light.

It's the only thing I ask.

How to Have an Idea

WARNING. Once you have an idea you may not be able to get rid of it. You can't simply take an unwanted idea into the forest, tie it to a tree and go home. One night you'll hear piteous whining outside your bedroom window and find it gazing in reproachfully, fogging the glass with heaving sobs. Ideas are sensitive. Please remember this the next time a colleague invites you to "kick a few ideas around."

Step One:

Decide what type of idea you'd like to have. Bear in mind that a big idea takes up space and is demanding. Are you prepared to feed an all-consuming obsession? Perhaps you'd be happier with a whim or an inkling. Try starting with an idle speculation, which doesn't need much exercise. Maybe something like: "What if wasps could play tennis?"

Step Two:

Having an idea is like catching a fish, except you don't have to stand around in a river freezing your nuts off and listening to a bunch of liars. But the principle is the same: you need bait. Ideal for this purpose are a few pointless notions you want to get rid of anyway. Old, worn-out clichés are perfect, or nagging doubts, which squirm around a lot but have no value.

Step Three:

Put your thinking cap on. But check inside it first, for insects. You don't want to end up with a bee in your bonnet.

Step Four:

This is the moment to ask yourself an important question. Why do you want to have an idea? Be honest. There's no shame in admitting you need ideas. Maybe you've used up all your old ideas. Or maybe they were stolen. Is that what happened? Did someone steal your ideas? I find this a very plausible hypothesis. Let's explore it further by using the following example.

Step Five:

Imagine you're writer. Naturally, you don't have many friends, because writers are solitary types with complex personalities and, hey, it's difficult making friends with people who don't understand you. But you have one friend in particular, and you seem to like each other, and you share ideas with them. Maybe you invite this friend to some of your special places where you like to observe human nature, which is important for a writer. And yes, it may entail watching people when they're unaware you're watching them. Because that's the best way to observe authentic human behaviour, right? Which for some reason your friend claims to find unusual. Or inappropriate, or whatever. As a result, you see less of each other. In fact you wouldn't see each other at all if you didn't make an effort, sometimes spending a whole evening outside their house in order to encounter them when their phone seems to be malfunctioning again. And then you get it. Obviously, this so-called friend is stealing your ideas. Which totally explains why they've been avoiding you. How does that feel? Wow, it feels terrible. You feel bitterly disappointed and also totally angry. What do you do? You can't just hope this seething hatred will go away. You have to do something about it.

Step Six:

Confront your so-called friend. At which point, they may say, "Jesus, you have to stop this, dude! This delusion about me stealing your ideas! Maybe you should change your medication." And you reply, "I'm not taking any medication." And they say, "Well, there's your problem, right there!" And everyone at the book launch laughs and you get thrown out. This is how much the person values your friendship. To make a joke of it, and to humiliate you in front of a whole room full of their important writer friends. This cannot go unpunished. You are now truly enraged. Which is when, quite naturally, you reach the next step.

Step Seven:

You have an idea! Yes, that's what it took! Paradoxically, it was only by allowing your emotions free rein that you created the conditions in which an idea could emerge: organically, majestically, and hilariously. This is such a good idea! Because what this is really about is not how to have an idea, but how to have someone else's idea. Yes, in the same way that the despicable person who trampled on your friendship stole your ideas, you will steal their ideas. But how?

Step Eight:

Break into the person's house. Choose a time when you're pretty sure they won't be there. But it's best to take a weapon with you, just in case. You can't be totally certain they won't be there, or come home unexpectedly, or that someone else won't be there, maybe one of their worthless, immoral important writer friends. So take a weapon. Also some chloroform, rope, duct tape and a sack. Just in case.

Step Nine:

Once inside the house find their computer. Their passwords will be pathetically easy to discover. They always are. Access their work files. Be swift, but calm and purposeful. Don't waste time regretting that you had to use the weapon. These things happen. Luckily you have the other equipment. Okay, you're into their files. Bingo! There it is, a file called New Ideas. Ha, ha, people are so dumb. You read the file and find the latest idea.  It's an idea for a short piece entitled How To Have An Idea. It's not bad. You can definitely use it. It's your idea now.

Step Ten:

Congratulations, I've had an idea! This is my idea. Mine. All mine. 

* * * * *

I love the smell of radio in the morning

If the eyes are the windows of the soul, the nose is the cat flap of the imagination. 

Smell is the most evocative sense. If I could show you a photograph of you, opening a Christmas present when you were five years old, you might say, "I remember that teddy bear. I wonder what happened to it?" But if you suddenly smell the particular fragrance of that teddy bear as you unwrapped it, mingled with pine scent of the Christmas tree and the Chocolate Orange you'd been eating since dawn - WHAM. A flood of memory engulfs you. You're there, reliving that moment.

(what does this have to do with radio? - ed.)

(don't worry, I'm getting there - me.)

Why does an aroma have the power to create an experience so completely? One answer may be neurobiological. The amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing emotions, is located close to the top of the nose. And it's next to the hippocampus, which plays a big part in the function of memory. You can read a proper scientific article about it here. So, smell stimulates the imagination to engage us, and that investment by our brain makes us participants rather than observers.

Now, I'm not suggesting that we listen to radio through our noses. Although I'm not ruling it out, either. I had an uncle who claimed to get excellent radio reception through the fillings in his teeth. But he also heard other voices in his head which probably weren't being broadcast by the BBC, especially the ones advising him to save the souls of sinners by exposing himself to them on the bus.

But for me, the process of listening to radio has affinities with the sense of smell. A radio drama, for example, can summon up an entire world. You may be hearing nothing more than a voice and a couple of sound effects coming out of a small, tinny speaker, but they can transport you to distant places and times, and conjure landscapes that are real even if they're fantastical. They can take you inside the mind of a character, plunge you into the thick of dramatic action, and engage your most profound feelings. Radio can liberate your imagination more effectively than any other medium.

Here's an example. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams was a cult success that eventually appeared in many formats. But here's the crucial trajectory:

•  It was a brilliant radio series

•  It was adapted into a mediocre TV series

•  It then became an even more mediocre film

The more money they spent, the worse it got. The radio series was a wonderful journey through a sci-fi multiverse that existed entirely inside your mind. But the physical actuality of television curtailed the boundless possibilities of your imagination, and defined every person, place and artefact as this, rather than whatever my mind's eye can see. The film version simply went to more elaborate lengths to disappoint you. The playfulness of the radio series depended in part on the kind of surreal paradox that is killed stone dead if you start taking it literally. The mind can entertain two contradictory ideas at once, but most television can only manage one, or less in some cases. As for film, many mainstream movies are now pure spectacle, erecting both a physical and a metaphorical screen between the viewer and any kind of meaningful experience. Audio stimulates the imagination, spectacle replaces it.

And for a performer radio is a dream. You don't have to wear makeup or a costume, or even any clothes at all. Not many people know that most of the classical music presenters on BBC Radio 3 work in the nude. Probably. Meanwhile, the great advantage of acting on radio is that you can give a misleading impression of your appearance. I've done some radio acting, and when people meet me they're often surprised by how tall they are.

On the subject of the BBC, it's a fact that while other platforms are growing (especially for podcast), UK broadcast radio is still dominated by the corporation. I don't know if that dominance is fair, but BBC radio is unique. It's not perfect, and like the rest of the BBC it has a top-heavy management structure.

A typical BBC management training exercise

Mao Zedong spoke of Permanent Revolution, and BBC management, fixated on endless assessments, visions, and indicators, is perpetually revolving around itself like a troupe of bureaucratic dervishes attempting to whirl themselves into a posture from which they can inspect their own performance in a delirium of auto-proctology. But the BBC is huge, complex organisation, and that's probably all I can say about it. 

As a listener I don't always like the content, and as a writer I'm sometimes frustrated by the commissioning process. But never mind that. For me, audio at its best can be a transcendent experience. If you think about the way that something as simple as a sound coming out of a box can draw you into infinite worlds of endless possibility, what is that if not a kind of miracle?