“The notion of companies paying for “online endorsements” from kids is even more sinister, although parental consent is required. Thanks in part to the media spooking parents into believing there’s a deathtrap full of paedophiles round every corner, kids are kept indoors and bombarded with sales propaganda as it is. They grow up being told, in the most sophisticated manner possible, that products are the ultimate source of self-worth. A recent Unicef report concluded that British kids are desperately unhappy: they have an abundance of toys and products and a lack of attention from their parents.
And we wonder why the ones who can’t afford these products kick in the windows of Currys and Foot Locker, risk arrest for a gizmo, land in jail for the sake of a shoe.”
As well as talk of what “values” a “product” is supposed to embody (something that still makes me spasm uncontrollably), there’s also a great passage about pooping.
I’m pretty sick of the constant news coverage about the Norway attacks, so much so that it’s put me off reading newspapers or visiting news websites, a habit that’s so ingrained within me that if I stop doing it for but one day I find myself clawing at the walls and gnawing the furniture in withdrawal.
I still find that preferable to loading up another news site to find the same image of this horrid man posing with a gun. It’s not difficult to imagine why he took such a brazen image. He knew it would be visually arresting and that it would be the ideal image for editors around the world to plaster across their front pages, much as they had done with similar photos of the gunman behind the Virginia Tech massacre, the Kauhajoki massacre in Finland, or with others still. The discovery of these images, after the event itself, gives the story more running time. It draws it out further, adding yet more to the endless analysis, reports, clarifications and updates.
Yes, this is a terrible thing that has happened, something reinforced by the placid and even humdrum nature of Norway, a country so peaceful and sensible that it’s news sometimes had nothing negative to report, a place you’d need an electron microscope to study their crime rate, or to tie yourself to a nuclear bomb to feel unsafe there. But as experts have said a number of times now, constantly showing and talking about the perpetrators behind these kinds of crimes only inspires others:
Hello, my name is Paul Dean. I'm a freelance writer and journalist based in south London and this is my semi-personal blog. You might've seen my beard on the board game show Shut Up & Sit Down, as featured on Penny Arcade, or you may have read my words splashed across a magazine, website or even broadsheet newspaper somewhere. I'm also the writer on the excellent indie game Maia.
For more about me, including a pseudo-CV and background, click here. Email me at paullicino at gmail.com if you need writing, editing, screenwriting, copywriting or any of those other word-based services. I also have experience as a broadcaster, because I'm pretty neat like that.
I'm interested in information theory, feminism, science fiction, technology, philosophy (which I studied), games of all types and how the internet changes our culture and our media.
My heroes are people like Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula Le Guin, Anne Frank, Alan Moore and Carl Sagan.
