The Politics of Everyday Life: Making Choices Changing Lives [Hardcover]

Its not often in a 200 page book that an author can be accused of not getting to the point, but Ginsborg manages it. I doggedly waded through a fairly woolly headed (but more of this later) analysis of the problems of modern society in the hope of discovering his views on how "making choices changes lives" as advertised on the cover. These views do not arrive. Instead we get a plea for participatory democracy on the local level and an appeal for local authorities to provide decent facilities in which to conduct local meetings. No problem with that I guess, but Ginsborg seems to have a very archaic or perhaps romanticised view of local participation. He blames television for the decline in participation and hopes for a time when people are not so addicted to television and can start coming to meetings again. But this surely misses the point - participation in local meetings and associations was certainly higher in the past, but in the last 20 years society has created a large number of other ways for citizens to spend their time, television being just one of them. Citizens have enthusiastically embraced all of these distractions. In the past attending a civic meeting may well have been a refreshing diversion, but its unsurprising if few think that now. It is all very well to regret the atomisation of society and the decline in public engagement but the fact is people have jumped at every chance to isolate themselves and distance themselves from collective behaviour. They clearly like atomisation. However, the internet clearly provides a way for people to form temporal communities to agitate for whatever change interests them - yet Ginsborg weirdly dismisses this; "Setting up one or two websites" he sniffs "can never be as effective as delivering a letter to someone's house". Perhaps in the Ginsborg household - but in most direct mail is the least effective means of getting people's attention. Most unsolicited mail goes straight to the bin. I accept that this was written in 2005 and the power of the internet may not have been as obvious then as it is now, but it still seems a very short sighted attitude

In fact Ginsborg's entire understanding of media seems outdated. He talks about the subversive influence and power of advertising - and then uses cigarette advertising, and a study of London households in the 1950s to back up his points. He speaks of advertising as trying to create an idealised and one dimensional view of the family in a way that suggests he hasn't watched much TV in the last 10 years. He dismisses claims that advertising is not as effective as once it was by asking why corporations would spend billions of dollars on something that doesn't work. The answer to which is of course that good advertising can still be very effective and influential, but that consumers are no longer much influenced by mediocre campaigns. And as in so much of life, there is a lot of mediocrity around in advertising.

Three other points that irked me. Firstly, throughout the book he divides the world into "North" and "South" rather than more generally accepted terminologies such as "Rich and Poor", "Developed vs Under developed" etc. I agree that the accepted divisions are problematic but how "North vs "South" is an improvement, I don't know. Is Australia part of the (poor) South? Are China and Russia part of the (rich) North? Or is he really just talking about Europe? Its all very unclear. Secondly, he uses novels, rather than sociologal or anthropological studies to illustrate his points about various societies. American consumerism - see "The Corrections". Indian village life? See the early works of Anita Desai. And thirdly, its all very well to talk about ethical trade, and few would disagree that a daily payment of 31 cents to a Honduran garment worker is exploitative. But at what point does the exploitation end? Is $3.00 a day exploitative? $30.00? $300? And what happens to the garment worker if he or she can't even get 31c? And what happens to the community if the trade goes else where. There is no attempt to deal with such issues

All in all disappointing and woolly headed

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