I think I watch more television over the Christmas break than at any other time of the year. As it likely was for many, a highlight for me was Charlie Brooker’s 2014 Wipe (still on iPlayer and most likely on YouTube somewhere too) – in particular a short segment produced by Adam Curtis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM
His argument concerns the deliberate disintegration of the political grand narrative, using techniques drawn from conceptual art and storytelling. (Long time readers may remember a post from me back in 2012 tackling similar ideas from a policy-making perspectives)
As a reminder of the task we have ahead of us this year (specifically, ahead of the May general election in the UK), I can’t think of anything better. We have an urgent need to make sense of things that are deliberately presented to us as atomised a-historical events in terms of our own wider narratives and in terms of what we may sometimes think of as the truth. Both in empirical and emotional senses.
On this blog (and maybe elsewhere) over the next four months I will be attempting to do this for UK Higher Education policy. Put like that, it seems like a very low priority side-quest in the grander project of making sense of the world that we live in. But hopefully, aside from a set of posts useful to HE wonk-kind, I’ll also be able to illuminate some of the techniques used to obfuscate in politics, policy, big media and social media more widely.
Wish me luck.
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