TV Times

Chris Norton, May 23rd 2006, 12:38PM

This year Big Brother rolled out its uber-trashy all-seeing televisual eyes amidst a welter of warnings - 'kiss goodbye to your summer' cried everyone from Heat magazine to BB's own increasingly cartoonish Davina McCall. There's a grain of truth in that, at least for those of us who can't be bothered putting up an impenetrable, culturally cool acceptable front... in fact half of us round these parts of the office are already discussing Shahbaz every morning, like the bunch of gossiping old fishwives we really are.

The real-time nature of BB, and the fact that it generates those 'water-cooler' conversations (you know, the sort all the media journalists were going on about a few years ago), well it makes me think. There's all this buzz online about iTunes selling episodes of Lost (another of our favourites, especially now the plot seems to revolve around people sitting in a room doing inexplicable things with computers) and the new plan to sell 24 (yeah, we love Bauer too) on myspace.

But this narrowcasting approach, treating TV shows like music, seems a little foolish - TV is completely different, and nowhere near the solitary experience the naysayers wibble on about. In fact, I think it's the most social of modern media. Discussion of last night's crop of big shows is a vital office bonding experience... Daz got quite annoyed with me because I missed Lost the other week, and fair enough, I was a bit miffed myself. Not because I missed it, but because we all need a bit of fuel for talking outside of the world of SQL queries and web form design. OK, and because I missed it.

Hey, if you can't gossip openly about your colleagues, at least you can gossip openly about the people on TV - and to do that you need to be tuning in as it happens, in synch. Now where's my copy of Heat?

Tags: bigbrother, conversations, media, myspace, office, tv, video
# Comment (3 comments)

I heard the noise today, oh boy

Chris Norton, April 19th 2006, 9:58AM

Aside from the fact that we have Big Brother, deadlines, diets and one hundred different ways to get in touch with people electronically in order to tell them what a crazy fool they were last night, the one thing that distinguishes us modern folks from our ancestors is noise. We're surrounded by it from the minute we get up (I need about five different electronic alarms to wake me up), and the working day is no exception.

At UKFast towers some of that noise is Rich whistling, or Chris pretending to be a pirate. Over there sales and tech are on their phones, over here there's the constant tapping of finger against key. Being in Manchester we've less a sound of the underground, more a gut-wobbling rumble of the overground as trams go past outside. None of this can really be brought to a stop (unless we tape up Rich's mouth), and to tell the truth I think most of us like a little of background sound - myself especially - I hardly ever get the show on the road in the morning without plugging my brain into the iPod.

But there's one source of noise I think that we in the office - and everyone outside of it too - could do without: that din that computers make. As the beasts get faster and faster their fans get louder and louder. We sit pretty near the office's server rack and it's like the constant roar of an angry ocean. My PC at home sounds like an asthmatic hoover - you can actually hear it through the ceiling if you go downstairs. Seems like some manufacturers are catching up - apparently a lot of the new Mac models, for instance, are somebody-somewhere-is-eating-a-Cadbury's-Whisper-quiet - but far too many PCs still produce a wash of background sound that makes it a relief to turn them off. I love machines - in fact, I'm waiting for a terminator-style brutal machine uprising - but sometimes I wish they'd just shut up.

Tags: macs, noise, office, pcs, workplace
# Comment (2 comments)

Office 06

Chris Norton, April 4th 2006, 11:15AM

My friends, we're living in the future. We can communicate with people across the globe as if they were in the next room, we can annoy people on the train with a vast array of portable noise-making devices, and we can access just about the entire sum of human knowledge from our desktops. So why are we still working in offices?

It hardly seems surprising that there's a game coming out called 'Office Massacre' (well, at least there was) -the cultural consensus seems to be that the office is a hellhole full of David Brents and broken dreams. Furthermore, over the years we've heard again and again that technology will let us all work from home. So why am I sitting here in a high-tech company that mainly runs from an open-plan office? Shouldn't we all be wired up to the matrix, holding meetings in a virtual space straight out of Tron and disconnecting occasionally to watch Neighbours at our leisure?

Well, from the technology side of things, yes, I could be working at home. But I'd be at a further level of remove from the team we have here. Communication is everything, and spontaneous communication is essential in this work. As I mentioned in my first post, I want to produce usable stuff, putting the emphasis on people. There's no better way to balance the highly abstracted coding my department has to do than to stick us right in the middle of a busy office. We can see what sales are up to, we can hear what tech support are telling the people who use our systems, we don't always need to formalise the process with meetings and phone calls, we're in it.

And the social side of things is much better than they'd have you believe, the writers of The Office or those smug rock stars who 'just couldn't bear the anonymity of office work'. Maybe we're lucky here with this mix of characters, but come on, who doesn't enjoy a bit of gossip? We're all social animals, even those of us who know what AJAX stands for and can happily spend an hour solid quoting Tarantino movies, and here we all are in a big room where we can easily decide to go to the pub after work - and if I was working from home I'd never get a chance to steal Giles' crisps.

Tags: conversations, internet, meetings, office, workplace
# Comment (4 comments)