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I am a self-facilitating media node
December 18th, 2008 at 00:01
Living in London has changed me, and I’m not sure I like what I’m turning into - because I seem to be turning into Nathan Barley - Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris’s parody of London media twats. I think today was a good example of why.
I left the house today dressed in my trendy new London gear. As I’ve previously described on this blog, I’m now a regular user of a Trilby, and a few weeks ago got a new coat that makes me look vaguely smart, but trendy-smart, like they wear in This is England. (I am slightly concerned that my fashion sense also implies that I’m a horrible racist).
Where was I heading? To trendy Shoreditch, of course. Shoreditch is basically like Camden Town* if it were on an independent label, and is populated almost exclusively by young professionals and shops that don’t display any products, and in which you have to ring a bell to enter.
After this with a couple of hours to kill I went and sat in a Pret with free wifi and used my trendy white laptop and read the Guardian. Just like everyone else in there. The only thing that showed me up as a media-industry fraud aside from my lack of meeja columnist job was that rather than use a Macbook I was using an Eee PC.
It was what happened later though that really made today Barley-esque. Inexplicably, some sort of PR firm have offered to lend me a new INQ1 mobile phone for a month - a device not until the Wasp T12. The only difference is that instead of having an extra-large 5-key, it has some Facebook and Skype integration.
So I went to the office to pick it up and I was stunned at just how much like Barley it was. Obviously it was a trendy modern new-media office. There were trendy sheer brick walls and it was converted from what looks like a former industrial space, and the office was almost completely empty, save for a few computers (probably Macs) - there was even a trendy kitchen area, and not a tie in sight.
Being a PR firm, they don’t make tangible things for people to buy, like bricks or hammers, or other things paraphernalia people in the north use, they’re people who care about brand image and social-media and buzzwords and things. And for some reason, they must have thought that I’d be the perfect vehicle in which to get in with the target market of young, urbane, affluent professionals. I tried my best to bluff being urbane, affluent and professional.
I couldn’t work out when I got there whether or not they were licking their lips at the number of demographic boxes that I ticked or were disappointed that underneath my trendy coat I still wear a five year old blue fleece rather than some sort of “ironic” Mr-T t-shirt.
I asked them “Why me?”, and it turns out it has something to do with me being moderately prolific on Twitter and Facebook and the like, and surprisingly, not because I used to write about phones and stuff for Tech Digest. They even said they weren’t targeting geeks and techies with this phone. I kept my mouth firmly shut.
The upshot of all of this is that now we have proof that I’m some sort of zeitgeist defining cultural leader. And a bit like the Canyonero episode of The Simpsons where Krusty briefly stops selling out before selling out again, I totally sold out and took the phone for a month. I’ll probably do some sort of review at the end of it as it’d be polite to do so.
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