Cuttings: January 2017

Cuddles, not bombs: how one woman helped children in Syria - article by Juliet Rix in The Guardian. "Fatima... starts to talk about her life in Syria.... 'I will never forget the airstrikes. The children were terrified … And the things they saw … their grandfather’s dead body after he had been tortured … their uncle taken away with his T-shirt over his head [he has not been seen since] … The house hit by a barrel bomb. We were out, but the neighbour and her child were killed.'... [Aala] El-Khani worked with Rachel Calam, professor of child and family psychology at the University of Manchester, and psychologist Dr Kim Cartwright to produce a leaflet explaining to parents that bedwetting, nightmares, withdrawal and even aggression are normal responses to childhood trauma, and offering basic reminders and suggestions for looking after themselves and their children. 'When you become focused on survival,' says El-Khani, 'you forget to praise your children, play, cuddle, or talk to them.' One young mother, after meeting El-Khani, later told her she had gone back to her tent and read her child a bedtime story for the first time since arriving in the camp.... Two sheets of paper (the leaflet and a feedback form) and a pen were tucked inside the wrappers of 3,000 flatbreads and delivered to families and caregivers in northern Syria. Sixty per cent responded, a high figure anywhere, let alone in a conflict zone. El-Khani remembers the excitement of opening the feedback forms. More than 80% of those displaced families who responded said the leaflet was useful; 400 had added comments. Most were positive remarks about the leaflet, some were prayers for better times, others asked for more information, particularly about bereavement and anxiety. The leaflet had hit a nerve." See details of the work and leaflet download.

John Berger remembered – by Ali Smith in The Guardian. "I heard John Berger speaking at the end of 2015 in London at the British Library. Someone in the audience ... asked what Berger thought about the huge movement of people across the world. He put his head in his hands and sat and thought; he didn’t say anything at all for what felt like a long time, a thinking space that cancelled any notion of soundbite. When he answered, what he spoke about ostensibly seemed off on a tangent. He said: 'I have been thinking about the storyteller’s responsibility to be hospitable.' As he went on, it became clear how revolutionary, hopeful and astute his thinking was. The act of hospitality, he suggested, is ancient and contemporary and at the core of every story we’ve ever told or listened to about ourselves – deny it, and you deny all human worth. He talked about the art act’s deep relationship with this, and with inclusion. Then he gave us a definition of fascism: one set of human beings believing it has the right to cordon off and decide about another set of human beings."

Tim Wu: ‘The internet is like the classic story of the party that went sour’ - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "The cue for [Tim Wu's] new book, The Attention Merchants, is an observation the Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon made in 1971. 'In an information-rich world,' Simon wrote, 'the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.' ... The Attention Merchants chronicles the attempts that publishers and entrepreneurs have made to capture and resell human attention over nearly two centuries, from [Benjamin] Day [creator of New York's first scandal sheet] in 1833 to BuzzFeed, Instagram, Google and Facebook today, with a major detour into state propaganda (Britain during the first world war, Goebbels during the second) along the way. In large measure, this is a story of communication technologies, starting with print, moving on to broadcast media (radio, television) and winding up with the internet and the technologies it has spawned (email, blogging, search engines, social media). But the striking feature of the book is the way it interweaves this story of technological development with two other strands. The first is an account of how the human subjects whose attention is being sought eventually rebel, giving rise to outbreaks of resistance that sometimes lead to regulatory intervention, but more often to changes of tack by the attention merchants. The second strand is a series of meditations on the cultural implications of the attention merchants’ success."

Bob Bates interview with Ingmar Böke, on the Adventure Gamers website. "Ingmar: What it is like to develop serious games for the US government? // Bob [Bates, former games author and design for Infocom, Legend and Synga]: The hardest part of working on any serious game is the design phase, when you need to ask three questions: What does the player need to learn? How will the game know when he has learned it? And who else needs to know that he has learned it? Most serious games are content to deal with the first two questions, but when your client is the US government, you also must deal with the third. It is not enough for the player to have learned something; the government wants proof that the training has been effective. This problem of proof is called 'assessment,' and you have to build into the game a way to demonstrate the player has learned what he needs to. Apart from that, the other hard part is finding a way to make the game entertaining when the client is notoriously averse to humor. It’s possible, but very hard."