by James Robinson

A few months ago I began an online fundraising project for funds to contribute to my study towards a Masters degree abroad.

I managed to gather some initial attention. I soon discovered that running a website and maintaining a steady stream of visitors is a vexing balancing act, and even more trying when placed concurrently with fulltime work. Quickly it became a site frequented mostly be family, and social networks.

Tracking the habits and patterns of traffic through your website becomes hypnotic. The most basic of internet hosting allows you to see what sites people clicked through to get there, what search terms were used, the amount of hits in a day, and where incoming links are coming from.

One morning I opened up my email to a raft of unpleasant website comments awaiting moderation. There was a certain comical violence to some of them, an unmistakable disdain in all of them.

The language was colourful to say the least.

“I hope your plane crashes into the middle of the Pacific Ocean where you have to survive on the flesh of one of your idiot “friends” who was stupid enough to sponsor you. Then, hopefully a bunch of Oceanic White Tip sharks will chew your c**k off…”

My web-traffic increased 500 percent in one day, with no surprise links to my website, and no new popular Google search combinations boosting traffic. The only lead I had was that someone, other than myself, and not a friend of mine, had posted a link to my website on Facebook.

This abuse continued, and I had to counter an unmistakable and surprising notion, that somewhere in the great wide internet I had attracted a faceless, nameless enemy. Buoyed on by the anonymity allowed by this format, a new screed of copy would await me every morning as I came to my screen.

“…please jump on that sinking ship that is the industry and sink to the bottom ya smarmy face git…”

“…you’re a c***, a priviledged, heart on sleeve, cancer-f***er…”

“…this is only going to get worse…”

There was a certain intimidation inherent in not knowing my enemy, or possibly even enemies. While I did not fear for my safety, I was troubled – my mind endlessly second-guessing at how this had, or who had forced this to, come about. (“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t…” sprang to mind easily.) Adding to it, most posts contained vague personal details about me, that couldn’t be ascertained from following the site. Whoever the author was they were, or had a connection to, someone that I knew personally.

All of this put me in an interesting position.

I have much the same relationship with my computer as I do with my car. I know the right things to do in order to work it, but if pressed for an answer would have no cogent explanation for a why or how.

I would imagine that likely this puts me in line with a vast majority of internet-users, and car-drivers for that matter.

These messages stirred at the edge of my mind for the following week. And I was quickly transformed from a computing everyman, into an internet-Sherlock Holmes.

For those in the know, the idea of tracing an IP (Internet Protocol) address would be common and obvious. But this was a new world for me to see up close.

All computers when logged into the Internet have an eight-digit Internet protocol address. Internet users either have a static address that stays the same every time they log on, or are assigned a different address every time they log in by their Internet service provider. (Largely due to the fact that the Internet has got so popular they’ve become a very moderated resource.)

Even if this was something I had a vague idea of, it was nothing I considered on any regular basis.

I quickly realised that every one of the forty comments left on the website over the week bore one of these digital fingerprints. Using an IP search tool readily available through a quick Google search – this nameless nemesis had a hometown – London, England and I even had the details of their internet service provider.

Sadly, a court order would’ve been required to take it any further than this. Generally, across most jurisdictions, IP addresses are considered to be private information and subject to strict privacy laws. Hypothetically, if the abuse escalated, I did have this option. Reportedly, however, Internet companies worldwide have vastly differing standards of record keeping when it comes to maintaining a record of who gets what IP address.

This is one of the more delicate areas of debate around Internet policing and privacy – it is difficult to regulate the actions of Internet users without giving up the privacy of Internet users. As it stands, you need to catch someone and work backwards from there.

My case caught a break. One of the IP addresses used was registered to a reputable worldwide not-for-profit company. Even more unfortunately for the poster, I was shocked to know that this post was the only entry that came attached to a valid email address.

From a whole mess of crude abuse, I was now armed with a place of employment, first name and last initial. I quickly reported this to the company in question, convinced that this culprit either was, or knew who was, the driving force behind this private campaign.

I received a decidedly serious response, from an extremely senior up:

…I would like to make to make it very clear that the views in the email are not those of my organisation and I would like to apologise unreservedly for any distress this has caused you. The individual concerned has been spoken to and appropriate disciplinary action has been taken. I can assure you that you will not be receiving abusive emails from the same source again…

My detective work had hit home, and as quickly as the messages had begun, they disappeared. I still had no idea the full name or information of who this was, but I had fired a shot back.

Case closed, somewhat. The whole episode left me completely fascinated.

This minor amount of Internet harassment visited upon me was taken immediately seriously. And rightly so – Internet harassment is serious, and an especially growing concern, especially amongst more cruel and impressionable teenagers. A recent study by the US Justice Department estimated that 23 percent of recorded harassment was electronic.

Internet harassment has led to several tragic teenage suicides, and New Zealand has not escaped this trend. Netsafe estimates that one in four school students are subjected to Internet harassment on some level.

One of the most covered instances internationally involved Megan Meier, in Missouri, USA who committed suicide at the age of thirteen in 2007, after a peer of hers set up a fake MySpace account with her mother and another older teenager. The account posed as a sixteen year-old boy, and was used to gain the romantic confidence of Megan, before those involved shared all personal information with Meier’s classmates, and quickly turned the correspondence abusive.

The mother was indicted, but acquitted. Internet harassment is slippery, and hard to place within clear guidelines. Is a clear threat to personal safety or a threat on family or property needed to execute a complaint? Or is a constant campaign of intimidation? Or is an implied level of threat within correspondence suffice?

A rabid explosion in online communication in the last decade, has in many ways, been fuelled by the new level of anonymity that this (still rather new) medium affords the user. Maybe a counter to these new and disturbing ways of intimidation would be to publicise the fact that this anonymity is only surface deep.

Even on the other side of the world I found my bully, in short time.

For a start, when slinking about the Internet, up to unsavoury deeds, your IP address means that effectively you’re leaving fingerprints everywhere, involuntarily. Following on from this, you can review what information Google holds on you at its new Database tool. Quickly you’ll see it knows you well. It has your friends and your habits, even employing word recognition software on your emails to match you up with relevant adverts.

All sorts of specific, individual information can be taken when performing every task online. Not to mention Google’s “inadvertent” acquisition of private Internet data from home wireless networks while canvassing for their Street View function, complete with personal browsing preferences and a potential capacity to be able to track the physical addresses of IP addresses.

Downloading music and movies is no safer, with most downloaders leaving themselves open to have their addresses and downloading history tracked.

So, with an estimated 90 percent of nighttime Internet traffic in New Zealand attributed to illegal file sharing it is probably worth pointing out the following. Even if straight harassment isn’t your kick, it is worth paying attention to just how anonymous one really is on the Internet.

You may be a little cyber-needle in the virtual haystack, but people can still find you.

I did.

ENDS

by James Robinson

There’s a conversation I keep having with a friend of mine about the marketing of modern cinema. You put the preview for a movie on television often enough, and you are bound to create an audience out of shallow curiosity. Sadly, art is a completely redundant concept. People just need to know something is there for it to be a commercially viable addition to the modern multiplex.

I sat through the grim reality of all six Saw movies consecutively. Standing in Amalgamated Video two weeks ago (the clerk did not bat an eyelid at my choice of movies, killing my hope for ironic banter to dumb down any potential judgement) I was taken with the notion that I was going to discover why these movies were popular. Or at least some pattern or reason within them as to what this popularity means. Instead, in the days that followed my mind circuited back constantly to the above point.

The low budgets give these movies the appearance of something cheap and made for TV. The plots have all of the melodrama of camp pornography, and soon run in a similar fashion – with plot exposition only filling the screen till we can have our next burst of sadistic violence. There are no good characters of any note, no clever writing ; the movies aren’t dangerous; the violence has no subtlety and does no damage. It has the same effect as watching someone throw up : unpleasant and stomach weakening at worst, but hardly traumatic. The franchise’s attempts at moralising to explain the actions of the dastardly Jigsaw are not persuasive.

From no imaginable angle are these movies entertaining. The two facts that seem pertinent about closer readings of their success are as follows: the movies were all made for less than 11 million dollars, and they come out reliably on, or around, Halloween. Case closed.

The following is a transcript of my notes from the experience.

Saw I (12.30pm-2.13pm)

With a dead body laying between them, two men wake up in the secure lair of a serial killer who’s been nicknamed “Jigsaw” by the police because of his unusual calling card.

12.40pm: The premise is a good one. It is dark, if unoriginal.

12.50pm: The doctor looks at the saw, looks at his ankle, and back again before declaring that “We’re not supposed to cut through the chains.” The dialogue is leaden.

1.15pm: 45 minutes in and we have the first slightly terrifying moment – “Jigsaw” holding the stethoscope to the chests of the doctor’s family with a gun at their head. There is a sort of cruel, humored sadism to it that is fun.

1.20pm: Like all good horror villains Jigsaw can easily withstand a blow from a shotgun to the chest.

1.25pm: I am probably more amused than I should be by Danny Glover flailing around with his throat cut.

1.35pm: The action in the bathroom is watchable, but the back-story is dull and they lever in a lot of it for a 90-minute movie. Jigsaw’s back-story, and general aesthetic, is aiming for ghoulish but comes across as cheap. The detective component is immediately stuck in sub-CSI cliché.

1.50pm: Finally we get some plot exposition on the actual story we started in on. The fact is, we’ve spent too much time away from the abandoned bathroom, so it means a lot less, and feels like a lot less of a reward.

1.55pm: If you have till 6pm to kill a strange guy you’re locked in a bathroom with and crawl to safety or your family dies, I’d like to think that I wouldn’t be able to be surprised when it is 6pm all of a sudden.

1.57pm: Watching the doctor saw off his ankle is unpleasant, but the low budget means it isn’t shown in great detail.

1.58pm: Cary Elwes is a horrible actor, and this is hilariously apparent when trying to act out “Guy with no ankle crawling to safety”.

2.06pm: One down! Saw makes a simple narrative error. It takes a core premise with more than an iota of interest in it, but then chooses to stuff in back story rather than exploit the tension from the dynamic right in front of us. It is also a really cheap looking film, with some horrible performances. Which bodes badly, because it is the only film with actors good enough to put names on the front of the box.

Saw II (2.20pm-3.50pm)

Jigsaw locks a few unlucky people in a booby trapped shelter and they must find a way out before they inhale too much of a lethal nerve gas and die. But they must watch out, for the traps Jigsaw has set in the shelter lead to death also.

2.20pm: I’m intrigued as to where it all goes from here. Movie one passed by quickly and didn’t set the bar very high. Movie two has Donnie Wahlberg

2.25pm: We open with a key in the eyeball and an exploding facemask. I feel uncomfortable for the first time.

2.28pm: An informant is killed – with more peculiar moralising from Jigsaw. Informants are scum worthy of Jigsaw’s “games” – not career criminals who have decided to do some good and assist in the prosecution of fellow criminals.

2.30pm: Donnie Wahlberg is on the trail of Jigsaw, alongside the unnamed girl cop from first film. They have a rapport that feels like the first real human interchange in the series yet.

2.35pm: Donnie Wahlberg is a bad Dad, as was Cary Ewles from the first movie.

2.40pm: The cops get to Jigsaw. Why they don’t immediately arrest Jigsaw confounds me. Surely they can interrogate him from jail, even if he does have Donnie Wahlberg’s son hostage?

2.50pm: The nurse in the new game is defending Jigsaw – “he’s helping us”; she played a nervy drug addict in the first film, the only survivor of Jigsaw’s games.

2.51pm: There are no even entertainingly cheesy moments in this.

2.55pm: The black guy (so hastily and loosely drawn from stock character stereotypes are our six contestants in Jigsaw’s trap, I can hardly remember their names three seconds after they move offscreen) references jail: “Guards don’t give you a way out, they trap you”. Is this a sly nod from the writers to the fact that Jigsaw’s moralizing is no good?

3pm: This isn’t scary.

3.10pm: We get Jigsaw’s motive from his own mouth. He helps make people feel alive, and he sees that they have something missing, We live in a world where Darwin’s theory of evolution no longer applies, so he reapplies an edge.

3.18pm: Watching a junkie hunt for an antidote in a pit full of needles is gross. It is the most unsettling scene of the movie. But it is just unsettling, not scary.

3.21pm: The house is rigged like crazy. How could this be done on the sly?

3.35pm: Wahlberg beats the bejeezus out of Jigsaw, right in front of the other cops. Breaks his finger. It is very unrealistic police work.

3.40pm: Wahlberg goes rogue, taking Jigsaw to the crime scene, and immediately lets Jigsaw out of his sight.

3.44pm: Wahlberg’s son was in the room with the cops the whole time, and now he has fallen into a trap, the original target all along. The junkie has become Jigsaw’s new apprentice and is set to continue the business when he dies.

3.46pm: Number two actually ties up into a neater, more succinct film. But the violence is a large step up, and step down for the franchise. There is little meat on these bones even to mock. We’re thrown cheap tropes, cheap sets, and a cheap film. There is no laughable pretension in the cinematography. I wish I had more jokes.

Saw III – (4pm-5.40pm)

Jigsaw kidnaps a doctor to keep him alive while he watches his new apprentice put an unlucky citizen through a brutal test.

4.08pm: Movie three has started off horrifically. Donnie Wahlberg bludgeons his own foot off, snapping his ankle.

4.10pm: A man had to rip himself free before the bomb went off, but the door was welded shut. The game is rigged!

4.12pm: The lady cop has been captured and killed horrifically, with her ribcage ripped out.

4.15pm: 15 minutes in, and movie three is brutal and industrial. Far more gore, and flash cuts.

4.21pm: The violence breaks for some plot exposition, a doctor with personal problems (her sin is antidepressant use) has to keep Jigsaw alive for 24 hours. Our second contestant is an angry father (third straight bad father protagonist) who has to face the people who helped free the man who killed his son in car accident.

4.27pm: Jigsaw’s lair has a peculiar amount of mannequins in it

4.41pm: Jigsaw is really sick, but the troubled doctor doesn’t know if she can save him. It is like a Grey’s Anatomy episode directed by Rob Zombie

5.05pm: The angry dad has the option to kill his son’s case judge, and for the life of me I cannot decide whether Jigsaw wants him to kill these people? The judge is dosed repeatedly in pig guts. It is both pointless and stomach turning.

5.10pm: Troubled doctor operates on Jigsaw, and the camera revels in the gore of the amateur surgery. It is a recklessly bloody scene, with no context apart from putting the watcher on edge.

5.12pm: We have our first scene of the film set in daylight!

5.40pm: Three down! The last 28 minutes of the movie were a convoluted, melodramatic mess. Jigsaw’s protégé fails her own test, for being too brutal. No one has a chance to win her games – making her more of a “murderer” than Jigsaw, who perceives himself to be more of a benevolent sadist. The film keeps coming back to this point, and repetition makes it no less laughable. The distinction of why Jigsaw is different, and why or what we’re supposed to feel towards him is never really set up. Both Troubled Doctor and Angry Dad die, and the twist is they’re married. Jigsaw dies. Protégé dies. Movie three is 20 minutes longer than the other one, extraordinarily more gruesome, convoluted and melodramatic. This is the first movie of the series that I can safely say really, really sucks.

Saw IV (6.30pm-8pm)

Jigsaw and his apprentice Amanda are dead. Two seasoned FBI profilers arrive in the terrified community to assist the veteran Detective Hoffman in sifting through Jigsaw’s latest grisly remains and piecing together the puzzle.

6.30pm: I found myself a bit depressed after the last film’s embrace of awfulness. . I’ve had a break. I have dinner in front of me. I’m refreshed. I have turned the lights on.

6.35pm: The opening scene is a brutal autopsy. Shown in extreme detail with close ups. It is a stomach curdling passage, with no purpose again but to unsettle. I feel a bit cross.

6.38pm: Having Jigsaw’s voice come out from a tape hidden in his stomach is a novel way to bring him back from the dead.

6.41pm: The crux of movie four is appearing that maybe there was a third accomplice… it is tiresome.

6.51pm: The aggro black cop (Detective Rigg) with about three minutes of screen time in the first three films has been elevated to main character – and we’re supposed to care deeply for him. He has a softer side! He is a neglectful husband and father! The Saw franchise likes violently dispensing with neglecting parents.

6.54pm: Detective Rigg’s abduction gives me my first genuine jolt in four movies. He has to try and save Donnie Wahlberg (alive!) and some other bit part cop.

6.56pm: Rigg is being framed as the other accomplice, and goes on the lam. Like a lot of badly put together fugitive films, there’s not a lot of good reason as to why he is running.

7pm: FBI agents take Jigsaw’s ex-wife into custody. She’s well put together. Flashbacks bring Jigsaw back in to the action.

7.10pm: Jigsaw’s wife miscarried when a junkie broke into the ‘wellness’ clinic they ran. Jigsaw left her. The parallels being made between social welfare and Jigsaw’s work are clichéd and really in your face. “They have to help themselves…”

7.15pm: The movies are getting more melodramatic – B-movie plots on top of increasing violence.

7.30pm: As part of Rigg’s game with Jigsaw (or faux-Jigsaw?) he lets a paedophile die, and saves his wife. This is justice, Jigsaw style.

7.40pm: Flashbacks show us that Jigsaw himself was a neglectful husband! I’m not sure I understand Jigsaw any better, even with the overblown origin story.

7.55pm: Depressingly, Rigg got shot, Donnie Wahlberg gets his head smashed by two huge blocks of ice. No one wins, and the other cop held hostage with them (Hoffman, by the way) is the villain. Not for the first time my reaction is “We’re supposed to care?” Yet another two-bit character is elevated to the front of the story.

8pm: Four down! I’m actually completely confused. Apparently this all took place before the first scene of the movie, which took place right after the last movie ended – so films three and four actually run concurrently.

I actually have no new criticisms of this – movie four did develop a good pace, but it still sucks. When the best thing you can say about a movie is that you feel like it went by quickly, you’re in trouble.

Saw V – (8.20pm-9.50pm)

Following Jigsaw’s grisly demise, Mark Hoffman, the final apprentice to the serial killer is deigned a hero. Meanwhile, Agent Strahm is tested and follows all the leads he can get until it boils down to a gruesome and bone-crushing finale.

8.20pm: With the two original villains dead, and the fourth movie heavy on flashbacks, where can we go? I’m in a surprisingly good frame of mind. I was nervous that this was going to get the best of me, but it is probably a bit of an indictment on the series so far that I am not close to unsettled. Numb to extreme violence? Yes.

8.26pm: True evidence that Saw is entirely about the violence, not the plot. A man (murderer who was released on a technicality) chooses to have his hands crushed in order to escape being sliced in half by a pendulum. But it slices him in half regardless. It would be more interesting if it didn’t – but it is further proof that we’re looking at murder, not moralism.

8.40pm: Strahm is investigating Hoffman, it is a cop against cop cliché – but its an entertaining enough one.

8.46pm: Within half an hour we’ve had neck braces rigged to razors rigged to keys, timers rigged to nail bombs, and a girl getting rather comically beheaded.

8.56pm: The new game is survival of the fittest – kill or be killed. Only one from six can live. It is entertaining. Five movies in, and you realise that you should appreciate the good times.

9.06pm: Another flashback heavy film. We get the Jigsaw/Hoffman origin story, Hoffman was a copycat for vengeance, Jigsaw is annoyed – he doesn’t “murder” anyone, okay? We learn that Jigsaw thinks that subjects who survive his method are instantly rehabilitated. How? Everyone dies anyway. Do these films actually think that Jigsaw is a good guy? He’s a pretty weak antihero.

9.22pm: As soon as anyone acknowledges the ‘survival of the fittest’ concept in the game they die. One would think in a battle royale stand off where people die one by one that that was the point?

9.28pm: Hoffman is framing Strahm. I’m losing interest in this – but miraculously this movie did hold my attention for a whole forty minutes.

9.32pm: The game was set up so they were all supposed to work together! Not kill each other. These psychopaths are actually benevolent life coaches!

9.50pm: Five down! It is the classic scenario here that afflicts a lot of poor films, where any sort of weak tension is lost upon plot resolution. I’m going to declare this film the best so far. A slightly less ridiculous plot, but a story that you can involve yourself in if you turn off just the right amount of your brain.

Saw VI (10pm-11.30pm)

Special Agent Strahm is dead, and Detective Hoffman has emerged as the unchallenged successor to Jigsaw’s legacy. However, when the FBI draws closer to Hoffman, he is forced to set a game into motion, and Jigsaw’s grand scheme is finally understood.

10.11pm: The opening victims/meat/offerings or however you want to label these two-dimensional bit players wheeled across our screen in order to have horrific violence visited upon them are predatory lenders.

10.25pm: The action then moves to a health insurance company! This movie is very 2009.

10.40pm: Truth be told, I’m having a very hard time paying attention to this. I struggle to stop myself from checking my email.

10.50pm: Is my final response to the Saw franchise going to not be disdain, or repulsion, but complete and utter indifference?

10.55pm: I’m fighting sleep. This movie is boring. Hoffman kills the cops who work out he’s the bad guy. Jigsaw’s ex is in the mix.

11.10pm: There are a heap of traps in play. More badly drawn characters. A spinning, blinking carousel may be my favourite of the series so far.

11.20pm: This film is big on getting the characters to choose whether another character lives or dies. It is very 2009.

11.29pm: Six down! I’m done. Jigsaw’s ex tries to kill Hoffman. He escapes. Messes his face up.

I stand up, walk away from the screen. I make myself a cup of tea. Watch the new episode of Outrageous Fortune.

I fall asleep thinking about cricket.

Saw has recently been declared the highest grossing horror franchise of all time. Saw VII: 3D will be released on October 29, 2010.

ENDS

By James Robinson

There is a generational split you may have noticed. And it doesn’t lead itself to labeling as easily as the Generation X/Generation Y divide. The divide falls between those who were in school when computers started to take hold, and these new, younger, digital natives. This divide is the sort of abyss that leads a 26 year old to feel alien staring out a bus full of text messaging school children without a hint of melodrama.

Digital makes all else quaint. It does by hand what was once done by machine.

79 percent of 15 year-olds have a cell phone. Roughly 30 percent of 10 year-olds have a cell phone. It is a sharp dividing line. Computer use is equally as rife. In the industrialised world 59 percent of all children have direct access to a home computer with internet. It is a sharp contrast to the schoolyard that most people over the age of twenty-five lived through.

And it is these sorts of statistics that are driving people to muse that the art of handwriting is dead (Slate, Time, BBC, The Guardian amongst many other reputable publications have all weighed in on this matter), with the amorphous idea of “the kids” at the centre of this debate. Too keyed up in iPhones and IMing to appreciate the simple art of pen of paper.

*****

Heading to the battle lines of our education system, there are many pieces of information immediately evident that those long finished with school might not have considered. And notably, the idea of the death of handwriting generates a slight shrug of the shoulders among teachers.

Handwriting is not emphasised at all past primary and intermediate level education. Across the board girls are neater than boys, priding presentation long past the point when it brings them direct reward. Converse to expectation, at the average school students have very little face time with computers. Internet policy is too hard to police, and printing costs are prohibitive. While some private secondary schools are apparently placing laptops in front of their kids, this is far from the norm.

The one prerequisite is legibility. Students need to be able to be understood. Damagingly, some teachers reported that electronic communication has weakened grammar and spelling. While it has opened new doors in learning potential for students with dyslexia, it has created new hurdles for the perfectly capable. Going off-road and on to the pen and pad, easy mistakes start to creep in.

Subsequently, it becomes a teacher’s choice whether assignments need to be handwritten or typed. Some choose handwriting – citing fostering a sense of accuracy, and preparing a student for exams. This could be a source of imaginable complaint for a young-student forced to work by hand with a taunting computer near by. But in the words of one teacher, “students will complain about doing anything that requires effort, and thought”.

Many students don’t have great handwriting, and while computers may undercut an encyclopedic knowledge of language when a spell-check isn’t handy, handwriting can also undermine a student’s performance in an exam. Tony, a retired headmaster, with nearly 30 years experience in schools says: “consistently, throughout my time in schools it was really frustrating if you had a script that looked like a spider had thrown a major fit over the pages. Some exams were often largely unintelligible.”

“There was a fair likelihood that the student had a good brain but he was untidy on paper and so he would have performed much better in an oral situation.” There are always two sides to every coin.

And we now have the notion tabled that bad handwriting has been around a lot longer than the internet, and is in no way a direct result of misshapen Playstation thumbs.

Teachers in 2010 outline a situation that probably sounds familiar. Handwriting drills in the early years, leading into a need for quick to produce, easy to read no-frills handwriting from secondary and up. Sure, there’s a bit of influence from new technologies. But if handwriting is dying, it is not here.

It seems rather that, handwriting, like mathematics, is a skill that dies with age. As soon as word processors hit the workplace, writing skills were always going to be obsolete past university level. The more resistant a person to the concept of a computer full stop, the more likely they were to hold on to a heavily stylised method of handwriting. But when you have the Dalai Lama on Twitter – this itself is increasingly unlikely.

So we have the workplace – rather than the schoolyard – eating the tradition of handwriting. And while the tradition of handwriting dies off slowly with age, beginning somewhere in the frantic note taking of University or NCEA, it isn’t dying. We’re still handwriting, and technology may have changed this for better or worse, but we’re still handwriting.

Katy, 33, works in communications for a Wellington IT company. Katy, even at 33, manages to possess about as distinctive and stylised style of handwriting as you will probably find on your average adult. She also works at a firm where outmoding such cumbersome activities as handwriting is part and parcel of the ethos.

Katy maps out her own personal decline of handwriting. These sorts of stories are common, and cement the idea that the ability and will to handwrite well slowly dies in us. It isn’t driven by a wider push from society.

“I remember being quite fastidious with my writing, and quite proud of it. I spent quite a bit of time cultivating it. I don’t know if it was partly because I really only ever went to an all-girls school, but handwriting was a bit of a status symbol. Or at least I thought it was.”

“I remember making a mental note when the changeover happened to working more from a laptop at University, it was a gradual changeover, and thinking – “I’ll never be as expressive”, but then it happened. And you adapt very quickly.”

At her work, note-taking software and dictaphones are used to remove a lot of the grunt work of handwriting. “Whenever I have to write like crazy I end up lamenting the fact that my handwriting has gone to hell and even I can’t read it.”

She keeps her handwriting alive like most people do, writing notes, cards, or the odd letter. It is just a bit harder on the hand these days.

*****

If anything, handwriting is the most personal media format. Everyone has a story to share about their handwriting abilities and adventures as a child. One teacher referred to perfect handwriting being as “important at the age of eleven as owning a tamagotchi” (and there is a dated reference). People offered up stories of winning handwriting cups in the 1960s, at the age of seven, or still talked with visible pride about being awarded their “pen licence” in primary school.

Katy recalls with still vivid horror: “One of my earliest angst episodes had to do with me running out of ‘publishing paper’ in Standard One (year 3) and being stricken with fear for weeks as the pad got thinner and thinner. We were given a certain amount of publishing paper at the start of the term and that was it. I couldn’t help but write lots of stories at home. It ended up with me breaking down in front of my parents. The upshot was I got another publishing pad and no one was cross with me.”

So what does it all mean? As email undercuts letter writing, and word processors nullify the need for writing in the work place – is this a mere technological shift, or is it culturally something more significant?

Everyone spoken with all shared a similar view of handwriting. It is individualised, and there was a relative level of pride or shame attached to perceived handwriting successes and failures. No one really writes by hand that often any more, but even when the handwriting devolves into the positively spider-like it is still an expression of yourself.

People simply do not feel the same attachment to the typed word as the written word. We feel compelled to hold on to handwritten birthday cards, and old letters, far more so than the intangible correspondence stored in the digital cloud.

Katy sums this up astutely: “When people print out emails I find it quaint, a little backward and unnecessary. But is that what I need to do? Print everything out and stick it in a ring binder in order to have something physical to hold on to, rather than just a computer screen filled with words from a loved one? To read the actual hand-writing of someone who has passed on, or who is far away, is more immediate and evocative than any printed out email.“

“Where will it all go when we’re gone, and there’s no one around to remember our passwords?”

ENDS

by James Robinson

On news of the re-publishing of this article, a brief comment in retort to the reactions beneath. Some of the comments, in my view, confirm completely my initial suspicions. Belief in Jesus is something that some people can categorically find ridiculous. I believe that most truths (I can not comment on the laws of mathmatics and science) are subjective. We make our own truth. So by that token, working oneself up about the faith of another is a completely redundant opposition.

I wasn’t commenting on the church as an institution, but what we feel on a personal level to the religous individuals we come in to contact with. Holding up a torch to our condescension of the church – it is a snap judgement. Driven by our own prejudice. We let people think and act in anyway, but we raise our eyebrows when they believe in the “cloud fairy”, because we think it is strange. — James Robinson

In a 1996 essay on the importance of Fyodor Dostoevsky to American fiction writers, David Foster Wallace argued that Dostoevsky’s belief in the depravity of a life lived without a moral/spiritual core is still an example to writers, close to 150 years later.

Dostoevsky advocated his beliefs in his work. His books teemed with moral invective of the likes that Wallace claims we don’t see anymore. It isn’t cool to argue too emphatically for a moral standpoint these days. Writers won’t “dare try to use serious art to advance ideologies”.

Ideology now needs to be handled with tongs at a safe distance through the tools of parody, ridicule, satire or direct criticism. Hipster culture endlessly permeates into similarly detached derivations, each with the same nihilistic bent.

We don’t believe in anything too strongly these days. It isn’t immorality, more an emerging non-morality. But if you don’t believe in anything, is it a contradiction to definitively believe that there is no God?

This article has no concern with a philosophical or merit driven assessment of the Christian story. It is concerned with the idea that religion has become a smirking point amongst the young, the hip and the intellectual. If truth is infinitely splintered and defiantly subjective, what makes religious truth any less true? If it is now okay to believe anything and act in anyway, why do so many young people seethe at the notion that someone could devote their self to the church?

Close to fifty percent of those between the ages of fifteen and thirty do not identify with a religion. In a recent TVNZ-sanctioned survey, slightly less than 40 percent of those under forty believe that New Zealand could not classify itself as a Christian nation. While this religious identification rises in older age groups, there is no evidence to suggest that people are crossing back to religion later in life.

Between 1994 and 2004, the median age of marriage in men and women rose by over ten percent. The annual number of marriages fell by close to twenty percent. The number of people per thousand that are married fell by thirty.

New Zealand, the world, is undeniably less religious in 2009.

But consider the recent controversy of the atheist bus advertisements. Or the aggressive marketing of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (Dawkins, alongside left-wing poster-journalist Christopher Hitchens is widely referred to as one of the ‘four horsement’ of atheism). Have half a dozen conversations about religion.

It seems that there’s an emerging culture that is not just not religious, but anti-religious.

You don’t have to cast a net too far to find a young, opinionated atheist ready to speak their mind.

“Anyone who believes in a man in the sky is crazy,” says Alice, 24. She adds that, “religion is for people who are too weak to believe in themselves and who have shitty friends who they can’t believe in either.”

“In a perfect world there would be no religion. Religion could provide a positive basis to a community if it wasn’t used a tool to repress and suppress.”

This is a common opinion, if an example on the stronger side of common. The Bush-era bought a base notion of ‘Christian conservatism’ into common vernacular, that is widely deriled. It is hard to see Alice’s harsh reduction of religion as unrelated. It is a blunt retort to the clichéd anti-intellectualism of religion personified by Bush-era conservatism.

Lauren, 24, cannot decide between agnosticism and atheism. She claims to not consider religion very much, but finds the culture and tradition of religion interesting.

“White, educated, middle class people, and especially the children of such people, do not typically hold strong religious views. Of the friends I had growing up that occasionally went to church, I know none that follow that same tradition as a young adult.”

Lauren points out a common, but interesting, talking point – people generally socialise with those with similar core beliefs and ideals. “There is a point when lifestyle truly influences the compatibility of two people in a friendship. People with strong beliefs about religion will gravitate towards others who share their views. Just as those who are passionate about music will do the same.“

The point comes up often. And is revealing. While people who enjoy music may find it easier to form friendships, no one would claim that a disagreement over the merits of the Cure would end a friendship. You can easily have gay friends, you can have right-wing friends, and can have friends who wrongfully undermine the cinematic output of Tom Cruise. But religion is the deal-breaker, posing a potential mismatch that is hypothetical friendship Kryptonite. To a point, like does seek like. But is it innocent that religion is a disqualifier?

Lauren continues: “Generally I am taken aback when discovering that a person has a markedly strong religious view. People my age that reference activities with Christian church groups, I know I’m unlikely to have many similarities with them. And maybe I don’t care to. I don’t want to be around sheltered, rule abiding, simpletons any more than they want to be around some sinner. I simply cannot relate to people with extremely religious lifestyles.”

Jon, 26, agrees. “Christianity is one of the powerful dividing commonalities.”

Jon moved to Auckland and discovered that many of his new group of friends had Christian ties and affiliations. Conversely, “my girlfriend and I worried at first that they wouldn’t want to be friends with us because of it. Our worries were unfounded.”

Jon presents an alternative to the common dismissal of religion, or friendship with the religious. “Christians make me feel safe. They’re less ironic and ascerbic. They’re not as judgmental and don’t make mean or rude statements that throw off a conversation. I like knowing that I’m in the presence of people who have an agreed sense of morality.”

Jon says that he is constantly aware and made to feel awkward by thoughtlessly negative comments towards religion, often around alcohol. He mentions having to point out to people that they are putting down Christianity, in front of Christians. “It is conversation that seems like easy laughs and no laughs come easier than from demeaning people that you don’t know.”

Chris, 27, echoes a similar theme as Jon. Chris moved to Vancouver, and realised that his new social set was part Christian. “I was really surprised by how aware of it I was, and how I had never even considered how unused to spending time with Christians I was.”

Matt, 26, is a recent convert to Christian faith. He contradicts a lot of the notions that Christians are separate and unintellectual. Matt came from a Christian home, but was not captivated by religion, and stopped going to church when he was 13. His parents were accepting of his decision, and the argument stopped there. He went to University and studied Philosophy. Which makes his recent conversion (after a chance invitation to a service by a friend) even more unlikely. He remembers studying ideas at University that directly undermine faith. “I remember doing an essay about how religion works as a supernatural police force and builds cooperation within a group, advantageous in competition against other groups that do not have such a social glue.”

Matt seems to understand why the university culture is geared against someone finding singular truths in their own life. “People often say that doing a philosophy degree, and studying moral relativism, should lead one to becoming more of a moral relativist. How could I come out the other end as a Christian with absolute moral rules when you spend time finding exceptions to moral rules?”

Ultimately, the process of learning and expanding analytical capabilities was not satisfying. Matt sees it as being geared away from fixed realities and truth and sends you into a process of endless searching and deconstruction. “During my study I found that in order to extend my analytical brain I had to step outside of belief systems. But I could conceivably keep doing that forever.”

Reconciling new beliefs with old beliefs was an extensive and frenzied process, Matt says. He does not believe that the world is only 6,000 years old, and accepts evolution and science as tools to reveal God’s majesty. “I am in awe of Richard Dawkins’ mind and biological discoveries, but he seems to think that science and faith can’t be compatible.”

There are huge amounts of questions that Matt still thinks over. Like the fact that he has gay friends in loving relationships, or whether the creation story can be taken at its word. But he knows that his journey is just beginning, and possesses a great enthusiasm for it. He seems to have bought a spirit of intellectualism and questioning into believing in God, that isn’t extremely present these days amongst many who dismiss religion offhand.

“Atheists who label themselves freethinkers frustrate me. I have challenged every part of my belief before locking it in, and some parts are still up in the air,” Matt says.

How was the conversion received amongst friends? “Friends have supported me in my journey but have certainly not shared my enthusiasm.”

It is hard to draw conclusions from conversations with young Christians or young atheists about the explicit nature of their own attitudes towards their own, and others beliefs. Matt illustrated an insight and inquisition into his own belief that might surprise a hard-line atheist. He also acknowledged the tensions between University and religious culture, but in no way saw intellectualism and religion as an either/or scenario. From the atheistic and the agnostic there was no dismissal of why they did not belief in God, just general acknowledgement that it was slightly nonsensical dogma. There was a recognisable sense of condescension in most people spoken too. Which locks in a near un-answerable question; why is a belief in God so laughable to those who believe the opposite?

Tim McKenzie is the chaplain at St. Aidans in Miramar, and was formerly the chaplain at Victoria University. McKenzie points to a cultural shift that has its antecedents in the 1960s. “People really argued about religion in Universities in the 60s and 70s. It opened up conflict between religious and Marxist groups on campus, with huge debate over where specific right and wrong fell.”

It opened up an intolerance and hostility towards religion, that McKenzie feels has dissipated somewhat. “Modernism gave way to post-modernity, and people started to leave people alone to do what they pleased. A separation has come out of this. And now with electronic media, people live in silos. You can program things so that you only ever read and hear what you want.”

McKenzie identifies a sense of condescension towards religion, especially from academic and intellectual spheres. But the academic snobbery is nothing new, and is driven by ever-changing strands of thought. He does feel very strongly about the supposed separation between intellectualism and religion. “Religion and intellectualism, religion and science are deeply connected.”

“They aren’t separate, and it is deeply ironic that so many think so. The west is built on Judeo-Christian reality, including Universities, which are all Christian foundations. Science today is greatly influenced by the early Western view of the ‘trustworthy’ world. All information we get from ancient cave-drawings, every well-preserved ancient skeleton, it was all from ancient religious ritual.”

Increasingly in recent years McKenzie has seen a defensiveness rise amongst Christians. The Bush-era had an extremely negative impact on this – bringing into popular consciousness a perceived set of values that was quickly stereotyped on to all Christians. “All of a sudden you had people saying ‘I’m Christian, but I don’t believe in such and such…”

Christians have been directly linked to a right-wing agenda in recent years, which amongst the typically left-leaning, educated young has inevitably set off some reactionary rhetoric. McKenzie is not in denial that this is a factor, while aware that the clichéd ‘Christian conservatism’ is a slightly crass notion. “I see how it happened. You have people who in the face of shifting sands retreated into religious conservatism as a way of dealing with modern life.”

But it is not helped by New Zealand’s adversarial media environment. “We’re so small. Opinion generally falls to one end of the spectrum or the other. No one really wants the moderate Christian opinion.”

Many church groups (including the Anglican church) supported Section 59. Many have moderate middle line opinions on gay marriage. Most believe climate change is man made. But these just aren’t the opinions called on by the media. And as a result images like 2004’s “Enough is Enough” Destiny Church march continue in our heads as images of religious belief and action – when in fact such events are an extreme part of the spectrum.

It is a cruel habit, only calling on a certain spectrum of church opinion for dramatic effect. And will continue to play into a cycle of tension, with two sides struggling to understand the other, and accept the others as is. McKenzie says that amongst young, he often sees a “nervousness in self-identifying as Christian. Not so much amongst those who have recently converted, but amongst those who have grown up in religious cultures, it is more deeply rooted. You can see that they’ve started to feel a bit marginalised.”

McKenzie mentions the notion of a post-religious world. He says that a slight demeaning of religion is strongly tied to the fall in marriage rates, and many probably see that religion “functioned as a means of social control which we’re well rid of.“

So what?

On one hand, you have a rift of understanding rising out of young people generally associating with similar people, and having limited exposure to religion in an era when the church is waning in influence and number. Younger people, more forcefully opinionated by nature are then exercising their own right to an opinion and expressing an assessment of the church as they see it.

But.

Religious affiliation has clearly been singled out as a defining, separating characteristic. It is hard to think about Christianity as some sort of friendship roadblock without feeling uneasy about the sort of systemic judgmental bent in society that that implies. This is the church. A dismissal of the church is an acceptance of ignorance about your own history, whether you respect or not the institutions it passed down.

And.

We’ve put paid to so many prejudices in the past decades, do we need to really build more up? Even if religion was a source of many prejudices, prejudice against religion is backward and hypocritical.

There is no conclusions. Only newly contorting opinion to shine a light on. This is the post-religion era. And for the church, this is their new reality.

“This is what we face,” McKenzie says.

Dostoevsky came to despise Nihilism, finding faith while imprisoned in a brutal Siberian jail. It is hard to see too many conversions in the futures of the rising tide of young atheists.

Tim McKenzie says, “people believing in nothing is not a new thing. It is a timeless, and stark, metaphysical dilemma.”

The faith we don’t find in ourselves does not put us in the wrong. But it does not give us the right to judge the faith of others.

ENDS