Look by Christian Madsbjerg

Author:Christian Madsbjerg [Madsbjerg, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

• •

Almost everyone stops observing the minute they see those shiny, young dancers at the Christmas ball. Most of us take in the foreground and then—snap—we stop looking. We land on a judgment, lose curiosity, and stop seeing the greater context.

Taking note of the dancers does matter, of course. But what matters much more is cultivating an awareness of the hidden social structures that are happening outside the light. The best observers know that leaving the Christmas ball without seeing the lonely bachelors in the shadows is to miss out on understanding the most profound forces shaping our reality. The ability to observe what is invisible in a social context—what Bourdieu referred to as “social silence”—isn’t only useful for an anthropologist in mid-twentieth-century France. It’s valuable for observing any context because it reveals what really matters in a society.

Take our culture’s fixation with tracking consumer behavior as an example. With big data and the barrage of statistics inundating our minds every day, we hear a lot about what consumers are doing. We learn that we are buying more snacks, downloading more content from streaming services, and ordering more home office furniture. But what are we not doing? What are we not buying? We base so many of our macro- and micro-decisions on large data sets that record what happened, but how much attention do we put on what goes unrecorded? When you ask who was in attendance, do you also look at who was left out? When a person is speaking, do you also observe who is choosing not to speak? When everyone is talking about a new trend, what are they not talking about? These social silences show us what matters. We can never truly know what happens in a place or a context unless we also know what doesn’t happen.

No one knows this better than Gillian Tett, a masterful observer and an editor at large at Financial Times—better known in the United States as FT. Gillian has been covering financial markets and global politics for decades, and she is widely recognized as a media expert, in part because she ushered FT through a rough period when media institutions were forced to reconsider twentieth-century business models in the face of digitization. FT is now owned by a Japanese holding company and, as a Brit, Gillian has been the conduit between its Anglo-Saxon roots and the culture of the new ownership.

Most journalists in the industry, however, revere Gillian as an observer for another reason. She was one of the only journalists covering the markets to understand the terrifying depths of the Great Financial Crisis—calling out her alarm years before Lehman Brothers collapsed in September of 2008. How was she able to see what so few others could? And how does she continue to get great scoops on one big story after another? What gives her the ability to observe the visible in what appears to be invisible?

The answers to these questions go back to Pierre Bourdieu and that Christmas ball.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.