A rchive Date
[ 04-06-2000 ]
Category
[ Sociology ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[A mundane manifesto
Scholars study backlash against media sensationalism
By HARRY BRUCE -- Issues Network
Tuesday, March 28, 2000
HALIFAX -- Tired of the sensational? Fed up with the perverse, the shocking, the ceaseless barrage of stories about weird, disgusting or horrifying human behaviour? Well, have Myron Orleans and Scott Schaffer got a deal for you!
Sociologists in California, they recently founded what the Chronicle of Higher Education calls an "online, peer-reviewed, cross-disciplinary journal" about the ordinary doings of ordinary people. Yup, it's the Journal of Mundane Behavior (http://www.mundanebehavior.org/), and it's long overdue.
If Martian anthropologists came to Earth to analyze what humans say about humans, Schaffer grumbles, "look at what they'd get: besides the usual dosage of murder, rape and other criminal perversions depicted by television and Hollywood films and reported by the news media, they'd get wild confessions of kinky sexual relationships on Jerry Springer...children sent to military-style boot camps...and other various and sundry forms of insanity. They'd leave this planet thinking we're a bunch of freaks."
In "A Mundane Manifesto" for the journal's first issue, Missouri social scientist Wayne.
Brekhus argues that, amid this frenzy of freakiness, "The history of mediocrity, the sociology of the boring and the anthropology of the familiar are neglected fields...It is time for a history of mediocrity, an anthropology of the average, and a sociology of the unimportant."
Striving to meet these goals, the Journal of Mundane Behavior will publish ground-breaking research on topics like "notions of power as displayed in the eating habits of teachers and students in British classrooms." The first issue already features the following papers by qualified academics: "In and Out of Elevators in Japan"; "I'm sick of shaving every morning,' or The Cultural Implications of Male' Facial Presentation"; and "Why the mundane? Or, My Unassailable Advantage': Reflections on Wiseman's Belfast, Maine.'"
This last paper is by journal co-founder Myron Orleans. "Belfast, Maine" is a four-hour film about workers packing sardines, guys fishing from a pier, and other excruciatingly ordinary small-town activities. Does Orleans find this stuff boring? Not in the least. For he believes in "the majesty of the obvious" and "the magnificence of the ordinary person seeing oneself as a...sculptor of the mundane." Film-maker Frederick Wiseman is "a master of the filmic approach to the mundane."
As an accomplished sculptor of the mundane myself, I am submitting several works to this refreshing new organ: "Thoughts and non-thoughts while clipping my toenails, or New Paradigms in Personal Hygiene"; "Sitting 90 minutes in a dentist's waiting room, with nothing to read but grubby dog-eared Chatelaines, before having my teeth cleaned, or A Self-referential Experience in Anger Repression"; and "Notions of authority as exemplified by disputes over whose turn it is to rake the leaves, or Experiential Conflict Arising from Hermeneutical Confusion in a Domestic Relationship.
Then, I'll move on to broccoli, boiled potatoes, blank walls, brushing my teeth, listening to speeches by Canadian senators, and the proverbial watching paint dry. I considered working up an unassailable treatise on "Up and down on escalators, or It Doesn't Get Any Mundaner Than This," but then I discovered, first, there's no such word as mundaner, and second, the U.S. National Council of Dull Men had beaten me to the subject.
"Dull 'R' Us," the council boasts. Its Web site (dullmen.com) -- "a place, in cyberspace, where dull men can share thoughts and experiences, free from pressures to be in and trendy,' to enjoy instead the simple, ordinary things of everyday life" -- offers dull jokes, reviews dull books, and recommends dull activities. These include watching coffee drip, listening to corn grow, and riding escalators in department stores.
The top dull activity for March is observing maple trees at sugaring time.
"Sap dripping. Just right to watch. The right pace, the right suspense." This Web site also offers trivia items so staggeringly boring that any man who repeats them to friends will be branded for life as a really dull guy.
Two examples: First, when Heinz ketchup leaves the bottle, it travels at 25 miles per year. Second, the only 15-letter word you can spell without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable. There, I said them, and I'm glad.
Why? I'm in on the ground floor of a revolution, that's why. Even before the first edition of the Journal of Mundane Behavior appeared on the Internet, more than 4,000 people had visited mundanebehavior.org. This is only the beginning. These first stirrings among us dull people will blossom into a movement that will welcome millions more ordinary nonentities to its ranks. We shall inherit the earth. Boringly, of course.]
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