Perception
I started writing this on Monday, staring out of the window into the dark to see if at 7.40 am, there’s any sign of daylight.
Nope.
I just posted “Ugh. Its dark, cold and wet; it must be Monday” to Twitter.
Then, while I was waiting for the bus (yes, still in the cold and dark and wet) I thought about this some more.
The truth is that two of those three can apply at any time of the year. Cold and wet don’t apply exclusively to January, although statistically it’s more likely they will. But dark?
I have this mental impression that in the winter I go to and from uni mostly in the dark. Certainly by the end of the Winter term more than half of my journeys take place before sunrise and after sunset.
But –and with the marvels of technology, we’ve just slid effortlessly into a sunny Tuesday– the reality is that by this time of year my only timetabled journeys to and from college in the dark, are homeward on alternate Mondays and Thursdays. But because I have to get up and make ready in the dark of a Monday morning, that perception stains my whole week.
It’s not just me. I lost track of the number of times while working for Unilever that working practices changed, often covered by the catch all phrase ‘we can’t just do the right thing, we have to be seen to be doing the right thing.’
The tendency has spread throughout society so that everything now has to have a PR angle. The downside of making media instead of objects is that perception is as important as the subject now.
And if you don’t think that that applies to you, turn it on it’s head; how many times have you used a cartoon, or a photo of an object, or of an odd angle of your body (say only the top of your head) to change people’s perceptions of you? On Facebook it’s only a joke, but the reality is that just as advertising relies on repeated iterations, so does perception — pixel by pixel, you’re strengethening one of many new realities.
