COMMUNICATIONS ISSUE

issue seven

Is GoodBadUgly a name? A concept? A phrase? A mere word on a page? We’re not entirely sure how to define it, but we will try to get some kind of message across to you in this issue. GBU 7 is all about communication, so it might be a start to tell you what we do.

Intro...

In a nutshell:

Why pay £4 for old-fashioned paper magazines written by over-paid media types when you can be entertained for FREE on this space-age thing called the ‘Internet’ by equally talented individuals? We wondered this, and then pondered it, and then pulled our fingers out and did something about it. Each issue of GoodBadUgly contains art and articles with a common theme for you to pore over at your lei-sure, knowing you still have £4 in your pocket for a gin and tonic or something. Or a Burger King meal. (Note: as yet we have not found a way to distribute these free of charge using the Internet. Sorry.)

Read us, send us feedback, suggest ideas for your own contributions. We’d love to hear from you.

And, just so you know, this is the first issue we’re publishing without the hard work and tireless efforts of Dave, the original driving force behind GoodBadUgly. We’d like to thank him very much indeed for creating and (almost) single-handed-ly running the magazine for six issues, and for helping us to carry on where he left off. We wish him lots of luck for the future!

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Contents:4. Bear-ly Understood

what the textbooks don’t tell you

6. Brief, Sticky Notesbeing passive-aggressive never felt so efficient

7. Alternative Reviewhow to upset churchgoers in five easy steps

8. Gallery Iwhatever happened to traditional communication methods?

11. Selling Stuff on the Internetdigital advertising and how it’s bigger than Jesus

13. iCame, iSaw, iTwatare you keeping up?

14. Gallery IIfrolicking in the forest

17. Time to Make-Upa bit of slap works wonders

18. Behave.we all need to be reminded not to sneeze on one another

19. Who’s Who in GBU?this issue’s contributors

19. Get in Touchhow to contribute or give feedback

by Rebecca Glassell (Illustration) by Stephanie Hosmer

Bear-ly Understood

Languages can be very tricky. It seems most people wish they spoke more foreign languages and even if they know several, they are still interested in learning more. How many of us have spent a few weeks, months or years

in a foreign country trying to master or at least learn decent conversational skills in their native tongue? I have studied French for fifteen (!!!) years and spent three summers of varying length in the country. I am still not fluent. That’s actually slightly embarrassing, but there are of course factors such as practice and familiar-ity that have to fall into place. I am not here to talk about why we are so interested in languages, but instead, the tricky business of even mastering the nuances of your own native language.

My latest experience made it clear to me that even two people who speak the same language fluently can have problems understanding each other - the main problem here being dialects! My boyfriend and I were traveling in Northern Sweden and spent the weekend with a couple of really sweet locals. He doesn’t speak Swedish so naturally asked me to translate, which I was happy to do as long as I understood what was being said.

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After the first evening, before bed, I said to him: “I don’t always understand these people’s accent or dialectal vocabulary, so if I say ‘bear’, that’s code for I have no idea what they just

said.” This to alleviate the embarrassment of translating what the locals had said, right in front of them, without actually understanding them in the first place! I definitely said “bear”

more than a couple of times, and it is entirely possible that they thought me a bit of a fool, what with all the ‘polite’ nodding and smiling I did while pretending to understand their sto-ries. And when they spoke to each other it was even worse, totally incomprehensible to me.

Funnily enough, they understand each other perfectly well.

And isn’t it the same in English? I can recall a number of times when getting a taxi driver who

is simply incomprehensible. Even after saying “Sorry?” and “Excuse me?” ten times, they still don’t slow down and articulate. Which all leads

me to believe that there is just so much more to a language than what you learn in school. Dialects,

social and regional, are my biggest obstacles in learning any language. But then again, there are

more ways to communicate than simply learn-ing to speak a language… which is what all these

articles are about!

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Brief, Sticky NotesLast year a foreign friend came to visit the old, crooked house I was co-renting at the time. In a grainy photo I dug up from the early 1900s, the building is labelled ‘The Institution,’ and in spirit remained just that. The majority of things that went on in my two years there wouldn’t have been out of place in Hogarth’s depiction of Bedlam. To clarify, this friend was foreign in the sense that he worked in an office, and couldn’t understand the mysterious hieroglyphs the inmates of my house had scrawled on little bits of yellow paper around the walls. ‘Where I come from, we use these,’ he said, ‘but for phone numbers and doodling. All I see here is rage. You must tell me more of your people.’

by James Campbell-Macdonald

In my primitive language, I explained that in our culture, Post-its are used to dispel ills and grievances. If the milk in the fridge goes sour, or if nobody takes the bins out, or if the crops fail, we scrawl the nature of the injustice on a Post-it and leave it someplace the gods are likely to find it, before quietly awaiting their divine intervention. The foreigner asked a question: ‘But why not just tell someone about the problem?’ I instantly beat him to death with a bone.Post-it notes: the cornerstone of modern civilisation. On the one hand, they remain the most efficient way of communicating our minor gripes to each other without tearing out each other’s throats or looking each other in the eye. On the other hand, someone is making mon-ey off of our sour milk and dirty living conditions like some sort of astonishingly entrepreneurial house goblin.

In fact I’m willing to bet that if we took everyone with a six-figure salary in Canary Wharf and Wall Street and launched them into Neptune’s orbit, the guy who owns the patent for Post-it notes would become the top profi-teer on human misery. Though perhaps he already is; even bankers need to vent their rage in the form of pas-sive-aggressive scribblings: ‘don’t touch the watch,’ ‘I ordered a mochafrapparocha, not a mochaccinochoca, you imbecile,’ etc. And I’m sure if Darfur war orphans’ schools weren’t either corrupt or bombed, they’d be able to write ‘this bloody malnutrition!’ or ‘to the person who ate my future – at least have the decency to own up to it.’Unless gently peeling from the skin of a naked lover, Post-its are woeful, sinister things. Sure, like all messages to heaven, they can sometimes contain a little joy: ‘I love strange mushrooms, but not on my kitchen table,’ for ex-

ample. Yet most of the prayers I witnessed in The Institu-tion went something along the lines of ‘Clean this or I will play my Ukulele all day and all night until you are dead.’

One situation that I felt called for a Post-it was when an enormous, grey, oatmealy pool of sick materialised in the middle of the kitchen floor one fine morning. Summa-rising my emotions, I wrote ‘Fuck off’ on a Post-it, and stuck it just next to the mess, like a marker at a crime-scene. In the afternoon I found the familiar puddle and another Post-it beside my one. It read ‘Be a little less terse?’ In my opinion, the puke remained the tersest thing in the room. All the same, I amended my note to suit the refined manners of the vom-culprit: ‘Do please Fuck off.’But the floor-jelly remained resolutely in place. Its mes-sage was clear: actions speak louder than words. Let the chunder do the chatting. We should, like my foreign friend, reserve our Post-its for phone numbers and doodling, keep-ing them well away from troubling fridge-smells. Any-way, my handwriting’s apparently too bad for the gods to understand; they never did break that twatting Ukulele.

Alternative Review I sat outside the Editor’s office on tenterhooks for this one. Last issue’s review was nowhere near as degrading or painful as it could have been, and I came out of it with my dignity (and bollocks) intact. Could he return to his wicked ways with ‘Communication’? Sinister ideas flew through my head. How far is ‘too far’ when using suggestive body language with stranger? Which writing implement hurts the most when it’s thrown at you? Which make of mobile phone is the easiest to ingest?

Physical pain turned out to be absent from this issue’s review, but public embarrassment (and caus-ing offence to old ladies) certainly wasn’t. The Editor fondly remembers his rebellious adolescent days when communicating slogans via the medium of t-shirts was all the rage, so by way of homage to that dubious period in fashion history, his question was this: which t-shirt’s slogan goes down the worst in church?

Always a winner on a Sunday in your local holy building. Not too many raised eyebrows, but then again the large majority of the congregation have rather poor eyesight so it’s possible that they just couldn’t read it. I caught up with the vicar at the end for the chat, and he seemed to find it rather amusing.

‘I’m with stupid’ (plus arrow)Different church and different Sunday for this one, just to mix things up. This slogan in itself isn’t particularly mischievous unless you stand next to some kind of religious depiction, like a statue of Jesus. I did. A few churchgoers alongside me in the pew noticed this, and glared at me during the hymns.

Not only is this one lacking in any form of humour, it is also very easy for even the visually challenged to spot. A bold, basic message that does not belong anywhere near an altar. I felt thoroughly uncomfortable the whole time with people scowling, and feared my nan was looking down at me. (Not, like, from heaven. She’s alive, I just thought she’d be disappointed.)

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Even without this contrived testing environment, I could have told you that this one would be the worst. The presence of an out-and-out obscenity (I par-ticularly enjoyed one disgruntled gentleman’s loud and unremitting use of the word ‘smut’ throughout the service) makes it the ultimate church taboo. I was in there for less than a minute before being asked to leave.

by Carly Morris

The Editor refused to say whether or not the t-shirts he lent me for this review belonged to him. It is my feeling that they do, and quite frankly he should be most ashamed of this one. Classic lad-wit that doesn’t go down at all well in church. A few loud whispers among the more bad-tempered of the congregation this time.

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Illustriation by Jessica Rigley

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Selling Stuff on the Internet by Lateef Joseph-Maynard

Adverts have long been a source of joy, boredom-spawned channel-flicking, controversy, conversation and catchphrases for the entire world. As a medium, advertising is one of the most universal modes of mass com-munication on the planet, almost impossible to escape. Whilst you are probably well aware of this, you may not be aware that advertising on the Internet is fast becoming brands’ most valued way of interacting with consumers.

The average UK adult spends thirteen hours a week online, the UK teenager spends thirty one. I have definitely not done the research on this but I am quite sure that the average thirteen hours spent online is a lot more than the average time spent reading the Bible. In saying this I am not trying to denounce Christ our lord saviour, what I mean to do is highlight the fact that the communication landscape has changed greatly. The way we interact with the world has changed considerably and business is adapting to capitalise to the fullest on this; last year alone gross online advertising spend grew 4.6% whilst TV spend shrank 16%. Digital is now encroaching on print and television advertising just as how the ‘trendy’ compact disc began to challenge vinyl in the nineties.

The rise of digital has been helped along a great deal by the recession; with a lot of companies cutting back on marketing spends, they turned to more cost-effective ways to mass market. As television and print can often be very expensive at the most prominent times and locations, online seems like an inexpensive way to maintain brand presence. This has in turn raised digital’s already growing market share, and its validity as an art form in advertising.

Digital offers brands another chance to try and sell you something; the NHS another way to engage teens with anti-binge drinking messages; ITV another source of revenue through advertising before online shows. Digital however is not just banners or pop-up messages telling you to blow torch fat off your body in two weeks. It is everything from becoming a fan of Converse on Facebook, to viral advertising on YouTube, to films and bands having MySpace pages. Applying the concept ‘time is money’, if we are spending a seventh of our waking life online, that might explain why Facebook is valued at 15 billion dollars. The transference of value to digital marketing is a natural step, just one that is easy to overlook because it happened so quickly. Many still hold the view that advertising is just what happens in commercials and on posters. A recent study claimed that one in every five pounds will be spent online by 2020 - it’s things like this that really underline that digital is the new rock and roll.

The Internet is largely about the transference of information. It’s opened up a wealth of potential and shar-ing that wasn’t half as accessible five years ago. A prediction I make in advertising over the next five years is that we will see adverts online become more and more targeted, perhaps even scarily so. Platforms like Googlemail and Facebook enable marketers to map out who they are targeting: they have the capacity of knowing your sex, age, hobbies, frequently used words, and advertise products and services that might ap-peal to you accordingly. Imagine logging in to Facebook and watching an advert that said ‘good afternoon’, your name out loud, told you to drink Coca Cola and a shop nearby where you could buy it. This is no longer advertising science fiction - it’s a real possibility. How quickly and to what extent this does happen I cannot tell you but it is very possible to map an Internet user’s interests, social habits, likes and dislikes from observing what they do or don’t do online. If you were Richard Branson and you could use that information to sell more and more flights, wouldn’t you? 11

http://www.bigbigtoe.co.uk/

iCame, iSaw, iTwatby Bruno Rojas Fisher (Illustration) by Darren Turner

Thinking back to the ’80s and the goals that the world set out for its future, it’s sur-prising how many of the big ones we’ve failed to achieve. None of us live on the moon, none of us live in space, we don’t drive hover cars, we don’t use hover boards, we haven’t discovered aliens and as for what we’ve done with Michael Jackson, I don’t think the ’80s would ever forgive us.

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There has however been one breakthrough that has pretty much come out of nowhere and has changed everything, and it all boils down to communication.

Whilst even a Victorian could probably have a car and a spaceship explained to them, given enough analogies with horse drawn carts and fireworks and all that, the concept of the Inter-net would be utterly beyond them. The Internet which, now firmly coupled with every new mo-bile phone, is everywhere.

All human knowledge is constantly at your fin-gertips. The entire planet, and indeed space, vis-ible in glorious 3D, every street in every major capital perversely available for you to stalk, ev-ery person’s actions exquisitely documented and photographed and their every inner musing laid bare. We can watch any film, hear any song, buy any thing and track down, correspond with, see, hear and even poke every person on the planet.

Communication with everyone and everything is hardly even a novelty any more, but fast be-coming an absolute necessity of normal life; if you’ve ever been without your phone for even a few days you’ll understand completely. But try explaining your utter dependence on communi-cation to someone from the ’80s. A dependence that is only going to get stronger as technology advances.

Technology hasn’t come such a long way since ‘I remember the days when’ because we’ve all put in some kind of extra special effort recently. No, not at all, in fact it is a law of nature that

technology advances exponentially, and recently we’ve really started shooting up the curve. And we’ll keep on shooting up, faster and faster, forever and ever, even as you get older and slower it’ll just keep on going! I remember once showing my grandmother how a mouse worked. Everyone knows how a mouse works; after my adequate explanation she obediently picked up the mouse, moved it up and left a bit, put it down and looked quizzically at the screen, wondering, I’m sure, what, if anything, had happened.

She, of course, was born into a world without computers: how and why could and should she ever learn? You could say that she was born into a world with no need for computers but, as should be painfully clear by now, technology not only justifies itself (‘you need me because of what I allow you to do, not just because of what I can do for you’) but soon enough it justifies you (‘without me, you are nothing!’).

So ask yourself: is there anything new and ap-parently life-changing that you’re just not that into? Something that you just don’t really care for? Can you see the point of an iPad? How long before you fall behind the exponential train? Let’s hope you don’t, because you might not catch up...

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Photographer Lotte Simons

Photographer Lotte Simons

Time to Make-Upby Nastassja Beaton (Photo) Sarah Lines

The love between a mother and her child can rarely be overruled, though at the ten-der age of eight I would come to the swift realisation that there are a few situations that the maternal bond may be replaced by pure unadulterated Darwinist animal instinct. Bear with me a moment as I quickly drag you down my personal memory lane…

Picture this: a young girl (that’s me!), hand in hand with my mum as we casually amble down Princes Street, breathing in the sweet smell of my beautiful home city of Edinburgh (for the purpose of narrative embellishment please imagine a warm sunny day, birdsong, butterflies etc.), and as we approach one of the large city centre department stores I hear my mum gasp; in that moment she drops my hand and dashes forward into a mirrored labyrinth of coun-ters into which she disappears under the veil of an anonymous crowd. Did I mention that in her haste the heavy glass door is thrown back into my small defenceless face, my arms too weak to push open the door?! And what exactly drove my own mother to leave me with squashed features, alone on a busy city street? A sale in the make-up department. And thank god she did! In that instant I learnt a valu-able lesson (an epiphany maybe?); after smashing through the shackles of evolution (I believe we completed the evolutionary process circa 1983, see Heaven 17 ‘Temptation’ for confirmation) we can now focus on the greater things in life… It’s now the era of survival of the cosmetically immaculate!

Some may argue that this sentiment is entirely shallow and vacuous; it has even been suggested that make-up is nothing more than another capital-ist commodity that we are coerced into consuming through a barrage of direct and subliminal adver-tising - but I say NO! I believe this to be a strong enough argument, but for the sake of creeping up my word count I will embellish upon this defence. The progression of make-up has greater meaning than simply colouring in a face; make-up reflects wider societal changes and struggles throughout the years. Sceptical? Well don’t be, thanks. The earliest record of make-up dates back to the 1st Dynasty of Egypt (c. 3100- 2907 BC) where the women would decorate their eyes with kohl and soot. Importantly make-up would also reflect class status or more predominately class emulation. Ladies from the Grecian-Roman society through to our great-great-

grandmothers would use dangerous concoctions to whiten their skin; a cocktail of arsenic and chalk for my skin please Sir!

Women from the 6th Century would even ‘bleed’ themselves to encourage the sought-after pale pal-lor. A rouged lip was enjoyed during the French Revolution as a playful hint to a more risqué side, but as time progressed and the Victorian era began, self-expression and the overt communication of self-confidence became passé and downright offensive; Victorian female delicacy reigned supreme. Though these restraints have been lifted to a degree, it must always be remembered that the ladies and gentlemen of previous eras pushed and experimented with the communication of self-expression through fashion and make-up, and just as men and women struggled for emancipation, so too did they struggle for a foun-dation that wouldn’t permanently scar them whilst still providing good coverage.

Whether make-up is displayed alongside the brico-lage of a contemporary subculture or on the faces and bodies of couture fashion models at London Fashion week, it communicates a personal freedom and expression which has previously been repressed in the name of sensibility and class distinction. Don’t let the Victorians win! Let us wear lipstick!

Every text is written for an intended audience. Journalists writing for The Times or The Economist expect more from their readers, in terms of previous knowledge as well as a grasp of sentential com-plexity, than journalists writing for The Sun do from theirs. Adver-tising aimed at professionals differs from that aimed at children. Obvious as it seems, you can draw some interesting conclusions based on this simple fact.

It is telling and a bit frighten-ing that the types of ads that are designed to work as public ser-vice announcements, ads issued by government bodies, treat their audience as children or imbeciles. I am thinking of the type of ads that encourage us to catch, kill and bin colds and bacteria rather than passing it on to our fellow commuters and colleagues. I don’t know about you, but this is not news to me. I mean, the theory that disease is caused by small, transferable entities is not altogether new and one that I previously thought we were quite well aware of. If nothing else, my parents always insisted that I use a tissue to wipe my nose and not the back of my hand (which I, of course, thought was more readily available and thus convenient). Although I didn’t understand the reasons for this until later in life, I was always well aware that wiping your nose with anything other than a tissue was seriously frowned upon.

The tendency to treat the audi-ence like children is prevalent; just look at all the nicely coloured cartoon-style cutesy ads out there. Like the one with a picture of a toy car’s wheel, warning you that if you speed you’re just a kid again. Yeah, and big boys don’t cry. Calling people immature can

hardly be the most efficient way to make people not speed. Or maybe I just don’t understand the psyche of the target audience (presumably the young male drivers who most frequently get into accidents).

The most worrisome campaign of all is, in my mind, the ‘Together for London’ one where the Mayor of London feels the need to ask his constituents to behave like decent people. The most mind-numbingly obvious statements are adorably put on adorable, smiling little cartoon characters, all adorably ethnically diverse. Look at happy multi-cultured London. “I will keep my stuff out of your way.” “I will give my seat to that person.” You might as well tell people not to spit on each other. Most people are aware that they should do these things, and the fact that the Mayor of London feels the need to tell us to do them is quite sad. Of course, some people do choose to ignore

the common convention of giv-ing your seat to an elderly person or a pregnant lady, but the same people are quite likely to ignore these infantile pictures. The rest of us are aware, and to us those kinds of reminders seem just a bit condescending. The intended audience is supposedly all of us in London (‘Together for London!’) and I for one don’t feel like I need to be told that I need to stop at red lights, or keep my feet of the seat. And “I won’t eat smelly food” actually sounds like a joke to me; horrifyingly, I don’t think it is.

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Behave.by Charlotte Nordgren

Who’s Who in GBU?

Thanks to all who have contributed articles to this issue of GoodBadUgly: Rebecca Glassell, James Campbell-Macdonald, La-

teef Joseph-Maynard, Bruno Rojas Fisher, Nastassja Beaton.

If you’d like to find out more about this issue’s illustrators, check out their websites:

Jessica Rigley - www.jess-rigley.co.ukStephanie Hosmer – www.up-side-down.co.uk

Darren Turner – www.bigbigtoe.co.ukLotte Simons – www.lottesimons.com

Sarah Lines – www.flickr.com/silverdustedtwilight

For everything else, we thank the ghost of Michael Jackson, Mrs Elin Nordegren-Woods, and Simon Cowell for giving us a reason to live. Oh, and Susanne Henriksson for the techy and design stuff, and Charlotte Nordgren and Carly Morris for imposing deadlines and causing general mischief.

How to Get in TouchIf you have any feedback for us or would like to contribute to the future success of GoodBadUgly, drop us a line. We’re always looking for keen writers and illustrators.

Twitter link / Facebook link / email link

Check out our previous issues at:www.goodbaduglymagazine.co.uk

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