THE INTERNATIONAL PEN

In chapter six of Ben Highmore’s book, there is a brief history and explanation of what and how Mass Observation came to be. 

 

Mass-Obs first started in England by Charles Madge, Tom Harisson and Humphrey Jennings, in 1936. 

 

Ben Highmore explains that not everyone has sided with the use of Mass-Obs to study Western civilization behavior, since, like he says, it used to be (and still is) a technique used in studying colonies and populace deemed “uncivilized”; as if they were comparing and antagonizing British people of all classes as to mere brutes or making them seem “uncivilized.”

 

He also writes about various projects that these social scientists had like for example: They tried to publish a book called 12th May only for it to be a failure, the Bolton project, which focused mostly on the working townsmen of Bolton and was later called Worktown.

 

There, of course, a lot of issues that rose with this new type of study. As scientifically accurate as they were trying to be there were a lot of things deemed unnecessary, determining what different activities or choices differing classes had, they went so far as to make note whether they chose butter or margarine. They started to take every little detail of an activity or choice as a ritual rather than mundane which led to people in general dismissing their claims. For Tom, who had worked with tribes, everything had a meaning and an explanation, even if it were an innocent bystander simply humming; he started to put Surrealism, an art form, in a social-scientific study. Which led to another question: What exactly were they pursuing?

 

When they started to receive a very high amount of page entries they didn’t have any purpose, they just asked the diarist to write conversations he/she had, activities, choices made. Then they shifted to simply asking people to write during a holiday or celebration. 

 

Mass Observation, as Tom Harisson stated, was not in any way trying to pull everyone together and make them a statistic, but rather in telling everyone’s story and creating individuals. 

 

This chapter was very useful in the getting to know how surveys started being made, or why diaries turned popular. Furthermore, Highmore has a very clear structure and was quite descriptive. Of course there are phrases that are a bit hard to “digest”as they can be too eloquent.

 

All in all, I highly recommend using this book (or in this case, this chapter), as a tool to get an introduction to Mass Observation, as it is a great source material in the future.

 

 

Reference: Highmore, Ben. 2002, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory : An Introduction, Chapter 6. Routledge