It seems to me that the English love of words - and particularly the universal nature of this passion, which transcends all class barriers - is most perfectly demonstrated not by the erudite wit of the broadsheet columnists, brilliant though they are, but by the journalists and subeditors who write the headlines in the tabloids. Take a random selection of English tabloids and flip through them: you will soon notice that almost every other headline involves some kind of play on words - a pun, a double meaning, a deliberate jokey misspelling, a literary or historical reference, a clever neologism, an ironic put-down, a cunning rhyme or amusing alliteration, and so on.
Yes, many of the puns are dreadful; much of the humour is laboured, vulgar or childish; the sexual innuendo is overdone; and the relentlessness of the wordplay can become wearing after a while. You may find yourself longing for a headline that simply gives you the gist of the story, without trying to be funny or clever. But the sheer ingenuity and linguistic playfulness must be admired, and all this compulsive punning, rhyming and joking is uniquely and gloriously English. Other countries may have 'quality' newspapers at least as learned and well written as ours, but no other national press can rival the manic wordplay of English tabloid headlines. So there we are: something to be proud of.
Cyberspace Rules
In recent times, the English have found a new and perfect excuse to stay at home, pull up the imaginary drawbridge and avoid the traumas of face-to-face social interaction: the Internet. Email, chatrooms, surfing, messaging - the whole thing could have been invented for the insular, socially handicapped, word-loving English.
In cyberspace, we are in our element: a world of disembodied words. No need to worry about what to wear, whether to make eye contact, whether to shake hands or kiss cheeks or just smile. No awkward pauses or embarrassing false starts; no need to fill uncomfortable silences with weather-speak; no polite procrastinating or tea-making or other displacement activity; no need for the usual prolonged goodbyes. Nothing physical, no actual corporeal human beings to deal with at all. Just written words. Our favourite thing.
And, best of all, cyberspace is a disinhibitor. The disinhibiting effect of cyberspace is a universal phenomenon, not peculiar to the English. People from many cultures find that online they are more open, more chatty, less reticent than they are face-to-face or even on the telephone. But this disinhibiting effect is particularly important to the English, who have a greater need for such social facilitators than other cultures.
In my focus groups and interviews with English Internet users, the disinhibiting effect of online communication is a constantly recurring theme. Without exception, participants say that they express themselves more freely, with less reserve, in cyberspace than in what they invariably call 'real life' encounters: 'I say things in emails that I would never dare to say in real life.' 'That's right, you lose your inhibitions when you're online - it's almost like being a bit drunk.'
It seems particularly significant to me that so many of my interviewees and focus group participants contrast their online communication style with what they would (or would not) say in 'real life'. This curious slip provides a clue to the nature of the disinhibiting effects of online communication. It seems that William Gibson, who coined the term 'cyberspace', was right when he said that 'It's not really a place, it's not really space'. We regard cyberspace as somehow separate from the real world: our behaviour there is different from our conduct in 'real life'.
In this sense, cyberspace can be seen as what anthropologists would call a 'liminal zone' - a marginal, borderline state, segregated from everyday existence, in which normal rules and social constructions are suspended, allowing brief exploration of alternative ways of being. Just as we abandon the conventional rules of spelling and grammar in our emails and other cyber-talk, so we ignore the social inhibitions and restrictions that normally govern our behaviour. The English behave in remarkably un-English ways. In cyberspace chatrooms, for example, unlike most 'realspace' public environments in England, striking up conversations with complete strangers is normal behaviour, indeed actively encouraged. We then go on, in instant messages and emails, to reveal personal details that we would never disclose in 'real life'. This may explain why a recent study found that cyberspace friendships form more easily and develop more rapidly than traditional 'realspace' relationships.
Much of this sociable disinhibition is based on an illusion. Because of the 'liminality effect', email feels more ephemeral and less binding than 'putting something in writing' on paper, but it is in fact if anything more permanent and considerably less discreet. So although many English people find the alternative reality of online communication a liberating experience, it can have adverse consequences. Just as we may sometimes regret things we have said or done while under the influence of alcohol, we may also sometimes regret our unrestrained behaviour in cyberspace. The problem is that cyberspace is not separate from the 'real' world, any more than the office Christmas party takes place in a parallel universe. Excessively uninhibited emails, like office-party misdemeanours, may come back to haunt us. But I would still argue that the benefits of the cyberspace 'liminality effect' in overcoming English social dis-ease far outweigh these disadvantages.
The Rules of Shopping
It may seem strange to include shopping in this section on 'private and domestic' pursuits, as shopping clearly does not take place in the home, but in shops, which are public places. We are talking about the English, however, which means that 'public' activities can be just as 'private' as domestic ones. Shopping is not, for most people, a social pastime. Indeed, for most people, most of the time, it is not a 'pastime' at all, but a domestic chore - and should really have been covered in the chapter on work, not here.
But you would probably have found it odd to see a section on shopping under the heading of 'work'. Shopping is not generally regarded as 'work'. There is a curious mismatch between shopping as a concept, and shopping as a real-life activity - between the way we talk in the abstract about shopping, and the realities of our actual experience of it.53 Discussions about 'shopping' - in the media, among researchers and social commentators, and often in ordinary conversation - tend to focus on the hedonistic, materialistic, individualistic view of shopping: we talk about shopaholics, about 'retail therapy', about the power of advertising, about people spending lots of money they don't have on lots of things they don't need, about the 'sex and shopping' novel, about shopping as self-indulgence, shopping as pleasure, shopping as leisure.
Shopping may indeed sometimes be all of these things. But apart from the very rich and the very young, most people's day-to-day experience of shopping bears little resemblance to this image of mindless hedonism. Most of the shopping we do is 'provisioning' - buying the mundane necessities of life such as food, drink, washing powder, loo paper, light bulbs, toothpaste and so on. This is no more an act of materialistic self-indulgence than the gathering and foraging of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Shopping is not work in the sense of 'production' - it is a form of 'consumption', and the people who do it are 'consumers' - but for many shoppers it is work in the sense of 'providing a service', albeit an unpaid service.