matt.me63.com - Matt Edgar

I loved this post pointing out that “You can’t move in London without someone giving you the news“.

It struck a chord with me - first because of my own interest in how the way we get the news has changed, yet stayed the same, but also because this seems to be a particularly London phenomenon.

While the big screens do exist up North, they don’t yet feel quite as ubiquitous or oppressive as in the Capital.

Is this because we’re behind the times? Is an army of telescreen installers waiting for the next clear day to descend on some unsuspecting provincial town?

Or is it that Northerners just don’t feel the same need to be frenetically in the know, up to the minute, every moment of the day?

We can have slow food, how about slow news?

Love it or loathe it, Richard Rogers’ Dome was the architectural icon of of Britain’s new millennium. The hubristic creation of Michael Heseltine and Peter Mandelson, it was meant to symbolise our country’s post-Thatcher renaissance, all Britpop and Cool Britannia. It didn’t work out quite like that.

Along with millions of other Britons, we didn’t make it to the Dome in its inaugural year. We were too busy with our new arrival, our own Millennium baby. He just turned eight and for his birthday treat we took him and his friends to see the Tutankhamum exhibition at the Dome now renamed The O2.

Disclosure: I work for a competitor to O2, but my problem is not with their sponsorship. O2’s own branded interventions - a nightclub, ice rink and inflatable chill-out zones - have their own integrity and fit with the aesthetic of the Dome itself. The naming rights have been seen through with Orwellian ruthlessness: no mention of Millennia, or even of Domes, it’s The O2, plain and simple.

Yet our impression as we walked along the narrow shopping mall that skirts the perimeter of The O2 was a distinctly underwhelming “is this it?”

From the outside the space is huge, but the way the new arena, cinema, exhibition space and leisure facilities have been fitted in manages to totally obscure this once inside. Worse, the partitions that carve up the space are treated as clumsily cut out faux art deco stage setting with no acknowledgement of the structure itself.

Suburban shopping mall, airport terminal, Las Vegas casino, Dubai resort - this could be anywhere. Only it’s not just anywhere. It’s one of our landmarks, a tarnished one but a landmark all the same. Had the hype curve for the Dome dipped so low that we’d settle for this? Britain Deserves Better.

On holiday in Cornwall this summer we visited Polperro, a Cornish fishing village so archetypal that it featured in Ptolemy Dean’s BBC programme The Perfect Village. As the programme synopsis says:

On the surface, Polperro looks as if it hasn’t changed for centuries, but in fact it exemplifies a delicate balance between the tourist village of today and the fishing village of yesteryear. It could, without careful management, slide into being a fishing village cum heritage theme park - a victim of its own success and adaptability.

As we wandered down streets where every fisherman’s home was now a holiday let, I felt there was a lesson for social web and mobile services at risk of being overwhelmed by their own success as destinations. So I stuck the name “Polperro” in the title of a blog post and left it there to see how it got on. Until now.

When I first arrived on Twitter it felt small enough to be that fishing village - a fairly homogenous group of the people so that even the river of recent public updates felt like an intimate conversation between friends. How a service like Twitter copes with the inevitable influx of visitors if successful is a matter of debate.

So here’s my thought on the matter prompted by the whole Polperro experience: the ability of the service to absorb newcomers varies massively depending on what the service is for, and what attracts visitors to it.

From Blackpool to Ibiza to Myspace, there are some destinations that positively revel in the crowds (and conversely feel somewhat forlorn without a critical mass of people).

On the other hand there are others - Venice? Alton Towers? Flickr? - where the mass of people is an inconvenience, but the content so compelling that we’re willing to put up with the crush.

And then, the most fragile of all, the places whose main or only selling point is unspoiltness - places we go to witness or take part in something special, but just by being there we destroy whatever that quality was. The perfect village? The perfect bar? Twitter?