Thoroughly Modern Norway

[ardcarp]

...or maybe I should say Oslo, as it's a big country and I didn't venture much beyond the capital. It seems the trend is to embrace modern technology. The main airport (Gardermoen) seems to have dispensed entirely with people to check you in and out. And talking of checks, cheques disappeared about 3 decades ago. Payment in cash seems to be on the wane too. Even payment by card on a bus or tram seems old-fashioned. An app. seems to be the accepted way of travelling on the Oslo equivalent of the Metro. Getting a ticket is just old-fashioned. Electric (or at least hybrid) cars are much more plentiful. Teslers are much in evidence. You are exempt from the 'Big Brother' payment system of driving through Oslo if you have one. (That will no doubt change when everybody has one!) Attempting to prepare food on the latest incarnation of a cooker takes some working out; you have to fathom an arcane system of touch-screen symbols to get the pan in the right place at the right temperature. A far cry from lovely cast iron stoves...which linger still in the cabins, I am sure.

By contrast I would say Norwegian Christmas Music is conservative. Germanic and somewhat foursquare carols with endless verses all sung the same...albeit beautifully...seem to be the fare of church choirs.

Luckily global warming had not, this year, robbed Oslo of its Christmas snow...and sledging seems to rely on gravity much the same as it always did.

[jean]

Any sign of Vasily?

We had to have our Russian Christmas without him!

[ardcarp]

I'm sure you did just fine with Elim.

As for Vasily? I was kept busy trying to spot Julenissen with various great nephews and nieces several times removed. Anyhow, it's a bit greedy being chief conductor of two orchestras......

[Alain Maréchal]

even more modern Estonia?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-digital-republic

[ardcarp]

The above article frightens me to death!

Even with safeguards such as.....

Data aren’t centrally held, thus reducing the chance of Equifax-level breaches. Instead, the government’s data platform, X-Road, links individual servers through end-to-end encrypted pathways, letting information live locally. Your dentist’s practice holds its own data; so does your high school and your bank. When a user requests a piece of information, it is delivered like a boat crossing a canal via locks.

....it all smacks of a very Big Brother. I suppose with a 1-million-plus population (a willing population) it could be OK, but with nearly 70 million, and Britain's woeful record in 'rolling out' the software for just one sphere of activity, then it's surely a recipe for disaster?

[Alain Maréchal]

The above article frightens me to death!

Even with safeguards such as.....

Data aren’t centrally held, thus reducing the chance of Equifax-level breaches. Instead, the government’s data platform, X-Road, links individual servers through end-to-end encrypted pathways, letting information live locally. Your dentist’s practice holds its own data; so does your high school and your bank. When a user requests a piece of information, it is delivered like a boat crossing a canal via locks.

....it all smacks of a very Big Brother. I suppose with a 1-million-plus population (a willing population) it could be OK, but with nearly 70 million, and Britain's woeful record in 'rolling out' the software for just one sphere of activity, then it's surely a recipe for disaster?

My feeling precisely (I had to read it several times to be sure I was not mistranslating). In spite of France's success with Minitel, it accustomed itself to the internet rather late, and emails are considered here to be something one reads and replies to when convenient ( I learned otherwise when on secondment to the UK). I think the problem with data leaks would be incompetence rather than malignity.

[ardcarp]

Interesting that the word 'couriel' has more or less died out in France. The youngsters at least refer to un email.

[Alain Maréchal]

Indeed, and since votre email is elided in speech, I have seen mél used in print. I prefer courriel since it is a useful modernisation of courrier, but I have long given up fighting for the purity of the language (and being francophone but not French, I have no cause. We have a ministry to pronounce on it rather than an Academie).

Update: Larousse accepts mél.

[BBMmk2]

Sounds like we are way behind the times!

[Serial_Apologist]

Sounds like we are way behind the times!

The composer Edgard Varese made the statement that, "The Artist, contrary to what most people think, is not ahead of his time; most people are far behind theirs". As a fervent follower of modernism, I used to believe this, priding myself on gradually getting to grips with what the greatest in the arts and the sciences had to say, and attempting to promulgate it in my own ways. Then, at a certain point in the early 1980s the entire situation flipped and everything started going in the opposite direction, upending that famous quote. My hope is that that situation is now coming to an end, but that it's going to take a huge effort and probably longer than I'm alive to clear up the awful consequences of that reversal.

[vinteuil]

"The Artist, contrary to what most people think, is not ahead of his time; most people are far behind theirs".

... what do you think that means? [ There is a fifty point penalty for using the word 'zeitgeist' ]

As a fervent follower of modernism, I used to believe this, priding myself on gradually getting to grips with what the greatest in the arts and the sciences had to say, and attempting to promulgate it in my own ways. Then, at a certain point in the early 1980s the entire situation flipped and everything started going in the opposite direction.

... what was it, in the early 1980s, that for you occasioned this 'flipping of the entire situation'?

.

[Serial_Apologist]

... what do you think that means? [ There is a fifty point penalty for using the word 'zeitgeist' ]

Not as much as it once did - to me, at any rate. If it meant anything it was probably the notion that people in general find difficulty in keeping up with "progress".

... what was it, in the early 1980s, that for you occasioned this 'flipping of the entire situation'?

.

The replacement of Keynsian demand management-style economics, and their political corollaries, with Reaganomics, or return to a belief in the "merits" of free market, government-unhindered economics, under the influence of such as Hayek and Keith Joseph.

[vinteuil]

.

... thanks for that, serial. I just wanted to check I was on the right lines!

[Richard Barrett]

The replacement of Keynsian demand management-style economics, and their political corollaries, with Reaganomics, or return to a belief in the "merits" of free market, government-unhindered economics, under the influence of such as Hayek and Keith Joseph.

I'm not really seeing, however, what this has to do with Varèse's assertion. The change in ruling-class strategy that took place in the years around 1980 may well take much time to unravel (but unravel it will, of course, hopefully not in favour of something even worse), but from my perspective it seems clear that it hasn't stopped artists from responding to the world around them in ever-renewed ways, which necessarily go against the inertia that characterises official cultural life. I don't like to use the word "modernism" to describe that kind of response, because as soon as it's given a name it becomes a historical object rather than remaining always in the evolving present. Or, as Varèse also said, "the present-day composer refuses to die"!

[Serial_Apologist]

I'm not really seeing, however, what this has to do with Varèse's assertion. The change in ruling-class strategy that took place in the years around 1980 may well take much time to unravel (but unravel it will, of course, hopefully not in favour of something even worse), but from my perspective it seems clear that it hasn't stopped artists from responding to the world around them in ever-renewed ways, which necessarily go against the inertia that characterises official cultural life. I don't like to use the word "modernism" to describe that kind of response, because as soon as it's given a name it becomes a historical object rather than remaining always in the evolving present. Or, as Varèse also said, "the present-day composer refuses to die"!

Well I interpret Varese's remark as in sympathy with progressive thinking in terms of scientific enquiry, discovery, invention, and politics, which is probably just wishful thinking on my part!