The job description is supposed to give a clear indication of the person that the prospective employer is looking for. We are encouraged to examine the duties that will be required of us, the skills we should possess, and the qualities that we should radiate in the working environment.

More often than not, these statments are delivered to us as a series of bullet points. These statements (or rather demands) are pitched towards us at high velocity:

• Ability to plan organise and manage priorities and workloads

• Excellent interpersonal skills

• Experienced with Microsoft Office

We are forced to respond in the same way: using bullet points like balls in a strange ping-pong; slamming return after ace return back into the body of the employer, grunting as we hit the magical Alt-8 key combination that launches our black mortars at the enemy.

” • Experienced with Microsoft Office!”

” • Three years experience using Word, Excell and Powerpoint to complete tasks and organise my workflow! Bam! Take that!”

” How about this! • Excellent interpersonal skills”

” • Five years managing large and small teams…”

…and so it goes on. These strange non-sentances, devoid of personal pronouns, are knocked around in an athletic choreography that seems less an objective search for the ‘right candidate’ and more a kind of judo. The skill demanded of us is not having the required experience or knowledge but finding the right retort, the right grip of words that balances out - or rather overbalances - the assailants demands. Using the incoming energy as weapon, we must pin the employer to the ground - at which point he or she, impressed with our strength, will concede and, weeping with admiration, will submit to giving us the interview we lust after.

 Nothing says Easter like a robot overlord.

Instead I am presented with a stream, the flow of which I control using my hands (always at some distance from the text). Using the scroll-wheel on my mouse, or keyboard shortcuts, I activate and control the movement in an interestingly abstract way - one that is not specific to the text or the object. Each book demands a different relationship to the reader as we negotiate its weight, texture, fragility, legibility and so forth. The actions needed to view this PDF are the same as for any PDF and almost the same as those used to view a web page or a large image.

At the centre of the process is a conflict between trying to follow the flow of text from left to right and top to bottom (which is how I was taught to read) and trying to maintain a constant position for my eyes as the text moves past.

Should we start teaching children to read on screen rather that with books? After all, its probably how they will do most of their reading anyway and it would reduce some of the physical barriers that us book-taught readers encounter.

There are two main patrons of Lunar House - the last-minute vacationer, applying for a panic passport and, of course, the new arrivals, the huddled masses seeking, or perhaps pleading for, asylum. One could imagine a system of equilibrium based on balancing the numbers of these two groups. “One out, one in mate”, a surly Global Solutions Ltd (formerly Group 4) employee of the month may tell you, regardless of whether you speak English or not. But things are not easy on either side of the equation. There is a complex calculus that must be executed before anything like a decision can be made on one’s suitability for travel or residency.

Identity is the first point. Are you who you say you are? As if anyone can answer such a question, as if it matters what identities move around the world. The first thing you think of in the morning, your favourite song, what your farts smell like - these things are at least as good if not better indications of who you are and your ’suitability’ than date of birth and mother’s maiden name. But the calculus deals with facts. Known knowns. The measurable. There is no appealing to the common sense, to any sense; only the proper channels. Lives flow through these passages like barges on a canal. There’s no turning round, no leaving the water, no jumping the lock.

The stamp falls on your passport and you are allowed to leave. Next stop Paris or Prague or Magaluf or Ankara or Basra. Pushing your way out of the door you see a family waiting in ‘the other line’. This is their fist trip to Britain, their first trip abroad.

We apologise for any delay, but it’s to be expected as with any journey. First the forms to fill in - any notes are clearly written in English on the the back. Then a friendly officer (replete with name badge - if only they’d said to wear a name badge, we could have sorted the identity problem out in a jiffy) guides you to a small room for searching and processing (men searched by men, women - and once children - by women). An interview: have you got your story straight? Are you a threat? Do you need to be detained? All these will be decided in good time, but first: the wait. Waiting is important, you must play out your uncertainty, your lack of control. A play with space but no action, save for a flickering television (an introduction to the local culture through property programmes and foreign soaps).

Judgement waits too, hides in doors and rattling offices. This happens in the beyond - the upstairs of the House. It happens between manilla files and phone calls, between printouts and re-faxed correspondence. Authority exercises itself. Stretches, poses and pouts; confirms its strength. It wants to look its best. This isn’t some anonymous shop-front, this is where the action is enacted. The building is modernist cool and therefore the non-cool of too-late coolness, of sunglasses in September. British holidayers in late season Costa Brava. It dominates its twin Apollo, despite being an exact mirror image, by courting publicity and controversy. The queues and protest and arrests for which it serves as a backdrop are part of its public proposal, its truculent charm.

The look is official, but not too official. Every day is dress-down Friday. It might be a college campus, or a joint embassy for a few of the ‘minor’ nations of the security council, or maybe a block of flats. It is all of these things. It wants to be seen, but it doesn’t want to be seen to be being seen.

Croydon is a fitting home (or rather hangout) for such a character, these are scenes that people expect to have been outsourced to some remote Asian warehouse economy. Those proposals for extra-national immigration centres - catalytic converters for the uninvited - were quietly dropped by all parties some time ago. Who needs a compound in Calais or Istanbul when we have a place as foreign as Croydon? A refugee returning to Sudan or Kenya would have great trouble convincing their surviving friends and family that they had truly visited Britain if they regaled them with tales of these tower and trams. “You must be delirious,” they would say, “you dreamed it all - you never even left the country.”

At last, a decision is reached, or rather, not reached. Further investigation is needed. More checks, more phone calls, more interviews. You are not dangerous enough to be ’sent home’ but were not sure you are safe enough to be allowed to stay. Having no money for a phone call to friends or relatives (or a solicitor), means you are not burdened with many belongings. So you are walked by another friendly officer (the shifts have changed over three times since you arrived) to the car-park. Once loaded on the bus, the officers gather outside to wave you off to Oakingdon Reception Centre. You have much to look forward to; as you move off down Wellesley road, you take in what could be the last you will see of Croydon, the closest you got to the dream of London. An old television in the coach flickers into life offering an introduction to the delights of Oakingdon. You settle down in your seat, and wait to be received.

An interesting (if rather old) article about the relative merits of explicit versus implicit metadata. At one point, regarding the difficulty of classifying controversial topics, Cory Doctorow says:

And so, I want to classify this as hallucination engendered by accident of evolution and you want to classify it as genuine religious experience. I have a feeling that both of us would be slightly peeved if the other’s label were applied to it.

While this is true, it would be wrong to call this a failure of taxonomies, or explicit metadata. It is simply an example of the complexity of human culture and language. Whilst tagging may well help solve the technical problem of finding, say ‘an account of a religious experience’, it will not change the fact of the difference of definition which is embedded in the culture of the person applying the taxonomy. Earlier he says:

Well, the problem with explicit metadata, as I sum up in the essay, is manifold. But it’s that people lie; they tell you what they think you want to hear. Or, they tell you what they think they believe, even if it’s not what they actually believe. People are dumb, right? They sometimes just have bad classification information. People are lazy, so they misclassify because they can’t be bothered to properly classify

I understand, and to an extent agree, that the use of tagging and folksononmies are a possible solution to this problem, but I’m not convinced that framing it as a problem doesn’t mask some crucial cultural information provided by different people’s taxonomies.

There seems to be an assumption that people are getting in the way of the data, that they are stopping us from getting to the information that we need. But of course the way in which people talk about and classify things and experiences provides an important context, one that the flattening effect of tagging can destroy.

I am still surprised by the proliferation of these shops, which are epidemic in South London and probably across the rest of the city too. It seems inconceivable that there is a sufficient market for phone customisations to sustain so many ofthese establishments. Many of them are not shops in their own right, rather they exist as tiny booths (often not much more than a vitrine and a chair) that sit in a small subdivision of a newsagent, barbers or butchers. The legality and tenancy of these businesses are, one suspects, something of a grey area. They appear, at first, to be parasitic upon the existing high street landscape, appearing for as long as the host business is viable and compatible with the patchwork, shanty aesthetic of the concession.

I wonder if they suggest a growing trend towards the sub-division and subletting of retail space in order to counter rising ground rents. It seems like a shift to a more freeform, bazaar-style retail landscape. One could picture high streets overflowing with micro-businesses providing a patchwork counterpoint to the expansion of generic shopping streets (which seem to be universally reviled even as they are universally patronised).

The best example of this (at least in south-west London) is the ‘Latin Boulevard’ in Brixton - an ordinary sized retail unit at the end of a parade which has been subdivided into half a dozen smaller units and acts as a shopping arcade serving mainly the Colombian community . It offers hairdressing, travel agency, currency exchange and other facilities. The use of ‘Latin’ reminds of a reading I listened to recently by Rebecca Solnit from her book “Storming the gates of Paradise” in which she talked about the differences between Latin and American use of urban space. In particular the way that Latinos used the front porch and garden as a way of bridging the gap between private and public. I wonder to what extent ethnicity has affected the retail landscape in London. The traditional English shop acts as an extension of the Englishman’s castle - it is a territory which is under the sole dominion of the shopkeeper. Are the phone concessions the result of alternative shopping traditions being introduced to the London retail landscape?

However, this was not what I was intending to write about.

What interested me was the way in which mobile phones are marketed as a disposable item, the turnover of new phones in Britain is very fast and the industry relies on this to maintain its increasing growth. The development of new features and designs keep the desire for an upgrade constant. Phones are some of the most technically advanced consumer objects available, and yet they are routinely dispensed with for the newest model. Even home computers (which are of similar complexity) are less frequently replaced.

Quite what this points to, I’m not sure. Its not simply a symptom of a culture of consumption, I think there is also something about the mobile phone that exaggerates their disposability. But what?