Oct 15, 2012
What a lot of shite
This post has been almost written dozens of times over the last few years.
I nearly wrote it after this.
And this.
But today I’ve seen this, and I can hold back no longer.
Whether the message is about mobile phones, bank notes or our hands, the underlying story’s always the same: we’re a grubby bunch, there’s all shit on everything we touch, and this is very bad news.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Because this coverage is spectacularly unhelpful in telling us what the real risk actually is.
To do that, it’s completely beside the point to offer us statistics of contamination, bacterial density, or any other big numbers in the way that these reports present them.
What we need to know is: does this matter?
And to do that, the research needs to focus on different questions. Try these:
1) are the levels high enough to cause some of us harm? …and if so,
2) who is at risk, of what, and by how much?
3) are these levels significantly higher than in comparable societies?
4) is there evidence of a progressive trend, whether for better or worse?
That’s the meaningful stuff.
The fact is that we’re pretty tolerant of these bugs. Think of some of the places – extraordinary places – that your mouth might have been. You know what I’m talking about. And you didn’t get ill, did you?
The claim that kitchen chopping boards have about 200% more bacteria on them than toilet seats? (I will skip over the omission of a base unit of measurement, and the old favourite of whether 200% really means “three times” but written more scarily.) Evidence, surely, that the best place to chop carrots is the loo?
We’re not all collapsing just because we prepared the veg in the kitchen, are we? Or boaking furiously after every phone call?
A little more sense is required, in the writing and the reading about this topic. Numbers by themselves mean nothing.
Look for the outcomes and the trends. That’s where the meaning lies.
“Meaning”? I can recommend “Mythologies” by Barthes for an investigation into the meaning of stories like this. The story has nothing to do with cleanliness, so has nothing to do with data – or indeed sense, really.
Cleanliness stories tie into our common perceptions of the world in ways shared by lots of other symbol-spinning fluffpieces. Namely 1) cleanliness is a status symbol 2) we know it’s a status symbol, yet we’re so bound to our status that 3) the “dirty truth” merely offers us a way to escape our social pretension for one minute.
It’s the same trick as Nigella saying indulging is good, or the X-Factor showing us people who can’t sing. We know we’re “bad” at stuff (or rather, we like to judge ourselves as “bad”) but we spend so many waking hours either pretending we’re not, or stressing about it, that the “truth” of a news item is like a valve, allowing us to vent our “badness” in a socially-controllable way. “Oh look, someone else has noticed. In public.”
You won’t find *practical* meaning on any of this, because it’s not a practical issue.
Sadly, it’s also the kind of thinking that seeps into everyday life and tears apart common sense and – yes – practical activity.
Bollocks to the “news”.
This might be useful: http://oasisdesign.net/water/quality/coliform.htm
There was a wonderful piece of research, a few years back, that showed clearly that kids who mixed with animals and are exposed to poo, dust and dirt on farms are a whole lot healthier than those in sterile, bleached homes….
I seem to recall an episode of MythBusters where they tested toothbrushes, stored brand new ones in completely different rooms of the house to see how much poo matter was on each after a week. Of course, the ones in the bathroom had more but not by much; their conclusion was that, yes, we are constantly living in shite and frankly there ain’t nothing you can do about it! Fact of life!