Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago. The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse. To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
MR R. NUTTER Following the death of Margaret Thatcher in April 2013 it seemed appropriate to re-examine privatisation, one of the former Prime Minister’s most important policies. Indeed it seemed quite likely then that a new round of privatisations was in the offing in the years ahead with Royal Mail the top of the ‘for sale’ list. Following her election in 1979 Margaret Thatcher’s government and John Major who followed her embarked on an unprecedented sale of state assets which included gas, water, electricity coal and rail. In addition British Airways, British Steel and British Telecom joined the private sector after years of state ownership. Most off these firms became public limited companies (PLCs) with their shares traded on the stock market. Although often seen as controversial at the time none of these privatised utilities were taken back into the state ownership by the subsequent the Blair and Brown Labour governments with the possible exception of Network Rail in 2003 which w...