Overtime, dating has evolved quite fast and no one so it coming. People this days date online. The online dating platform has grown to be unimaginably huge that it has left researchers baffled.

Here are some facts about modern dating that may catch you by surprise

In 2010, dating websites such as eHarmony were crowded with people looking for dates. Back then, you would have thought that they were just intrigued by the fact that you can meet people online. Fast forward this to a year later when mobile applications had started taking root. People move and signed up for mobile dating apps that the number overtook those using websites.

More than half of those looking for advice on dating turn to the internet rather than consulting close friends. This can be attributed to the fact that it is easier to find support and connection on mobile apps than to find physically. The response is also instantaneous when using applications. You do not have to wait till morning to get advice from a friend.

Most users of dating apps and websites averages between ages 25 to 34. One may have thought that the apps are flooded by 17 year old teens looking to have fun. The number of people below 18 is too small and the reason to this may be that dating applications require one to be over 18.

Reasons as to why people prefer online dating

The platform provides a large audience from which people can pick a potential date. This makes it possible for people to find their idealistic date since all sorts of people are using dating applications. This contrasts to physical meetings where one is limited to the peoples around him/her each day.

It is easier to find one’s match online. This may be because the applications have algorithms behind them that allow one to specify what they are looking for and find probable suitors. This, together with the vast number of people in the online dating world, only work to benefit the people.

Some of the downsides of online dating

People may pretend and lie about who they are. For example one may upload a picture of him/her that looks overly cute but then the person is not that cute. This is mostly the case with women and old people who want to look younger.

Most people have turned to open relationships that last only a few days. Modern dating, as most people argue, has made love lose its magic. People do not want to form permanent relationships anymore as they can easily meet better catches on the internet hence they leave their options open.

To maintain a relationship that was built online may be difficult as people may tend to find irritating habits in their partners that they were not aware of before such as snoring.

21st century dating has made it easy for researchers and analysts to collect and scrutinize data. This is because everything is available online. Telling the population of gay men and women, bisexuals and even the percentage population of people looking for mates at a go has been made a bit easier.

Appropriate terminology – or in other words how to describe people and things – is a major issue for archivists, so it’s important for us to be having this discussion about our own research practice. The Community Archives group uses the term Black, Minority and Ethnic Communities (do the comma and the ‘and’ make it worse or better?) and since things only get listed once in their otherwise very useful directory this would seem to suggest that BME community archives (that handy shorthand again) are not or cannot also be ‘special interest communities‘ or ‘national collections‘.

So… what terms should be using? ‘Communities with culturally diverse origins’? (but then isn’t that so broad as to be almost useless?) ‘Black and other diasporic communities’? I look forward to reading your suggestions.

Marriage is still a valued institution in contemporary times. While marriage might not be for everyone it still remains a critical component of social stability, relational commitment and family strength. Here are some facts about marriage that will help to explain how people view marriage in modern times.

1. Many married couples spend less than four minutes a day together. This is because a lot of their time is divided between their children, jobs, school and outside responsibilities. The average family (married couple) is extremely busy and they are constantly on the go. Moms and dads usually do not have a lot of time during the week to spend with one another unless they make time.

2. People under the age of 25 are more prone to divorce. Women who marry younger men are prone to divorce as well. Younger people are normally not ready to marry though it might be a good idea. Society is not geared toward younger people getting married. Young adults are not as socially mature in terms of their roles within society and they are not as financially stable. Older women who marry a younger man are usually not compatible with their mates over time.

3. If a person marries someone from an affair, there is a 75% chance that their relationship will end in divorce. When a person is not faithful to their spouse and they leave them for another person; chances are that some person will not be faithful to them. More importantly, they will more than likely leave because their relationship was not formed on a solid foundation.

4. Marriage hardship causes many businesses to lose income because of the loss productivity. When married people are on the job their personal problems do affect their performance and cause them to stop being effective on the job.

5. Marriage still promotes life satisfaction despite how many people have a negative attitude about it. Marriage is a great thing despite the sex, money or children.

6. Marriage offers people love, romance, friendship and a whole lot more. Well at least a marriage should. Even in this day and time people still value marriages with their spouses for these reasons.

7. If you are not happy before you get married chances are you will not be after you get married. If you are not happy before you get married, then this attitude will carry over. Many people inside of a marriage like to blame their spouses for having a bad union. The reality is that they bring their own problems to the marriage.

8. At least 40% of all marriages has one spouse in it that has been married before. Many people divorce and remarry just to divorce again. If a person does not fix what was wrong in their first marriage, chances are they will bring the same issues to their second one.

9. The average marriage couple has sex at least twice a week. Many married people have lots of sex and it is a good thing. Sex without guilt or problems is a great thing and marriage normally offers this type of benefit to participants.

10. Marriage still remains one of the best options in life and though this institution has been drastically changed it still is important for many people.

Description: I missed this study day but it’s interesting to note what’s going on in France. The terminology is particularly interesting. Rather than ‘community archives’ in France the focus is on ‘immigration archives’ i.e. archives that document the arrival and subsequent history in France of different communities. What would the consequences be if we applied this terminology in the UK? The problem of course is that it risks defining members of diverse communities permanently as ‘immigrants’ i.e. perpetual outsiders. It creates difficulties in talking about populations who held the nationality of the host nation at the time of their arrival, e.g. migrants from the Caribbean. What would the impact be on visual and performing arts archives?

Mary

The list of contributors is impressive and I’d be particularly interested to read Jessica Evans’ chapter ‘Cathected Identities: Governance and Community Activism’. There does appear to be a strong Freudian dimension to the analysis, which is also interesting, and perhaps reflects the authors’ background in cultural studies.

Mary

Its claims are grandiose (and not just in the tag line…):

The Times of My Life is a ground-breaking website which is set to create a revolution in the way we record our historical past. It will be one of the first ever websites specifically designed to allow users to record first hand accounts of their lives through text, images and video.

Social networking sites have become common place and eight out of ten people who are members of these sites go directly to them when turning on their computers. The Times of My Life is a social networking site and historical reference library rolled into one.

There are other issues with the site; there’s an argument to suggest that the eleven key moments selected, even if by popular vote, present a very narrow and exclusive version of key moments in British history. Why not make some suggestions but let people suggest their own topic areas? It’s a little hard to tell who’s behind the the site as well. There is clearly a grassroots drive (see about us) but but it would be interesting to know more about the ‘academics and IT, web and Media experts’ now backing the site.

But, hyperbole aside, archive theorists and public historians, ourselves included, will be watching with interest how the site develops. When our research project was devised we thoroughly expected to find a lot more of this sort of thing: sites that combined social networking technology and the interest in genealogy/community history, especially in diasporic communities. To our surprise, we didn’t find as much evidence of this as we had hoped. We would still be delighted to hear about examples of any such projects, particularly in so far as they concern diasporic groups. We’d also be keen to know about any research projects exploring this phenomenon; media anthropology is where I’d expect to find such things, as I think there you might find people with interests in both the technology and the dynamics of the human interaction, but does anyone have any examples? But in the meantime, perhaps the virtual community archive (if indeed ‘The Times of My Life’ can be described as a ‘community’ archive?) is beginning to catch on?

From a theoretical point of view I am also fascinated by the explicit links to death (of the founder’s mother) and the kind of redemptive language that appears on the website. It has long been argued that one of the reasons for the continued draw of museums and historic sites (and physical archives) is that they give people something stable (or perceived as stable) to latch on to in an age where the compression of space-time (through the Internet etc.) seems to be resulting in a feeling of loss of control for individuals (I’m thinking of Andreas Huyssen’s Twilight Memories for example). But if the idea of ‘leaving a legacy’ can be transferred to a digital platform perhaps some of this theory needs to be rethought?

Anyone interested in these issues might also consider submitting a proposal to the 2009 Digital Humanities conference (taking place in Maryland, USA), for which our own board member and colleague, Claire Warwick, is the programme chair.

Mary

Principles: Many of the Archives’ principles are a radical departure from conventional archival practices. They are inclusive and non-institutional and reveal the Archives’ commitment to living history, to housing the past along with the present. Among the basic principles guiding the Archives are:

• All Lesbian women must have access to the Archives; no academic, political, or sexual credentials will be required for use of the collection; race and class must be no barrier for use or inclusion.
• The Archives shall be housed within the community, not on an academic campus that is by definition closed to many women.
• The Archives shall be involved in the political struggles of all Lesbians.
• Archival skills shall be taught, one generation of Lesbians to another, breaking the elitism of traditional archives.
• The community should share in the work of the Archives.
• Funding shall be sought from within the communities the Archives serves, rather than from outside sources.
• The community should share in the work of the Archives.
• The Archives will always have a caretaker living in it so that it will always be someone’s home rather than an institution.
• The Archives will never be sold nor will its contents be divided.

Now not everybody involved in a community archive would want to sign up to all of these points and remain totally independent but I guess there are many principles here people would feel very comfortable with. If anyone is interested in reading more, an account of the LHA’s early years can be found in Joan Nestle, ‘The Will to Remember: the Lesbian Herstory Archives of New York’ in Feminist Review 34 (Spring 1990).

Andrew

Speakers include:

* Welcome address – Lord Herman Ouseley
* Screening of Colin Prescod’s remastered film From you were Black, you were out on Notting Hill in the 1950s and \’60s
* Launch of Catching History on the Wing [Pluto Press], a new collection of A. Sivanandan’s writings, chair Lee Bridges
* Panel discussion on Islamophobia and Civil Society with Ruqayyah Collector, David Edgar, Liz Fekete, Arun Kundnani and Salma Yaqoob
* Closing remarks Victoria Brittain and A. Sivanandan

Here’s an extract from the publisher’s blurb about the book:

A. Sivanandan is a highly influential thinker on race, racism, globalisation and resistance. Since 1972, he has been the director of the Institute of Race Relations and the editor of Race & Class, which set the policy agenda on ethnicity and race in the UK and worldwide. Sivanandan has been writing for over forty years and this is the definitive collection of his work.

The articles selected span his entire career and are chosen for their relevance to today’s most pressing issues. Included is a complete bibliography of Sivanandan’s writings, and an introduction by Colin Prescod (chair of the IRR), which sets the writings in context.

As well as being director of the Institute of Race Relations and editor of its journal Race & Class for over 35 years Ambalavaner Sivanandan was also its first librarian. As a consequence he is sure to have interesting things to say about the relationship between documentation, archives, history and anti-racist politics.

Mary

(This is what the government thinks community cohesion looks like – from the website of the Department for Communities and Local Government).

On Tuesday I attended a seminar at the V&A as part of their Diversity series (see this post) entitled ‘Museums as transformative spaces’. The speaker at the event was Henry Burgess from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport who set out the government’s vision of community cohesion and how museums might contribute to it (but much of this applies to archives too).

(Warning! What follows is a bit jargon-heavy!). It was useful to be brought up to speed with government thinking and government targets in this area. Basically, in the last Comprehensive Spending Review (which takes place every three years) the government set its targets in the form of ‘public service agreements’ (or PSAs) until 2011. The previous round included the following target:

To increase the take-up of cultural and sporting opportunities by people aged 16 and above from priority groups by 2008.

Priority groups included: ‘people from black or ethnic minority groups’. (It’s easy to see how BME community archives could have made a strong case for contributing to this agenda). In the latest round (published last autumn) there is a new set of targets however and from our point of view the most relevant aspect is the new focus on ‘community cohesion’ and ‘empowerment’. Indeed PSA 21 is:

Build more cohesive, empowered and active communities

This broad goal is broken down into more specific targets such as:

Cohesive communities:

– Helping to create a sense of belonging among young people from different communities.
– Supporting the integration of immigrants into communities
– Celebrating and understanding diversity
– Increasing opportunities for everyone to participate in civic life
– Tackling extremism, racism and religiously-motivated crime

Active Communities

– Strengthen partnership working between local authorities, the third sector and cultural and sports organisations, including improved commissioning and procurement
– Increase the amount and the quality of small grant funding to support the community sector
– Invest in community anchor organisations and use mainstream regeneration funding to support social enterprise
– Supporting volunteering, particularly among young people and socially excluded groups
– Support local capacity building and local infrastructure to support the community sector

Obviously how you measure these things is incredibly tricky. The government’s indicators of cohesion include such subjective measures as ‘how well people from different backgrounds get on’, whether or not people in a given neighbourhood have ‘meaningful interactions’ with people from other backgrounds and whether people ‘feel they belong’. No doubt debate about how to assess these things will rage on, but in the meantime, community archives ought to be able to make the case for doing precisely these things: in particular increasing a sense of belonging but also providing volunteering opportunities that stimulate meaningful interaction. More of this agenda is to be delivered through Local Authorities than perhaps has previously been the case: again, there must be opportunities here for community archives to partner with Local Authorities. Henry Burgess was keen to make this point with regard to museums and I see no reason why the situation would be different for community archives.

To find out more about this there is a helpful short summary available at urban forum. To really get to grips with it all you need to check out the relevant pages of the Treasury’s website.

Before we get too enthusiastic it is however worth remembering where this ever-so-fluffy sounding government agenda has come from. Burgess did not shy away spelling out the fact that there are direct links to the Home Office’s ‘Prevent’ strategy, the explicit purpose of which is to ’stop the spread of violent extremism’. There was healthy scepticism at the seminar about whether this was something museums (or archives) could reasonably be expected to achieve. Precisely how community-based grassroots initiatives feed into the ‘Britishness’ agenda is an interesting area to explore but there is no doubt that behind a rather appealing set of policies you may find there is some less appealing thinking. Oddly, the ‘communities’ agenda might in fact go hand-in-hand with the rolling back of the multicultural vision and its replacement by a much more assimilationist vision of collective national identity.

And there’s another new buzz-phrase doing the rounds. Instead of cohesive communities, some people in government are starting to talk about ‘communities at ease’ (spotted for example in this 2005 report by the Deputy Chief Executive of Oldham Council). Burgess described this term as “less difficult [that the alternatives such as cohesive communities] in definitional terms” (?), arguing that it was important not to get too “hung up” on the terminology. I happen to think terminology is very important; if we mean different things when we say the same word then it becomes easier for those in power to push their agenda (for example on things like ‘identity’) whilst encouraging community groups etc. to think they are pushing theirs. We need to know what we mean when we use these words and “common sense” understandings is generally another way of saying “dominant group” understandings. And it amuses me that the military implications of “communities at ease” does not seem to have been considered. What’s the opposite? “communities to attention”?!

Mary
(all the views expressed here are my own – not UCL’s or the project’s, I should probably make clear)

The aim of the workshop was to bring together those interested in the broad topic of ‘heritage and wellbeing’, including medical professionals, researchers, arts curators, and museum, library and archive workers to work towards the creation of a critical framework for assessing wellbeing in the context of heritage. The background to this seminar was an ongoing research project jointly run by UCL Museums and Collections and UCL Hospitals to exploring the potential benefits of museum object-handling sessions for patients and visitors.

A UCL Museums loan box, of the sort taken out into the hospitals. For more info visit the UCL Museums and Collections site.

This is clearly an exciting area for research, not least because many of the presenters contrasted their own anecdotal experience of the positive impact of contact with heritage materials with the lack of research data to support their case, or even to provide a more nuanced understanding of when such interventions may or may not be appropriate.

The vast majority of the presentations related to museums and material culture, which suggests that there is scope for archivists to get more involved in this discussion. One very notable exception was Judith Etherton, Borough Archivist, Valence House Museum (Barking and Dagenham) whose fascinating talk explored how archivists can better support people doing genealogical research, many of whom are doing it not as a leisure pursuit but as a means to provide answers to traumatic episodes in their past (such as adoption). Similarly, archivists can act as facilitators for terminally ill parents compiling ‘memory boxes’ for their children, by directing them towards sources of information about their family and their neighbourhood but also by offering advice on conservation techniques which can ensure that precious letters and photos intended to be opened as some future date (a child’s 18th birthday, for example) are kept safe until they are needed. In short, “therapists know that sense of place and sense of belonging are key components of sound mental health” and archivists are uniquely placed to deliver this. You can read more about Judith’s research here (if you or your library has online access to the journals).

Some of the later speakers took on the them in more general terms and sounded notes of caution. Beverley Butler questioned whether there has been a shift from thinking about the past as a redemptive force in theological sense to the idea of heritage as therapy and, if so, what the implications of this might be (heritage as quick fix for social or economic deprivation, for example). And, drawing on material from fieldwork with older people in Haringey, Mike Rowlands sought to underline the extent to which there is always an element of choice in heritage; we choose how we wish to tell our stories what objects and documents we wish to carry through life with us, even if we can no longer determine what has happened to us. Any notion of heritage as therapy needs to bear this in mind; heritage, like memory, is always already a ’strategy’, not something pre-determined and fixed, waiting to be unearthed by therapist-heritage professional.

One of the questions that I came away with was the issue of the extent to which it is possible to scale this work and these findings up from the individual to the collective. Is there such a thing as “community wellbeing” (the government would, I feel, certainly like there to be) and if so who decides how the community feels? If it is a useful concept, then what role might archives play in fostering it? And, critically, how would we devise a methodology to assess this link?

Mary