An article on the BBC website describes a project which started in the 1930s to catalogue the details of everyday activities - activities which would ordinarily be seen as so mundane as to not be worth documenting. Some choice quotes from the article:
" As well as asking volunteers to keep diaries, Mass Observation's researchers interviewed people in the street, listened in to conversations, and observed public behaviour in places like pubs and factories. It wanted to thwart the tendency in modern society to live our daily lives deadened by habit, "with as little consciousness of our surroundings as though we were walking in our sleep"."
" If you visit the archive today, you will see that the files have wonderfully banal headings, obviously provided by someone with a quirky sense of humour:
• Implications of Peckham
• The application of face cream
• Upper and middle-class soup-eating habits"
Peckham is of course just another boring suburb of London. But what of its implications? :-)
The article also makes the obvious point that these days such attention to the 'man in the street' is common-place due to polls and rolling news interviews. Silly blogs such as this now add to the deafening noise.
Perhaps the only place left in the world where you don't hear the opinions of the common plebs is North Korea. Make of that what you will.
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