An emergent service

It has been fascinating today to see the results of the BBC’s Great British Class Survey suggesting that there are now seven social groups in Britain. It brings out exactly what my muddled thoughts were trying to get at in response to Grayson Perry’s TV series In The Best Possible Taste and set of tapestries The Vanity of Small Differences. I felt then that each of his three programmes on class actually contained at least two different groups, and that this is what the six tapestries brought out. How prescient you are Grayson!

Like everyone else, I took the ‘Class Calculator’ today and discovered that I am in the ‘Emergent Service Workers’ category, basically because I have no money but nonetheless have a high level of cultural engagement. I guess that’s essentially what being a PhD student is. But, what interested me most was that one of the ‘cultural activities’ that the survey listed was ‘Use Facebook/Twitter.’ I find it odd that those are listed as cultural activities when surely they are so much more than that, they are communication, advertising and discussion tools and they are, crucially, free. I’d be interested to see how use of social media swings the calculator.

What this also got me thinking about was how well museums are doing at exploiting these tools at the moment. Social media seem to have been a worry in the sector for a while, but I think that two recent examples have shown utter brilliance and real flare at mixing the unique qualities of a museum artefact with the spread and humour of so much digital media. One was the Museum of London's recent Harlem Shake film using jugs in their stores, the second was today’s film from the re-opening Rijksmuseum, showing a flashmob recreating Rembrandt’s Night Watch in a shopping centre. Social media can do so much for museums when used with imagination like this.

They are in fact an ‘emergent service’ just like me. Which class my appreciation of that fact puts me in, I don’t know.