I once had a conversation with a student who had enrolled in the anthropology course at university, but had dropped out to study marketing a few misspent weeks later. She couldn’t see the point of spending at least three years of her life reading and thinking about things that were as far removed from her life as she could possibly imagine.
The proverbial straw had come when one of her professors gave a lecture about a peculiar custom of a people who lived on a group of islands off the northern coast of Australia. It was called kula and had been described in a book written in 1922 called Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Not exactly current affairs, then.
More on kula later. One afternoon last January I found myself killing time at a gate at Zürich airport. One corner of the hall in particular caught my attention. It was packed with people armed with laptops, miles of telephoto lenses, notebooks, and mobile phones. All around them were stacks of empty plastic boxes that had contained the kind of overpriced stodge sold at airports.
It turned out they were British, and plane spotters. They had travelled to Zürich in order to be able to spend whole days with their eyes glued to the glass that overlooked the runway at the airport. They had all the latest information about flight arrivals, and went into a small frenzy whenever an unusual flight number came up. On the day, the Davos summit promised lots of highly rare numbers.
The point of the exercise was to write down those numbers, and to take photos of the planes that displayed them. The numbers, and photos, would then be shared on plane-spotting websites. The notebooks with their dense lists of numbers would be treasured and compared. And that was that.
Birdwatching and twitching are two related but fundamentally different things. The first involves observing birds, often for long periods of time in familiar settings. Although birdwatchers delight in unusual birds, they also derive pleasure from watching more mundane species.
Twitchers, on the other hand, usually have little time for robins and swallows. They prefer to keep themselves updated with news of the latest rare bird sightings, and to try to ‘twitch’ those birds. Depending on the size of the country, they will travel huge distances to do so. British twitchers, for example, have been known to travel hundreds of miles to the Scottish isles, just to twitch a rare bird.
If the bird obliges and stays put long enough, the happy twitchers write down the details in a notebook, share the information and possibly a photo online, and call it a memorable occasion. The best twitchers are those with the longest lists of ‘lifers’ (birds seen in one’s lifetime).
The best a twitcher can say is that they once saw a rare owl. And so on – Pokémon pixels on a screen, in other words
Back to kula, and to a well-trodden quote from that 1922 book: “And then arose before me the vision of a native village on coral sand […] brown, naked men, and one of them showing me long, thin red strings, and big, white, worn-out objects, clumsy to sight and greasy to touch.”
Those objects were bits and pieces of armbands and shells. They were essentially worthless, except the people of the Trobriand islands would embark on long and risky journeys by canoe in order to secure them, by exchange. If it came to be known that a man living on some remote island had a rare armband, the canoes would be sure to go there. The objects would then be exchanged on for other, equally worthless but equally desirable, ones.
Plane spotters, twitchers, Trobrianders, and players of Pokémon Go sound like very unlikely bedfellows. Except they share at least five things.
First, they are not mad – or, rather, not madder than average. They are not necessarily people who need to get out more, or to get lives. Certainly they get out quite a bit, and many of them have lives that are as purposeful, and as pointless, as the rest. The keenest-looking of the plane spotters was a father of three, held a good job, and liked to pop down to the local for a pint every so often.
Second, the things they collect (plane numbers, names of rare birds, greasy shells, and pixels on a screen) are as worthless as they are highly desirable. They cannot be bought or sold; indeed, it would be inconceivable to, say, plane spotters, to buy lists of numbers drawn up by other people. As such, they cannot be compared to things like art, vintage cars or book bindings.
Third, they will go to great lengths to get their hands on the objects (if they can be called that at all) of desire. This often involves travelling, and experiencing places, along the way. Pokémon Go does this partly through the clever use of GPS technology, but there are no short cuts and no consolation prizes for the stay-at-homes.
Fourth, they are usually involved in circles of exchange of information. A plane spotter who kept their notebooks to themself, and who never posted a photo online, would qualify as a rare and odd species. It is easy to see how the internet lends itself, but there was also much going on offline on a Pacific island in 1922.
Fifth, and unlike collectors and hoarders, they do not get to keep or own anything remotely tangible. Kula shells are fairly tangible, and may seem like the exception. But then I did say that they are exchanged on. The best a Trobriander can say is that he was once in fleeting possession of a highly desirable kula object. The best a twitcher can say is that they once saw a rare owl. And so on – Pokémon pixels on a screen, in other words.
And that is the point really. There is nothing new or strange about chasing about the place trying to catch imaginary monsters. It is just another example of the difference between ownership and possession. As someone put it of twitchers, it is about the joy of possessing something you will never quite own. Unlike my disappointed student, a Japanese company saw much marketing potential in that joy.
mafalzon@hotmail.com