This:
Photoed by me last night. And explained here. The Metropolitan Line came up with this logo just after the regular London Underground logo was devised. Now this version of it survives, but only on platforms at Moorgate that are no longer used.
Weird.
In the twentieth century, weird is all it would have been. Then forgotten. Just another of life’s little mysteries. But, in the age of the internet, there are no little mysteries.
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> In the twentieth century, weird is all it would have been.
> Then forgotten. Just another of life’s little mysteries.
> But, in the age of the internet, there are no little mysteries.
Even before he Internet, such mysteries would not necessarily have been forgotten entirely. I have a book published in (I think) the 1950s covering lots of little mysteries of London (including things very much like this sign). And fascination with underground London (e.g. rivers, tunnels, etc.) was demonstrated in book form in the 19th Century.
And now, with the Internet, mysteries big and small remain. questions like UFOs and bigfoot are not answered and are shared more widely still. Many people authoritatively claim that now that everyone has a camera with them nearly 24 hours a day, how can there be any mystery left. There’d be good photos of bigfoot, of UFOs, or whatever. But it’s not that simple: There are lot and lots of photos. But how do you know which ones are genuine? Just as more and more people have cameras, it has become easier and easier to produce truly photo-realistic digital imagery. And of course cameras still don’t work well at night or in low light or at great distances (usually). So the ubiquity of cameras has changed little. Mysteries remain.
Furthermore, fake news (and what one might call uncertain news) is a new kind of public mystery. And alongside this there is a new kind of ‘conspiracyism’, one that has grown out of the religious flat Earth movement and out of Moon Landing-denial. This new form of conspiracy belief/mystery belief structure rejects much of modern science or claims that much of what we see is a hoax or is fake, e.g. that air travel is fake, that the sky is fake (seriously!), that nothing can go into space (yet alone to the Moon), and so on. Where science has solved mysteries, it seems that people have an in-built desire to re-create mystery where there is plainly none.
Posted by markr on 04 October 2018
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Sorry about the typos!
Posted by markr on 04 October 2018