ARTICLE: Everything’s Going to Sh**, 1937

Right now, scroll through any news feed, any social media timeline, and you’d be forgiven for thinking we’re on the verge of the end of life as we know it; that the world has lost its mind. Today, in yet another example of why you should listen to history because it teaches you things, I want to have a look at a publication put out by Mass Observation in the late 1930s. Because it turns out all those conflicting feelings and concerns you’ve got and your responses to them are nothing new…

For those that don’t know, Mass Observation was launched in 1937. The team in charge recruited a team of investigators and a collection of volunteer writers to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain, and record what they saw. In 1939, Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson used some of the first accounts and produced a volume simply entitled “Britain,” at a point in time when the descent into the Second World War had fully begun. Some of what they had to say about how ordinary people react to extraordinary events has resonance today, and makes some clarifying points about how we consume information, and where ordinary folk stand…

1937-38 was demonstrably a time of crises both domestically and abroad. But what is a crisis?

(Londonist.com)