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Wouldn't it be great if someone (me) had been tirelessly aggregating historical examples of nebulous demands for vigilance and alertness as a catch-all for health and safety? Stay alert, @readandheed
It's totally unreasonable to tell people to 'be alert to all hazards'. It's not an instruction that it's possible to follow and responsibilises individuals in completely unreasonable ways https://twitter.com/readandheed/status/774931714368016384?s=20
'Stay alert' makes inattention or even rest into a failing https://twitter.com/readandheed/status/865538780324741123?s=20
Of course, this isn't anything new. Productivity culture wants to punish carelessness (and, even more, being free of care) in every possible way https://twitter.com/readandheed/status/1212752909747838976?s=20
'Stay Alert' means it's possible to allocate blame to you, with your fallible human vigilance, in case of an accident https://twitter.com/readandheed/status/1211302351874621441?s=20
The demand is not just that you monitor your surroundings for dangers but that you monitor yourself for inattention https://twitter.com/readandheed/status/877499593847693312?s=20
Btw, they've missed a trick with the boring 'Stay Alert' message. Here is 'Bea Alerte', a character from a Canadian nuclear preparedness campaign from the 1950s. Her companion was called 'Justin Case'. https://twitter.com/readandheed/status/861561071269691393?s=20
Anyway, 'Stay Alert' is a useless, empty message for this situation but definitely tells us something about a bigger cultural demand that attention should be always under your tight control https://twitter.com/readandheed/status/798168359338655744?s=20
Your choices are: constant vigilance or death (and death means that you obviously weren't vigilant enough) https://twitter.com/readandheed/status/805429456248520705?s=20
It's a fantasy that we can 'control the virus', but we can't actually control our attention either. 'Stay Alert' is the 'Never Forget' of public safety messaging: actionless, objectless, infinitely expansive https://twitter.com/readandheed/status/867717636477636608
