Probably the most important sentence that I will remember from my five day trip to London. Whenever you go by tube you will hear this over and over again three, times at each station. It is mainly a warning so that you don’t fall off the train when entering or leaving but I suppose it is much more than just a simple warning because it’s EVERYWHERE. I mean we have such warnings too. But they are not repeated three times by an announcer and written all over the floor so that even blind and deaf people will never forget about it. It remembered me so very much of the omniexistent blimp in the movie Bladerunner that is constantly repeating the same announcement. It gets into your brain, slowly but with increasing intensity and I think there might be some unknown effect of these three words that cause maybe a certain feeling or it helps to keep the people calm. Maybe there is some meta meaning to those words or just the sound of them affects certain regions in the spatial cortex (if something like this exists). I honestly don’t know what is so important about it but I’m sure there is something magical and mysterious about them and that they contain much more than just the obvious information. It’s somehow even an example for the helplessness of people in everyday life. Is it really necessary to remind people to keep an eye on where they step? Can’t we do this on our own? Are we really so irresponsible? Is it a way of the government or any other important group that has a control function in our society to reassure us that we are looked after? To make us feel safe? But why shouldn’t we feel safe? Is there something they know that they keep away from us?
Well, that’s a lot of questions but in a general sense I just wanted to explain how odd this actually is (or at least how odd it seemed to me). Whenever I watch science-fiction movies that show a future society where the people are kept under control I hope that something like that always remains fictional. Well, but how far away are we really from a world where every individual depends on someone who looks after us? It’s not like they make us listen… we happily choose to listen, don’t we? Well, open you eyes and , of course, mind the gap!