A few weeks ago I came across the photo below of a poster that was part of a Queensland Rail campaign. My initial reaction was, Wow, those Australians and their edgy public transit ads! They did it again!
Then I got a little suspicious and started to look around for more details. It turns out that these are not real posters (surprise, surprise), but rather one of those meme* things from a public service outreach campaign that went awry.
Apparently, Queensland Rail put up an application where people could create custom etiquette posters and people did just that.
So, instead of posters about where to stand and where to place one's bag, they ended up with posters about public drunkenness, sexual deviancy, and other such unsavory or delay-inducing behavior.
A collection of the infamous Queensland Rail etiquette posters is here and another here (note: these are not for the easily offended). While many of these are repugnant and reflect racist, misogynist, homophobic, and other discriminatory attitudes, they are interesting as manifestations of social and cultural tensions. Some of them are about the unsavory things that do happen (or people think happen) on public transit, such as masturbating, passing gas, and drinking. Some are about societal insecurities around race, gender, religion, and ability/disability that are expressed by marking the Other through this anonymous medium. And, some just make no sense - the tampon in the trash one falling into this category.
*I never really understood how a meme was different from
something that went viral, but here's what I learned from the site Know Your Meme (an impressive site "considered
the most authoritative source on news, history and origins of viral phenomena
and Internet memes" - it claims to have its own editorial and research
staff):
An Internet meme is a piece of content or an idea that's passed
from person to person, changing and evolving along the way. A piece of content
that is passed from person to person, but does not evolve or change during the
transmission process is considered viral content.
(thx Mike S!) (via Know Your Meme, Ranker, BuzzFeed)
As someone very interested in the stigmas around public transit, I was delighted a number of years ago to come across this quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher: "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."
It turns out that the back story about this utterance is not as straightforward as it seems. David McKie from the Guardian did some digging around to get to the bottom of things:
I have quite often read
that Margaret Thatcher declared that any man seen riding on a bus after
the age of 30 should consider himself a failure. That most of those who
have quoted this merciless sentiment have done so without checking their
source is clear from the number of variants, with the qualifying age
for establishing that you're one of life's losers being variously quoted
as 30, 29 or even 26. Having spent much of a day trying to discover
where and when she said it, I began to suspect that it might be
apocryphal too.
He points out that other famous quotes have similarly questionable origins and they're difficult to validate once they're embedded in the cultural lore. The Thatcher bus quote even has its own section in Wikiquotes.
(via The Guardian)
