1 December 2010

When the last hotdog stand is gone.

In October 2009, the Danish newspaper Politiken publish an article about the fact, that now there were more Sushi restaurants than hotdog stands in my home city, Copenhagen. The entire article can be found here (in Danish).

I think the declining number of hotdog stands can have a severe impact on the communicative interactions, in the everyday life of Copenhagen citizens.

Now, I’m gonna have to give you an introduction to the concept of a Danish hotdog stand. I shall gladly admit that I haven’t traveled a lot, but from what I’ve seen, the Danish hotdog stand is like no other hotdog stand in the world. Why is this? Well, being a nation that has a production of five pigs pr. capita, Denmark has a long standing tradition of eating pork, and pork related foods. We do love us some bacon. Even better, we love to rap the Bacon around some other form of pork, like a sausage. This is in Danish hotdog slang called a ‘red Henning in tarpaulin’, Henning being a male name. If you think that’s wierd, well, we call a plain hotdog an ‘Indian with a side carriage’.  Yes, we have quite the hotdog culture here. Last year, an organic hotdog stand even won the award for being the ‘Best place to eat in Copenhagen’.   
But back to the standard hotdog stand. This is what I looks like.



Now see, the interesting part that I want to get to, is the culture of talking with the vender, because in Denmark, the hotdog vender does more that sell you hotdogs. He talks with you. He listens to you. He serves as a kind of bartender. It’s custom to chit chat with the vender and if there’s no rush, to start a conversation with the sausage flipping man. But this is about to end. The hotdog stands are fading out of Copenhagen, and are replaced with healthier, tastier foods. I don’t think this is a bad thing, but I do wonder about the conversations with the vender and the sociological effect of they’re absence. Casual chit chat is a part of cultural norm, as well a fulfillment of a personal need. It’s a way of taking the edge of the emotions of everyday life. And the vender doesn’t mind that you nag a bit about your boss, or wife or the alarm not going off this morning. As long as you do it with a slight smile on your face, he will nod understandingly and tell you, “aint that the truth”. You unload a bit and can now face the rest of the day, in a slightly better mood.

Every culture has this interaction, this reassurance that, yes life can be annoying sometimes, and it’s ok to think so. But the providers of this comfort are getting more and more scattered. With the increased use of social media like facebook and twitter (and the decline of hotdog stands) our unloading patterns have shifted. We still nag about the weather and the alarm clock, those universal subjects of annoyance, but the rest has gotten an anonymous distant feel to it. We don’t log onto facebook to be reinforced that wives are demanding or husbands are hopeless. Of cause we’ve all seen the examples of “my boss is an ass and now I’m pretending to be sick” posts, were the nagger forgot that he/she had added their boss as a friend. Woops. But, now we’ve learned to navigate in social media, and that carries along with it a silence.

Now we’re searching for a new hotdog vender. An anonymous place to unload and be told, that it’s ok to feel like this. One of the effects of the expanding social networks, is that we fragment our network to a greater degree. There’s one friend for that problem and one friend for this problem, ect. But that’s an awful lot of emotional strings to keep track of, in comparison to telling a stranger that your day sucked."Did I tell Margaret about my boss not being capable of hosting meetings, or was it Dylan?" Somewhere the tension had to be lifted, but where did the information go, and how will it affect you and the friend you unloaded onto?
So what will happen? Well, I see two possible outcomes: 

  1.  We adapt in a way where we learn to handle our emotions better, where we learn to realize and trust that ‘yes, it’s ok to find the boss and spouse as annoying as the alarm clock’, but worrying and nagging about it, is just a expression of our own frustration and insecurity, and therefore a total waste of time, or
  2.  That the need for social approval is so deeply rooted in us that we will have to either find a new source of reinsurance, and use friends and family to mirror us in -“Is this normal? Is your boss also stupid?”- or to bottle it up inside until we finally end up telling our boss to go [censured] himself.


I’m rooting for 1, but unfortunately I think we are slaves to our need of social approval to such a degree, that we would rather extreme fragment our social relations and try to keep the stories straight, than trust that we are normal and that our frustrations are both ok, temporary and not really that important in the scheme of things. After all, every alarm clock fails at some point.   

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