We Are Not In Charge

A while ago I was on the Management Committee of a community centre. We had a meeting between the local council and representatives from all the different community centres in the borough. A lady raised the very valid point that community centres are supposed to be about fun not boring meetings. Someone asked her how we could quantify the success of a centre by measuring fun. The lady insisted that she knew exactly what fun was and was able to measure it.

One of the symptoms of the fall of man is that we try to measure everything. We think we can understand everything that way and thus control it. This is of course nonsense. But someone now has the task of quantifying fun so we should all do our bit to help.

The usual method in England is to give people a feedback form to fill in. As soon as they finish their activity they should be given a piece of paper and asked whether they had fun. Most will say yes but this does not define what fun is. Consequently the answer cannot be evaluated or compared with the amount of fun people say they have elsewhere as two sets of people may mean different things by fun. Therefore supplementary questions will be necessary. The most obvious one is "what aspects of the activity in particular were fun" with a choice of boxes to tick but this would also be misleading. In any given activity some parts will be more fun than others and the activity will not take place without someone doing the less fun bits. It would not reflect the overall level of fun to be gained from the activity or the community centre which hosted it.

It would also have little effect if you asked people what they meant by fun. To produce valid data you would need a common mode of expression. Different people will say fundamentally the same things in different ways or use the same words when they mean two completely different things. There are other methods of measurement such as videoing the activity and counting the smiles on people's faces but this too is inherently inexact. It would only produce worthwhile data if the smile tolerance of each individual on film had been measured previously. You would need precise data on how often someone smiled during a significant sample period and if there were any patterns to what made them smile to calculate the effect of the activity. Similarly you would have to demonstrate that the fun level obtained was significantly higher in the community centre than it would have been if the activity had taken place elsewhere. This would involve measuring fun levels of the same activity outside the centre with all the time, expense and legal implications of this.

The statistical measure of fun most favoured by community centres themselves is how many people come to the centre to do things when they could be doing other things. This method of assessment has some undeniable advantages over others as it is a simple calculation of free will. It does however have some clear disadvantages. The data would only have meaning if everyone came to the centre to have fun. Some of those who organise activities do so out of a sense of duty or contractual obligation but no longer get any fun out of it. Some people take part in activities because they have nothing else to do or because someone has told them to take part. Some just want to get out of the house because they have a bad domestic situation and do not care whether they enjoy what they do as long as it is outside their home. Fun is not always the motivating factor in taking part in an activity or going to a community centre to do so. Once again although this measure has a lot of superficial attractions it ultimately fails to present a meaningful picture of the nature and effect of fun and its relation to the hosting of that fun by the local community centre. Still we search for the exact theoretical framework for measuring fun and for calculating why we should want to do so in the first place.

There are some literary critics known as "unpopularisers" who take a popular work and bore the pants off its fans by subjecting it to endless criticism of a very technical kind. The way they appreciate the book is totally different from that of other readers. It is often felt that it is in the interests of social harmony to break down barriers such as this. Sod it. Take your own definition of fun and you will find it at West Acton Community Centre. If others are incapable of appreciating it that is their problem. We do not have to measure fun. Our only need is to measure those who need to measure everything. Over and over again until we have measured them out of existence by their own definition of it. Want to join me?