Thoughts on wearing a lanyard

The other day I picked up another lanyard. It’s in a restrained and tasteful shade of khaki and branded Land Rover, and it will come in very handy in my ongoing quest to stop myself from losing things like keys and cameras and gate remotes. Lanyards are very useful for that sort of thing.

It struck me, as I pulled the nylon strap over my head and attached it to the ticket that had allowed me into the golf at Sun City, that lanyards are everywhere. Have you noticed how, these days, every second economically active person wears one? Along with the access card, they are a potent — and overlooked — symbol of modern corporate culture: the way it orders and defines the people who work within it, separating insider from outsider, privileged from excluded, wage slave from free agent.

So, depending on the context, the lanyard you wear is not merely functional — it places you within a very distinct logic of power. For instance, my new lanyard was the type that gave me access to privilege. Thanks to the ticket attached to it, I was able to get in to the Land Rover hospitality area near the tennis courts, where I could enjoy free drinks, free lunch, and free King Cones from the freezer in the corner next to the puddings, after I put on my free Land Rover golf shirt and slipped my free Land Rover cap onto my head.

Here, in this pleasant space — manned by security guards in yellow bibs whose eyes flicked over our badges as we walked by — we were set apart from the ordinary spectators, free to chat about the surprisingly good November car sales, while the commentators on the TV in the corner grasped for something to talk about because rain had suspended play. This lanyard defined me as somehow set apart, and I liked wearing it.

I’ve always associated lanyards with geeks, who seem to wear them much as multiple Olympic gold-winning medallists would display their haul, attaching them to USBs, pens, access cards. Software companies love handing out lanyards at geek get-togethers; along with the mug and the pen, the lanyard is an essential promotional item.

Besides the association of the term with ships’ rigging, their origins lie in warfare, where they were first used to fix pistols, swords or whistles — anything easy to lose — to the uniforms of cavalry officers or men at sea. Later their use extended to holding anything that could easily be lost or had to be on display, or both. Thus, their usefulness in holding identity cards.

In the mechanised liminality of our security-obsessed world, lanyards identify who is a threat and who is not. Inside the corporate space, the lanyard and its tag communicate belonging; outside it, it indicates — I think — a sense of being owned. A lanyard alludes to leashes and halters. Wearing a lanyard, you are not your own person; instead you are marked as a member of the particular tribe that lives in that particular building and engages in those particular cultural practices. To wear a lanyard is to express your allegiance to the corporate communication programme, the one with a theme and an intranet and workshops, and where the worker with the most points at the end of the year gets to go on a cruise on the Nile.

So, I don’t wear a lanyard, not to the office. I have, however, found a purpose for the new one I got at the golf: I’ve attached it to a camera so that I can wear it around my neck when I go horseriding. That’s when it’s fine to wear a lanyard, because all it is is a loop holding an item that’s easy to lose.

It’s not a chain linking me to the corporate world, the one where it is so easy to lose your identity.