"Suitably limited gentle thrusting"

 censorship, commercialisation of childhood, David Cameron, in a hole, New Labour, on a high, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Jun 042011
 

That, apparently, was Ofcom on the subject of Rihanna’s suggestive dancing:

Ofcom has dismissed previous complaints at the way in which programmes like X Factor, watched by millions of children, feature huge stars such as Christina Aguilera and Rihanna wearing few clothes and posing suggestively.

Ofcom ruled that Rihanna’s routine “featured some gentle thrusting”, but it was “suitably limited”.

I’m not exactly sure what – in this context – “suitably limited” means.  Sexuality is always going to be a grim matter of profound disagreement for a society such as ours.  On the one hand, many of us enjoy it.  On the other hand, many of us feel guilty about it.  Religious bodies don’t help with their hypocrisies but neither are secular institutions such as TV stations, the music industry, fashion companies and publishing organisations doing very much to help all of us feel entirely comfortable with ourselves.

And whilst I welcome what I believe is probably an honestly-felt thinking behind Cameron’s proposals – that is to say, a desire to deal with what is the manifest commercialisation of childhood – I would be far happier with such ideas if they were couched in far more general terms.  There is an industry out there now deliberately designed to hook us all into an addictive relationship with those infamous fifteen minutes of fame.  Big Tobacco, now suitably vanquished, at least in the Western world, has, as a result, been replaced by Big Talent (more here).

If Cameron is truly looking to do something more than just capture cheap headlines – if he is looking, in this campaign, to truly re-engineer modern society – he needs to show us he’s not out simply to ghettoise the lads mags (an easy thing to achieve, by the way), but that he’s also looking to change the way we buy and sell almost everything else.  And that includes how his friends in the newspaper industry, who make the business of celebrity sex an available-to-all daily bread and butter, act out their prejudices.

A thought does occur to me, though – if New Labour had ever dared to face up to such a powerful group of interests on this kind of an issue, the entertainment industry would surely have, a priori, crucified them.  It either takes guts to take such an industry on – or it’s a massive miscalculation.  So it is that I honestly wish Cameron well in this matter – but, even so, simultaneously find myself fascinated by exactly how far he intends to run with it; how coherent and cogent he intends to be; and how much real success his sponsors in very different matters will end up allowing him to reap.

For it does seem very New Labour-ish, don’t you think?  And as I wish Cameron well, at least in this matter, I also wonder if other forces around him – or, indeed, he himself in a moment of political expediency – mightn’t use this initiative to lever a degeneration into another kind of world altogether: a world of thought police, censorship and mind control we thought we might have escaped from long ago.

Is this really an issue of freedom of speech? (II) (or text as the result and speech as the process)

 on a high, result vs process, social media, sorted, tweech, twext, Twitter  No Responses »
Jun 042011
 

The other day I asked if the recent legal questions around Twitter in particular were really an issue of freedom of speech.  It turns out that, intrinsically, they can actually neither be a question of freedom of speech nor of freedom to write but, rather, as with all innovation – and thus uncomfortably (for the legal profession) but happily (for its users) – a combination of the two:

And whether we deem Twitter a text-based mechanism of orality, as the scholar Zeynep Tufekci has suggested, or of a “secondary orality,” as Walter Ong has argued, or of something else entirely (tweech? twext? something even more grating, if that’s possible?), it almost doesn’t matter. The point is to acknowledge, online, a new environment — indeed, a new culture — in which writing and speech, textuality and orality, collapse into each other. Speaking is no longer fully ephemeral. And text is no longer simply a repository of thought, composed by an author and bestowed upon the world in an ecstasy of self-containment. On the web, writing is newly dynamic. It talks. It twists. It has people on the other end of it. You read it, sure, but it reads you back.

The distinctions between speech and the written word are important – particularly, though, because the legal profession says they are:

The broader answer, sure, is that it shouldn’t matter. Twitter is…Twitter. It is what it is, and that should be enough. As a culture, though, we tend to insist on categorizing our communication, drawing thick lines between words that are spoken and words that are written. So libel is, legally, a different offense than slander; the written word, we assume, carries the heft of both deliberation and proliferation and therefore a moral weight that the spoken word does not. Text, we figure, is: conclusive, in that its words are the deliberate products of discourse; inclusive, in that it is available equally to anyone who happens to read it; exclusive, in that it filters those words selectively; archival, in that it preserves information for posterity; and static, in that, once published, its words are final.

And speech, while we’re at it, is discursive and ephemeral and, importantly, continual. A conversation will end, yes, but it is not the ending that defines it.

We could, therefore, in this new world of “twext/tweech” come to the following classificatory conclusion: text as we have known it, Jim, has always been more about the result, whilst speech has traditionally focussed its efforts around process – that is to say, the journey of communication rather than the getting there of traditionally published and distributed tablets set in stone.

In this sense, Twitter – and social media in general – are clearly about process, even as there is also a permanence about their acts which talking with the neighbour over the garden fence is never going to achieve.  And yet, as the virtual world begins to invade its offline equivalent more and more, we cannot be absolutely sure that throwaway conversations will, in the future, be thrown away.

Therein, then, lies the challenge for the legal profession.

Therein, then, lie the very great virtues of Twitter in particular – but also social media in general.  The throwaway has become shareable in a way we have never experienced before.  And this is both exhilarating and empowering – as it is democratising and dumbing-up.

We – through the words we have always used and without requiring any grand changes of register on our part -  have suddenly become the Great Communicators of the 21st century.  And in so doing, we have helped create and sustain a brand new art form: the art form of living our lives in public.

Let’s just hope the legal busybodies learn to appreciate the novelty of this matter to its full extent.  Otherwise, we will all end up paying, in some sad way or another, the consequences of such hidebound mindsets.  And that would be most dispiriting for the vast majority of citizens – enabled as they are by new technologies, software constitutions and devices to do exactly what human beings have forever been totally good at: societal communication and support.