John Naughton, an old-school web-logger of considerable note, confused me this morning. His very short quote for the day went as follows:
“If you’re the most intelligent person in the room, you’re in the wrong room”
James Watson
Luckily, I spend a lot of my time in the right rooms.
So why did this confuse me? Because it made me wonder why I am where I am, so many years down the line. So many years since I got seven straight “A” grades at the age of sixteen (just a “C” in German, I’m afraid – most of the class preferred paper planes); stumbled fractiously at the age of eighteen; and never quite managed to look forward since then.
For I’m pretty sure I’ve been underachieving here. At least in this world. At least according to its overriding and generally accepted criteria.
Anyway, I was just reading this piece in the New Yorker. It’s short and to the point, and asks an interesting question. Why doesn’t Mitt Romney finally let his hair down a little. It’s of course well-written, it’s in the New Yorker after all. I thought to myself — “I bet this is the kind of writing they’re looking for at Medium.”
I’m more casual a writer. I think of blogging as a written form of fresco. Made of plaster with a little coloring. It hardens fast, and you move on to something else. I used to say “we’re just folks here.” That’s the kind of writing I aspire to.
Yes! This! This! Precisely this!
“We’re just folks here.”
It’s no underachievement to be communicating in this ether at all. Occasionally, just a bit, the real-world intelligentsia believe themselves a step up from everyone else, but – in truth (and thankfully) – intelligence has no respect for social boundaries, nor only resides in the intelligentsia I mention.
In much the same way, in fact, as the ether we’re operating in has little respect for real-world definers and delimiters.
So by all means ensure you’re in those rooms filled with people your intellectual betters – just don’t expect it to be easy to identify which rooms or who these might be.
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Further reading: this, on the buzzword prefix/label/limiter “open” (as in “open source” or “open government”), is probably relevant to much of what I write on this blog, especially as a prejudice I hold; especially as an instinct I exhibit.
I do, however, also wonder whether “open” is such an attractive idea precisely because “closed” is (perceived as being) such a common experience.
Your call on this one. I’m sure you’ll decide for yourselves.
After meekly exiting Labour’s intranet, Members Net, having blogged for quite a while in its partisan embrace, I stumbled across an outside world of blogging at the hand of Andrew Regan’s now defunct political aggregator, Bloggers4Labour. I thought this a wonderful device, maintaining as it healthily did the visual and locational idiosyncrasies of individual blogsites, even as it brought together in one sensible place the feeds of each and every one. It allowed for a wonderful overview of what was bubbling under in the Labour-blogging community; it helped new bloggers get exposure and support from existing practioners; and it served to sustain a worthy sense of common cause in what has often historically been a fractured political grouping.
Andrew really did know how to integrate the needs of readerships by using technology. He would even supply his own often gently proffered and constructive comments on other people’s posts. This helped create a point of focus on the wider input which – in a very simple and neat way – helped generate an air of shared purpose.
My memory of Bloggers4Labour was almost entirely positive. Both Andrew and I, sometimes together, sometimes separately, tried to build on this original achievement with other projects which I was either rather tangentially involved in (for example, Andrew’s Poblish – a super-aggregator designed to outdo Google’s own search in the global field of political blogging) or more directly engaged with (for example, my idea for a Last.fm of political thought). In all cases, I think what drove him – and certainly myself – was a desire to return, in some way or other, to that golden age of political blogging which Bloggers4Labour – at its most didactic and pedagogical best – seemed at the time to represent.
Instead of cramming everyone together in a single platform – a kind of awful melting-pot as per a United States of Blogging – Bloggers4Labour and the ideas that came afterwards looked to allow individuality to shine through even as the aim was to bring voices together.
A European Union of Sovereign Blogging, if you like.
So if it was such a good idea, why didn’t it quite work out? Who knows? Maybe because we didn’t have the resource; maybe because we didn’t quite hone the ideas; maybe, in reality, because it wasn’t such a golden age. Or maybe because blogging, in a different way, has kind of had its time and has transmuted into other ways of exchanging the information we value.
Blogging always was a bit of a traditional hierarchy of communication: author-led top-down authorities who were often challenged, but never entirely toppled, by those who would hang from their coattails. Which is not to underestimate the importance of commenters to the good functioning of a blogsite. Sometimes, the broader reputations acquired belonged more to those who commented than to the original posters themselves.
Symbiotic relationships of thought were ever thus.
Of course, we all know what happened to blogging: Facebook and Twitter. It was probably going to happen, whatever the company name, whatever the online constitution, whatever the business model. But Facebook and Twitter both hastened traditional blogging’s demise.
People much better resourced than us English blogging fans were able to re-engineer the instincts behind standard blogging for an instant-fix generation. And so the beautiful exchanges between considered author-led hierarchies began to lose their dominance on the web.
*
So now we come to February, 2013. And whilst the domain’s been running for a while, with a fairly traditional blogging platform behind it, SpeakersChair.com – a cross-party political blogging website on which I have had some of my recent posts published – has suddenly had the audacity to suggest, through a massive makeover of functionality, that political blogging might not be as defunct as we thought.
Before this change, SpeakersChair.com was essentially a traditional melting-pot-type blogging platform. Writers of different political colours submitted their posts for site editors to repost on the site. We see this model operating successfully in many places: from Liberal Conspiracy to – I guess – even the Guardian‘s Comment is Free. I think, however, that the new SpeakersChair.com moves away from this model in several significant ways:
From a melting-pot blogging platform like Liberal Conspiracy, where visuals and technologies become common to all authors even as posting rights remain with site editors, it transmutes itself more into a souped-up kind of TweetDeck, where its prime function is to sit as a front-end to both Facebook and Twitter – as well as SpeakersChair.com itself.
The ability – and challenge – of each contributor is to act as an authorial hub around which comment is designed to flow. I guess this could be the case for contributors who write original posts just as much as it might be for contributors who add their opinions as comments to original posts. In fact, at very first glance it seems that the deliberate intention is to blur as much as possible the hierarchy between original posters and commenters.
I cannot but help considering this latter innovation healthy: it clearly shows that the designers of this online constitution understand that their version of political blogging needs to “get” social, if it’s to have any decent chance of catching on. And social is much more than tacking on commenting tools at the tail-end of the professionalising commentariat: social, above all, is a matter of sharing hierarchy and power.
Seen, then, as a communication front-end more than a traditional website, seen in fact primarily as a posting tool to various channels, there is no reason why SpeakersChair.com shouldn’t compete effectively with Facebook, web Twitter and even third-party communication tools out there.
I just wonder if there’s also an app in the pipeline. That imperious world of mobile Internet doesn’t half make or break communication these days. It surely would serve to complete a beautifully political blogging circle which, for me, started out with Labour’s Members Net, stumbled for a few years after Bloggers4Labour’s major steps forwards – and which could now quite easily find its natural home in a cross-party communication project that, at least in my humble opinion, has everything it needs to deservedly succeed.
Questions, questions, questions. In latterday society, it seems you’re OK as long as you keep any you have to yourself. What 21st century society appears to require of us – above all – is certainty, application and action.
I’m the first to admit my skills at headlining posts are bordering on the non-existent. And I freely admit I’m the first to admire the poetry which English tabloids – in particular those tabloids from Mr Rupert Murdoch’s stable – inevitably exhibit with respect to this very particular art. So it was with great interest that I learned today of this piece of wisdom in relation to the writing of headlines, especially headlines as questions (many thanks to David for the heads-up!):
Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states, “Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” The name refers to Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who primarily covers topics relating to Apple,[1] although the general concept is much older.[2] The observation has also been called “Davis’ law“[3][4] or just the “journalistic principle.”[5]
Wikipedia goes on to state (the bold is mine):
Betteridge explained the concept in a February 2009 article, regarding a TechCrunch article with the headline “Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?”:
This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.” The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bollocks, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.[6]
Andrew Marr also gets in on the act with these revealing words on how short-of-time journalists skimming for useful data tend not to look beyond the initial wrapper because of the punctuation mark used (again, the bold is mine):
Five years before Betteridge’s article, a similar observation was made by UK journalist Andrew Marr in his 2004 book My Trade. It was among Marr’s suggestions for how a reader should approach a newspaper if they really wish to know what is going on:
If the headline asks a question, try answering ‘no.’ Is This the True Face of Britain’s Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn’t have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means ‘don’t bother reading this bit’.[7]
I have to say this looks like it might explain quite a great deal of my current experience with blogging. Whilst I easily get 10,000 spam comments a month, the real and productive reactions rarely show themselves. Is, then, my tendency to ask more questions than provide authoritarian answers frightening away the readership engagement in droves?
Are we really saying there is no market for places which postulate instead of declaim?
Must we really give in to the fearsome dictatorship of authority-seekers?
And does the very fact that I ask so many questions really mean I’m actually writing a load of absolute bollocks?
James summarised it thus (more than fully) on November 30th, in a piece clearly titled “#Leveson is excellent on internet free speech. He didn’t brush over it, he robustly defended it”:
Leveson [...] draws a clear distinction between a news outlet which claims to provide trusted reporting and the internet in general, where there is no implied trust (although Leveson uses the term ethical rather than trusted, which in this particular case I believe are interchangeable as trust in news output flows from ethical journalism).
Chapter 7, section 3.2:
“… the internet does not claim to operate by any particular ethical standards, still less high ones. Some have called it a ‘wild west’ but I would prefer to use the term ‘ethical vacuum’. This is not to say for one moment that everything on the internet is therefore unethical. That would be a gross mischaracterisation of the work of very many bloggers and websites which should rightly and fairly be characterised as valuable and professional. The point I am making is a more modest one, namely that the internet does not claim to operate by express ethical standards, so that bloggers and others may, if they choose, act with impunity.”
Leveson doesn’t say this but there is also a jurisdiction issue online. It’s not strictly true that bloggers may act with impunity if based in the UK, as there’s always the possibility they will be traced using existing legal instruments and prosecuted or face civil proceedings for libel or privacy breach.
7.3.3:
“The press, on the other hand, does claim to operate by and adhere to an ethical code of conduct. Publishers of newspapers will be (or, at least, are far more likely to be) far more heavily resourced than most, if not all, bloggers and websites that report news (as opposed to search engines that direct those on line to different sites). Newspapers, through whichever medium they are delivered, purport to offer a quality product in all senses of that term.”
James also goes on to point out the difference between social media making content available and the very same content being “emblazoned” on the front page of a highly visible online newspaper.
So. We have an ethically-driven industry versus an ethical vacuum such as the Internet. And we have the industry of extreme visibility versus the amateur placing of content at a much lower level. As I pointed out a couple of posts ago (the bold is mine today):
Some further thoughts, then, on where this might all be leading us:
We need to look beyond the tools and their physical manifestations – it’s always easy to notice the technology and think that content must inevitably follow suit. What’s clearly missing in all kinds of media at the moment is the instinct to reflect and think behind the headlines before putting virtual pen to paper – the impulse to leave, for a few days as a draft, a piece of work usefully unpublished. Blogging is as guilty of this as any newspaper columnist out there. I am as guilty of this as anyone else.
I would also ask us to keep in mind that whilst the free press belongs to limited liability industry, free speech should belong to unlimited liability people. And the rights and responsibilities, as well as the punishments for transgression and so forth, should be quite different in each case. If we believe that international corporations are better guarantors of our free press than the laws of representative democracy, then the real problem doesn’t lie in statutory underpinning or not – it lies in a democracy which isn’t representative enough. No amount of any social media under the evermore fierce gaze of Western governments is going to fix a system as broken as that.
A people’s press, then, perhaps? A kind of Fifth or Sixth Estate? We need statutory protection for free speech here in the UK at the very least if we are to propose such a model.
The ideal? Maybe an osmotic world of information exchange where industry and people interface to their mutual benefit. But not under the current weight of English and Welsh libel laws.
Leveson, then, as per the slant James places on him at the end of last month, seems clear that there is a substantial difference between, on the one hand, the Internet as it has grown up and is manifesting itself through blogging, tweeting and Facebooking and, on the other, the industry of highly visible newspapermen and women.
Anyhow. At least according to the Guardian, Leveson is now in two minds about the Internet. Whilst he still accepts that social media is the “electronic version of pub gossip”, and does seem to accept that this might actual inscribe a virtue for human thought (that is to say, the thinking of the unthinkable – the freedom to go anywhere with a train of thought), he doesn’t seem quite convinced any more that the implications in relation to law, and what and how we should apply it, should be followed through.
What’s more, he seems to recognise the ethical side of the newspaper industry isn’t quite as ethical or convincing as it might be, especially when he says:
[...] if journalists saw the law going unenforced against bloggers, it might “undermine media standards through encouraging them to adopt a casual approach to the law”.
“If we are to ensure that appropriate standards are maintained, we must meet these challenges, and ensure that the media … is not placed at a disadvantage where the enforcement of the law is concerned,” Leveson said.
I think, to be honest, and I’m happy to be corrected if you feel I’m being too cynical, that those who’d really be placed at a disadvantage would not be the media but, rather, the rich, powerful and/or well-connected who strive to manage the news which journalists are allowed to print. If such things as described by Greenslade are happening already – and they have happened for a long time I am sure – just think what they could get away with under a regime where lawyerless and amateur communicators could be silenced and punished to the same degree as an industry.
Leveson is right to say:
[...] that it was a “pernicious and false belief” that bloggers were not subject to the same laws as print and broadcast journalists.
But he is wrong to argue that, in exactly the same way, both individual free speech and the industrial free press should be marshalled, controlled and punished by our justice system.
It’s just not fair, proportional or democratic. If my yearly income is a minuscule percentage of what a media behemoth turns over globally, I can hardly be held equally responsible for errors of judgement.
Now can I?
So I come to my last question: what does Leveson really think about blogging? Is it a force for good which often takes us to the wilder parts of human thought in a productive and constructive manner? Or is it something which for the good of the status quo must now be progressively chilled into holding back its occurrences?
A sensibly policed state – or the anteroom of a police state?
Ariel has an interesting article over at the Guardian which not only describes current behaviours in mainstream and social media but serves as an excellent repository of such behaviours – in this case, in relation to the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas. Whilst during the riots last year in Britain, social networks and social media served to put the authorities on the back foot, lessons since then have clearly been learned. When Ariel headlines the article in question as “The first social media war between Israel and Gaza”, he could just as easily describe it as one of the first social media wars, full stop. This, for example:
From the start, the Isreaeli Defence Force (IDF) and Hamas shared clips on YouTube, and posted messages and images on Facebook and Twitter (also here), which initiated heated debates on the platforms. Many reporters followed these and actively participated in the discussions, which made social media an important element of both reporting and criticism of the conflict.
This should hardly surprise us. That manipulation of social-media news and its transmission takes place must be self-evident to anyone with any experience of how stories in such contexts surge. Recent cases of sex-abuse allegations have generated claims and counter-claims which can hardly depend only on the dynamics of sheeply flocks. But in the argument that Ariel develops, we get a further strand of behaviours that add a far more complex interest to the mix. For he also describes and defines the following processes:
[...] Unlike any other war in the past, the Israeli-Gaza conflict has been characterised by the mass virtual participation of ordinary people via social media. [...]
And this has led to the more mainstream media feeling obliged to take onboard, and within their own frames, websites and even offline print, such popular – and, maybe, populist – content. In a post-blogging Facebook generation, where the very fact you’re an amateur communicator adds weight, veracity and conviction to what you tell, it must be the case that, in order to be able to properly convince, latterday industrial media has had to acquire a journalistic equivalent of what film-makers learned to call cinéma vérité. A kind of post-modern approach to communication, perhaps. A veneer of “realistic” edginess to their product where once smooth and house-ridden styles were sub-editorially imposed as unquestioned – and unquestionable – good practice.
Some further thoughts, then, on where this might all be leading us:
We need to look beyond the tools and their physical manifestations – it’s always easy to notice the technology and think that content must inevitably follow suit. What’s clearly missing in all kinds of media at the moment is the instinct to reflect and think behind the headlines before putting virtual pen to paper – the impulse to leave, for a few days as a draft, a piece of work usefully unpublished. Blogging is as guilty of this as any newspaper columnist out there. I am as guilty of this as anyone else.
I would also ask us to keep in mind that whilst the free press belongs to limited liability industry, free speech should belong to unlimited liability people. And the rights and responsibilities, as well as the punishments for transgression and so forth, should be quite different in each case. If we believe that international corporations are better guarantors of our free press than the laws of representative democracy, then the real problem doesn’t lie in statutory underpinning or not – it lies in a democracy which isn’t representative enough. No amount of any social media under the evermore fierce gaze of Western governments is going to fix a system as broken as that.
A people’s press, then, perhaps? A kind of Fifth or Sixth Estate? We need statutory protection for free speech here in the UK at the very least if we are to propose such a model.
The ideal? Maybe an osmotic world of information exchange where industry and people interface to their mutual benefit. But not under the current weight of English and Welsh libel laws.
A couple of final thoughts. First, in relation to these words from Ariel (the bold is mine):
Just as cyber-war and cyber-terrorism have become prevalent, social media warfare is here to stay. It seems that the fight for public opinion will keep growing in importance, and play a more central role in future conflicts. The fact that opposing parties can communicate directly with the public will increase the pressure on journalists to stay relevant.
To these words I would be inclined to add that the above-mentioned three battles will shortly form part of a new Holy Trinity of communication. Just as industrial media was kept in the shadow and practice of the security services throughout the whole Cold War and its aftermath, leading to the corruption that recent phone-hacking scandals have uncovered here in Britain, so now social media will be in the eye of and form a target for such institutions. It could hardly be any other way. If amateur communicators are making more of the news their peers are wanting to read than the news outlets themselves, no veneer, however thick, will fool any member of the post-Leveson generation. There is no way back. And the security services probably know this well before the newspaper industry is able and prepared to take it on the chin.
Second, these are all matters which have interested a lot of us recently – both readers and writers, both amateurs and professionals. Such a post-Leveson moment as this will surely serve to define at least the next fifty years of communication in Britain – and people really don’t realise what’s happening.
We’re sleepwalking into the future of so many unfreedoms.
Social media warfare being just one more sorry battleground they’ll fashion in order to restrict our ability not only, not primarily, to freely exchange our thoughts but also – far more importantly – to be able to evaluate their narratives.
Because if the future is going to work as I think Ariel believes, the ability to sift and determine where truth really lies will become far greater and relevant than it currently might be.
A world of multiple and simultaneous intertextualities?
Almost fit for a new generation of Johann Haris … and I mean that in as complimentary a fashion as you care to allow me.
Emily Bell argued yesterday in the Guardian that by making and sustaining a distinction between the press on the one hand and social media on the other the Leveson Inquiry had painted itself into the corner of irrelevance. Her definition of the free press would, instead, be as follows:
The free press of the 21st century consists of the distributed social platforms, the WordPress blogging software and the “dark social” matter of the hidden web, as much as it is the venerable institutions that have local accountability to whatever regulator the UK government should seek to appoint.
Leveson is, however, quite undeterred. He repeated his assertions today as he delivered his 2000-page report on press culture, its ethics and its possibly regulated future. Try minute three of the video below:
He’s clear there is a difference, isn’t he? No doubt in his mind at all. The question is, whose instincts should we run with? Those of a professional journalist such as Bell, seeped, as she is, in communication lore and its dynamics – or a man with the kind of regulatory instincts which only the professions of lawyer and judge can infuse?
I’m not sure, actually, that’s the real issue to hand. I’ve always felt my blogging – and latterly my tweeting and Facebook output – was more along the lines of a global conversation than publishing. Certainly, if anything tended to the latter, it would be this blog – but even there, the habit of hyperlinking and bouncing off other’s occurrences, the fact that the purpose of my blogging has always been to brainstorm ideas and follow them to their ultimate consequences, surely gives me the right to side more with Lord Justice Leveson than with Emily Bell’s almost catch-all attempt to include social media under her professionalising umbrellas.
And I really don’t think I’d be the only blogger or social-media fan to believe that we converse and dialogue more than publish. Whilst Leveson attempts to see beyond the technology – to identify what makes institutional and industrial communication very particular to the health of a democracy, to that holding of power to account – it would appear that Bell seems to confuse means and aims.
That newspapers like the Guardian use social-media technologies – blogging software, tweeting and Facebooking facilities, even the chatty discourse of conversation – doesn’t mean that the original social media, the bloggers and tweeters and Facebookers galore, have suddenly become paid-up members of the official British press. And it goes without saying it’s my firm belief that all attempts to make us so, by anyone who believes that’s the way forward, should be firmly resisted.
Why? Out of pure self-interest? Out of a creeping set of double standards? Out of a desire to be able to say without having to accept responsibility for one’s content?
I don’t think so.
Firstly, bloggers, tweeters and Facebookers do not have access to legions of lawyerly support. Nor, in general, do they have the consistent and easily maintainable visibility which power of any real kind demands. If they do have any power, it is the power of the crowd: a lent out, shared and circulated power. Yes, in its negative manifestations, possibly similar to the power of the mob. But in its positives, a glorious song to human collaboration.
Secondly, if we’re looking to have an area of reasonably public discourse which can follow trains of new and ground-breaking thought to their logical conclusions, which can imagine new worlds and which does offer our civilisation a route out of a pervasive group-think, surely anyone who cares at all about democratic communication will understand we need to encourage the ambiguity that social media has so eagerly generated and enabled. The institutional press, in Leveson’s terms, is there to hold institutional power to account – and quite rightly so. But social media should be reserved, equally rightly so, for the amateur citizen and interested voter to express their opinions as often and as freely as they like.
With certain limitations where the pale is gone so far beyond – but with a desire for “independent and effective self-regulation” whenever the free and open web is able to thus deliver.
This is one of those days when its good to be mindful of the difference between “free speech” and “free press”
And he’s right. Let us guarantee by all means the freedoms of the press, as Bell fairly pursues. Let us also, however, consciously sustain the right of a virtualised base of evermore engaged citizens to use the very same technologies which the press is now appropriating as its own – but for purely individual, non-institutional, crowd-focussed and conversational purposes.
The difference between the press and social media is, therefore, after all, a useful distinction indeed: it is the clearly understandable difference between writing up and speaking up.
Keep that in mind, dear professional journalists – and it’ll be easier to comprehend why Leveson, in this at least, is absolutely spot-on.
Spot-on, that is to say, in his interestingly outsider’s perceptions of exactly where each of our duties really should lie in the future.
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Update to this post: if you prefer reading to watching videos, you can now find a full transcript of Leveson’s statement this afternoon over at the Politics Home website. The executive summary of the report itself can be found here (.pdf file); the report in its entirety here (.pdf file).
This started out as a comment to a reply Dave Semple posted in his “Requiem for a Blog”. I thought I’d reproduce it here because I feel it may have a wider applicability to others who may frustratedly feel the same at the moment on the subject of left-wing participation in the blogosphere in particular – as well as social media more generally:
“But as a great man once said, philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
Yes. That is very true. I still do wonder if what we need out here is a better feedback mechanism. So much of what we have written gets taken onboard (that’s my firm belief) – and yet we can’t be absolutely sure it has at all, because a comment isn’t made even as a conclusion is quietly reached.
Blogging see-saws between furious trolling on the one hand and an uncommon reader silence on the other. The happy medium – where the comments are just as important and frequent as the OPs; a happy medium which I have to say has often been found on TCF – is not widely apparent elsewhere. So if you were looking to engage people and get them off their backsides, in our monitor-facing virtual world you already achieved quite a lot.
It’s clearly not enough, of course – and your appeal to change the real world in order that as a side-effect the blogosphere be conquered is revealing. Everyone wants a job. That individuals use their freely offered-up writings to lever such positions of paid employment is only human. That it should corrupt the potential power of the blogosphere was perhaps inevitable. That the solution is to retire from a game you feel you cannot win – and which you conclude in any case is secondary to the real task at hand – is, however, in my gently expressed opinion, not a viable option.
But I do respect the thought processes which have led you to such a conclusion. Those I cannot deny – they are as totally coherent as one could want.
Perhaps you’re simply not a natural editor- and blogger-in-chief? Too impatient to sit back and let ideas take their unpredictable and unrecognised course?
Or perhaps you were once a natural editor- and blogger-in-chief – and now you’ve grown into something else? Doesn’t mean you have to reinterpret the past – or conclude that the tool that got you thus far is generally corrupting, weak and inappropriate for left-wing agitation.
That the big bloggers scurry rapidly to become as MSM as possible is their choice. It doesn’t, however, have to be ours.
Each to his own is the principle which I think might operate here.
I’m never going to be able to stand up physically in front of a crowd and lead them intelligently through the steps a revolution should take. I simply cannot do it – I would physically shake. I *can* gather my thoughts in front of a computer screen and put them together reasonably cogently. If you are prepared enough and capable enough to do the first, and are good at organisation, and can see clearly enough to communicate your vision in first person, then do so. And let others, who are only just setting out on their journey of understanding, creep there slowly by beginning to write and communicate tentatively in public. Where that is what *they* want to do.
The blogosphere often serves as a mechanism of self-initiated consciousness-raising. Yes. It’s inefficient, lumberingly repetitive and leads to so many people reinventing the wheel. But it also means that once such a state of awareness is reached, a real sea-change of understanding is auto-cemented.
Truth of the matter is that what we’re unable to achieve right now is a useful appreciation of how to tap into those very permanent sea-changes – and take advantage of them for our own ends. But they *are* out there – and they *do* exist.
Don’t give up on social media, Dave. Even if it simply means you choose to use it behind the scenes, only.
And I would say the same to all of you out there who find it difficult to maintain the patience of ages. Publishing – a measured historical act which, under social media’s auspices, has morphed into an instantaneous tool for rapid communication – even now sustains its ability to lay down future paths of unknowable development. It’s true. Sometimes we don’t know if what we are doing will lead to a modern“Mein Kampf” – or, alternatively, to a truly brave new world we can all be proud of.
But there is nothing we can do about those unquantifiables – all that is open to us is the choice between an irreproachably perfect inaction or a criticisably imperfect participation.
A couple of days ago I posted on the subject of money and how those who use it to define everything appear now to want to impose their criteria on everyone else. Today, I am minded to recall the thesis of that post as I finish an afternoon stint reading a good Kindle book on my wife’s sunbed out in the garden.
This gentle hour or so in a much improved Spanish afternoon – yesterday was unbearably bochornoso and hit 37 degrees – created in my being such an utter sense of wellbeing that I really couldn’t help feeling: “Why isn’t this kind of experience available to all?”
Can it really be beyond our sophisticated and technologically analytical age to develop the kind of society where such simple freedoms are – realistically – available to all?
Why shouldn’t more of us be able to enjoy such wellbeing?
Why can’t we use money to maximise humanity’s happiness – instead of concentrating it in wells of pitiful limitation?
Why are those in power pushing us towards competing with each other more and more – instead of encouraging us to work together to common interests?
Why in a world where competition is the name of the game – and, thus, where plurality should be a guiding factor – does difference become a potential indicator of shame and suspicious behaviour, and homogeneity the only globalisingly accepted virtue?
Why have we allowed the concept of the free market to become distorted by those who use their monetary wealth to corrupt for their own benefit the appreciable tenets of competition and diversity?
And when will all the above finally cease?
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Footnote to this piece: sadly, Dave Semple, over at Though Cowards Flinch, has formerly announced he will no longer be blogging. I’m inclined to believe that many of the questions I ask above have their answers in his considerable writings over the years. He feels that blogging has had little effect. I think his kind of blogging will continue to resonate for a long time.
I posted a comment at the foot of his piece and republish it below as a kind of manifesto in favour of keeping faith with the blogosphere – or, at least, as thinking people might wish to continue to conceptualise it:
I think your best blogging was as you described it: agitational propaganda. I wouldn’t be so harsh on the wider activity though. I think it has many similarities to being a teacher. Not because it is didactic but – rather – because you never know the impact you’ve had (or will have) when someone stumbles across your writings. Intellectually coherent bloggers are more common than you might presume and just because some notable use blogging as a lever to greater power doesn’t mean we all do.
We’re not all the blogging equivalents of churnalists, though there *is* a lot of that – where people coattail the main news to spike their hits.
Myself, I’m very occasionally read and I may be spitting in the well of insignficance but in order to feel at peace with the awfulness of this world I do have to bear witness.
Bearing witness means more to myself than my readers? Yes, perhaps it does. But, in the worst case scenario, it’s better than being locked up in a hospital because one can’t deal with what’s out there.
And in the best case scenario, it fills that well just a little so that one day someone may be able to climb out of it.
We’re small. I am, anyway. I have to take small steps. Blogging is one of those steps.
And just so you know, the only reason I now blog on the open Internet – instead of burrowing away inside Members Net and trying to reason from my mindset of relative privilege with your determined class anger – was because of the things you wrote.
You didn’t intend to teach me, Dave. But I did learn from both your behaviours and your content.
I don’t, after all, think I could have written the stuff I’ve posted in the last couple of days if I hadn’t escaped from the self-serving cosiness of the aforementioned environment.
So you see. You saved at least one soul – can’t that sometimes be enough?
:-)
Good luck with all your endeavours, anyhow. Even when you’re wrong, as I think in part you are in what you say above, you’re engaging. And I’ve never got the feeling I’m wasting my precious life on this earth whilst I’ve chosen to read something you’ve written.
A tweet which this morning was directed at my innermost open-source leanings led me to wonder if Wikipedia has a symbiotic or parasitical relationship with knowledge. The tweet went thus:
@eiohel like the wonderful open source voluntarism-driven marvel that is Wikipedia. It’s foundation is well-funded publications 4 citation
I answered with a perhaps too flippant reply that just as many journalists working for paid publications would be taking advantage of Wikipedia’s millions of pages as any of the alleged “free-loaders” out there. I say flippant because this of course wouldn’t necessarily make the situation any better: quite the reverse in fact, as paid-for organisations could arguably free-load on the back of other paid-fors via the intermediary actions and paraphrasing skills of Wikipedia itself.
@Paul0Evans1 We could of course equally say the same of blogging since the beginning of time … symbiotic rather than parasitic?
Which leads to me to my final occurrence and the very point of this post: does blogging – has blogging ever – added real value to anything at all? Dependent as it is on much of paid-for media’s output to spark off its over-the-garden-fence discourses, it would probably not exist if there weren’t a close interface between the blogosphere and MSM. Yet surely even those most in favour of traditional copyright models could not argue that the blogosphere taken in its entirety had not added anything useful to the sum of human thought.
Or, in their irascible and fanatical mindsets, might they be tempted to assert that it manifestly hadn’t?
My opinion is, of course, quite different. I believe we need deniable outriders in thought – just as much as we need them in politics. They are the proving-ground of new and bright ideas – and such ideas need the freedoms of open and unrestricted places if the future is to be dealt with under any kind of intelligence at all. The shutdowns of traditional copyright models probably do have their place in some form: but blogging, and the kind of open access to general knowledge which Wikipedia and social media in general tend to provide, are a necessary adjunct to the intellectually sustainable – and directly fundable – stuff traditional copyright seems to want to continue inscribing.
In any case, there have been notable calls recently for open access to publicly-funded research: if the debate is now getting as far ahead as the cutting-edge of such research, surely that cutting-edge shouldn’t any longer be causing us to bleed?
Recently, a young man was sent to prison for racist remarks about a footballer who collapsed on the field of play. The famous, or perhaps infamous, Twitter Joke Trial before it provided plenty of grist to the legal and constitutional mills.
These days, any of you who occupy the field of play that is Twitter or Facebook will surely be aware there are specific risks in posting “controversial” comments – not only about certain subjects in particular but also, especially lately it would seem, almost any subject in general the lawyers can get their clever hands on. Whilst the mainstream press and media have legions of lawyers to doublecheck their every move, we who tweet, update our Facebook statuses or blog on this and that are less able to fully understand the implications of everything we say.
In part, this is because the mode of discourse of such social networks is throwaway conversation. And yet whilst throwaway conversation would appear to have been how it all started out, it’s clear from recent events that this was never contemplated in the business models of these corporate behemoths of communication. From Twitter’s US Library of Congress archiving agreement and exclusively monetisedfire-hose access to Facebook’s impositional timeline, all these marvellous Web 2.0 tools have clearly been developed in order to provide very permanent content – quite the opposite of how they originally sold it to us. All this time storing away every single foolishness, whilst, all the time, giving us the impression we had been involved in virtual chats with our private neighbours over shared garden fences.
So what is the result of all of these diversionary tactics? Well, the best of all possible worlds for the enablers of such tools and the worst of all possible worlds for ourselves. Whilst court case after court case limits the liability of the framers, we as individual users – as real people – become totally, entirely, legally and seriously responsible for everything we were tossing lightly into the ether. The long-term implications are, then, quite terrifying: we are now pointedly and precisely liable for our Facebook groups, our conceptual explorations, our brainstorming of ideas, our insults and our irony, our parody and our barefaced cheek – indeed, anything and everything that in an offline space of municipal integrity occupied the much safer area of analogue privacy.
The growing objective to contain social networks and media within very public and corporate law is nothing but one massive anti-democratic trap we’ve all fallen into. And I really do not see any way out of it – except, perhaps, to decidedly go back, Luddite-like, to the analogue unconnected world of yore.
It is that freedom of municipal space we need to recover for ourselves and for the benefit of our democracy. Only then can we shrug off the fear that our every move is being tracked and checked in order to see how an error of judgement might be monetised by the already powerful. For that, precisely that, is what I suspect is going to be happening very shortly to a significant minority of us.
And this fear, this very real fear, is something we need to rapidly disabuse ourselves of – especially if, over the next few years, our democracy is to stand a fighting chance of sticking around in anything like the healthy shape we may, in hindsight, realise it once reasonably had.
I read this and even managed to comment on it via my mobile phone on the journey back from Spain.
It’s a good and measured piece on the needs of both politicians and bloggers – and fairly describes the recent history of interactions between the two. I like these two paragraphs in particular (the bold is mine):
You can even see people trying to stifle debate on the political blogosphere, in the name of managing our message. People are condemned as being disloyal for writing things that the leadership allegedly might not like, or that our opponents might. Certainly expressing concern about directions of travel can invite abuse. I can understand this; after all I used to be a part of a party machine that prided itself on imposing discipline after the dark and anarchic days of the 1980s. Shutting down debate and ensuring message consistency was a key skill for the party, and it helped make us electorally successful. Fear of returning there is understandable.
But times have changed. You can no more stop discussion and debate taking place on the internet, than you can stop any inevitable analogy you can think of. If people are expressing concern in conversations in the pub, at work or even in party meetings, then it will end up being reflected in a discussion somewhere online. To pretend otherwise is folly. And so, in response, political parties need to change as well. Simply using sound bites and obviously sticking to a script looks wooden. People can see through the charade. Debate and nuance is expected in other spheres of life and honesty can be refreshing. But not yet it seems in politics.
But politics is like mathematics – it has a language all of its own. So let us not be surprised when we misunderstand and mistake communication and charade.
Sometimes, we will never see what someone is trying to say without that sad intervention of the automated kaleidoscope of jaundiced cynicism.
That there is probably an ideal age for politicians – but not, as in maths, chronological – I would imagine is pretty undeniable. A desire to serve others, an ability to think around the ingrained stereotypes and prejudices of a society, a manifest wish to question the status quo in the interests and to the benefit of a wider society: all this, for me, would constitute a perfect storm which would serve to bring together a beneficial range of qualities.
The age of sincerity, in fact.
Perhaps, between us, politicians and bloggers, we can bring about a new age where sincerity is indeed the touchstone.
I have great sympathy for the underlying thesis of all three of these seriously important pieces of content. The blogging experts often ask why women don’t engage with the blogosphere. This not only puts the blame on women, it’s also inaccurate. The real issue is, of course, why the blogosphere doesn’t care to engage with women on their own terms.
And when we say the blogosphere, I guess we’re talking about the big four that Lisa mentions in her video. Which is also inaccurate, because blogging – and social media interaction more generally – is becoming much more than Liberal Conspiracy, Labour List, Lib Dem Voice and Conservative Home. As, in fact, I have pointed out on these pages more than once, traditional blogging has peeled off into simpler Twitter-type communities on the one hand and rather more complex Facebook-type interactions on the other. Although the big four get plenty of traffic, it’s nothing compared to the millions of active British Twitter and Facebook users. The truth of the matter is that a lot more of what people say and do online is carried out in the latter two these days than in the traditionally structured blogging formats of yore.
And thus speaketh one of the blogosphere’s biggest fans.
Indeed, it’s also curious how these multi-author blogging sites seem to want to emulate mainstream media in so many things these days: professional and very corporate images and logos; strict and focussed editorial lines; the branding-up of virtual collaborators in big-name real world events. The process that is being followed – whether conscious or not – is exactly as Lisa describes it: in some way or another, reputations are being built on the back of real people’s suffering – and those who acquire such reputations are then taking decisions as how to best channel that suffering to maximum political effect, and in accordance with undemocratically arrived at, and possibly, as a result, inappropriately focussed editorial lines.
I once had a short virtual conversation with Dave Semple on the subject of the true role and place of an editor. I argued that people like Dave, as well as Sunny Hundal at Liberal Conspiracy itself, playing as they did the role of writer and editor both, were running the risk of making untenable the job of editing content effectively. For how many good books ever mention their editors anywhere between the front and back covers?
And there’s a good reason for this: editors, first and foremost, are enablers of the work of others – not of their own reputations.
Not stars in their own right.
So it was that I found myself claiming that the job of a true editor was to be entirely invisible – was, that is to say, to direct and coax, support and hassle gently, sub-edit politely but firmly, the work of the real stars. The real stars being the people with something to say, with real experiences to communicate and real lives to share.
And if I understand Lisa properly, the essential problem at the heart of this lack of fit between women’s needs and the supposedly progressive channels of non-mainstream communication is that the latter live in a Westminster bubble mostly of their own making whilst women out there in real Britain are – most clearly – on a brutal receiving end of what that selfsame bubble has decided to do with their futures. Whether we’re talking about the Tory-led Coalition government doing its best to worsen lives, communities and all those ties that generally serve to defend the weak or the Labour-led opposition doing its best to play catch-up and triangulation as it carefully reconstructs its future viability in a two-party state.
So if the situation is as Lisa describes it, the question surely must arise: how do we change it?
Perhaps, firstly, technologically, by using tools such as Andrew Regan’s Poblish to aggregate and foreground content over names – to prevent the big-name bloggers in their media-riven attempts to turn social media completely into a starry adjunct of its mainstream equivalent. Then, secondly, structurally, creating alternative websites, virtual communities and even new social media tools which – as I pointed out at the beginning of this post – allow women to conduct their campaigns, affairs, communications and interactions entirely on their own terms. Whatever they may be.
You’re not going to be getting me to second-guess what those should be though. For one thing, I’m an aghast observer on the outside unable to avoid looking in on a situation which can only get worse. It’s not my job or my business to define what a majority of the suffering British should do about their futures.
All I would say is that if capitalism should have taught us anything, it is the importance of owning the means of production.
Here’s a bit of admin stuff for those of you geeky enough to notice such things. I’ve just updated my blogroll so it’s more active than it was – it now updates in a rolling fashion and shows the first sentence or so of any post that appears from other blogs out there that have caught my attention. If you were already on the original blogroll – or currently have me on yours – and I haven’t reciprocated in this new list, please do contact me and I’ll add you forthwith.
Meanwhile, instead of Google’s searchbox in the top right of the blog, I’ve included a link to Andrew Regan’s Poblish website – anything related to the political blogosphere, in particular the content of 21stCenturyFix.org, will be much easier to find using the tools he has provided us with.
Finally, please do take advantage of the Apture bar at the top of the blog – its presence not only serves to allow you to post recommendations to Twitter, Facebook and via email but also means you can search words and phrases that appear here within the body of the posts themselves by just selecting what you would like further background to. So if I haven’t fully explained myself in one of my tangential wanderings, you might want to do that little bit of extra research to get at what I’m trying to communicate from the comfort of Apture’s highly useful in-page search facilities.
Happy reading – and here’s to a reinvigorated political blogosphere for 2011!
I’ve since been thinking further along these lines and have finally come to the conclusion that modern Britain is indeed wacky.
It’s not the preserve of the right, mind. To believe this would be an unfortunate error of almighty consequence. If you’ve been reading these pages over the last few months, one of my more common themes is that the social, cultural and economic mess the Coalition is bringing to bear on us is directly related to the previous regime and New Labour behaviours.
Not in the way the Coalition would have us believe though. It would like us to think that there is a simple relationship between the supposedly spendthrift ways of the left and the disastrous economic situation we find ourselves on the edge of. I do not believe this is the truth. Truths told simply always hide far more complex realities – and this, here, is no exception.
The truth of the matter, as far as I can see, is that New Labour was too clever by half – discourse-wise – for anything politically consensual to ever come out of it long-term. It was always destined to lead to a pendulum swing in the opposite direction, even more exaggerated than its own proved to be. If current parliamentary practice – as exemplified by the Coalition government – is anything to go by, the British body politic doesn’t need Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News to poison public debate. It’s already irredeemably poisoned.
And it’s the politicians who make a profession out of the situation who need and require it to remain like this. I can only assume – in the absence of an obvious parliamentary defence of the blogosphere – that Paul Flynn MP is representative of his colleagues in Parliament when, as he attempts to criticise the idea of the voting public participating in online petitions which could then be debated in Parliament itself, he uses and abuses the figure of the blogosphere wholesale. The former would be so clearly a separate entity to the latter, both technologically and culturally, that it does truly beg the following question: are Flynn and his ilk more interested in slapping down the Coalition government for foolish and wayward initiatives they’re only actually against because New Labour didn’t think them up whilst in power or are they more interested in slapping down engaged online citizens of a broad and diverse nature because – in their inquisitive and focussed attitudes – they threaten the status quo such professional politicians make their living out of?
We should be mightily suspicious of intelligent people who conflate clearly different cultures and worlds with the obvious objective of smearing both in the easy and inaccurately wacky manner of Flynn. But Flynn is a symptom, not the root cause. New Labour’s reign of thirteen years brought us to where we stand right now. The Conservative-led Coalition government has learnt only too well from its former masters how to make weird and wonderful the truth.
Only in Britain would an allegedly democratic government be prepared to play games with the finite lives of its people.
Only in Britain are we crazed enough to build a society on the whims of the temporally – where not temporarily – powerful.
Only in Britain are we mad enough to try out in the real world something as fundamentally life-altering as this Coalition government proposes – even as the process of theorising, that is to say, experimenting safely in the mind first (like those jolly silly Continentals over the Channel who we so despise), is something we so frequently and vigorously resist.
Paul Flynn MP has this to say of the Coalition government’s latest proposals to promote online petitions (the bold is mine):
Labour MP Paul Flynn, a member of the Commons public administration committee, criticised the government’s proposal, telling BBC Radio 4′s Today programme: “This seems to be an attractive idea to those who haven’t seen how useless this has been in other parts of the world when it’s tried.
“If you ask people the question ‘do you want to pay less tax?’, they vote yes. If we get the e-petitions in there will be some asking for Jeremy Clarkson to be prime minister, for Jedi and Darth Vader to be the religions of the country.
“The blogosphere is not an area that is open to sensible debate; it is dominated by the obsessed and the fanatical and we will get crazy ideas coming forward.”
