Why we need to recover a face-to-face society

 social links, social media, social networks, social organisation, sorted, Spain  No Responses »
May 012013
 

This morning, I was talking about the current situation in Spain with some of my students of Spanish.  We were discussing what I had been tweeting on Twitter the night before with a dear follower from Spain, Monica Lalanda.  Monica was feeling sad about her country, arguing that it felt as if it were a country of losers.  I suggested that history had shown the Spanish (all its nationalities) were much more a country of survivors than losers.

As I related the exchange to my students this morning, I realised exactly how much emotion I have invested in Spain.  For a touch-and-go moment, I had to fight back the tears.

I also told my students my experience as a language-training provider for the car components industry in Spain.  This was when I discovered how clever, creative and competent the Spanish at their best really are.  They characterise themselves often as brilliant improvisers and whilst to a certain degree this is true, they are also undeniably brilliant implementers.  You can’t be otherwise in such a competitive and continuously improving sector.

And then one of my students described an experience she’d had as a project manager, working simultaneously with both Swiss and Spanish workforces.  Here, she compared the straightforward Swiss to the brilliantly enthusiastic and colourful Spanish: the documentation produced by each group of workers reflected these differing national characteristics.  She also described how the Spanish wouldn’t stop nattering whilst they worked.  It was clear that the Spanish weren’t only good at continuous improvement, they were also sharp and ingenious at what we could term continuous communication.

Which is when I realised this is indeed what distinguishes the Spanish from other workforces I’ve come up against.  For example, the English will shut down as the 5 o’clock deadline approaches; maintaining a relationship with one’s fellow men and women becomes far less important than finishing the job on time.  Yet communication is the glue of everything business, politics and society does well.  No wonder the Spanish have achieved so many great things in their history: they understand, they fully comprehend, the significance of “wasting” time on relating to each other.

At least in the sector under discussion, and I’m sure in many other areas of endeavour, they won’t sacrifice their right and obligation to speak amongst themselves, simply in order that they might get home on time.

The Spanish are survivors – not losers at all – precisely because they reserve the right to question each other; even at work.  Even amongst hierarchy, they maintain their creative habits of grumbling: this “rechistar” they convincingly sustain which often leads to pragmatic solution.  And competent hierarchy knows all too well they will inevitably be like this – and so competent hierarchy, at least that competent hierarchy you find in certain big businesses, knows you have to take them along with you.

You can’t pull the wool over Spanish eyes, that’s for sure.  You have to convince them up as close as it gets: you have to convince them face-to-face.

So we come finally to the point of this post.  Here we have a New York Times article from last year as one piece of evidence:

[...] We typically feel that we understand how complex systems work even when our true understanding is superficial. And it is not until we are asked to explain how such a system works — whether it’s what’s involved in a trade deal with China or how a toilet flushes — that we realize how little we actually know.

The interesting bit comes, however, when detailed explanations are finally made:

[...] The real surprise is what happens after these same individuals are asked to explain how these policy ideas work: they become more moderate in their political views — either in support of such policies or against them. In fact, not only do their attitudes change, but so does their behavior. In one of our experiments, for example, after attempting to explain how various policy ideas would actually work, people became less likely to donate to organizations that supported the positions they had initially favored.

With the Spanish experience in mind – that is to say, with their ability to continuously communicate and thus moderate their actions (the only explanation I can encounter as they proceed to put up with soaring unemployment rates of 27 percent) – I am minded to remember my own experience whilst I was a co-opted parish councillor in the place in which I still find myself living.  I had by then set up what I intended to be a local blogsite which would combine photos of the area with pithy comment.  But, in the event, I found it extraordinarily difficult to say any productive or useful word about my experiences.  Simply knowing the potential audience was people I lived cheek-and-jowl next to terrified me into a counter-productive silence.

Or perhaps the silence was not as counter-productive as I thought.  It seems to me, in the light of the findings recounted in the New York Times, that what I was experiencing was actually a virtual equivalent of that highly constructive and continuous communication of the Spanish: I was being forced to explain myself to people I knew I’d bump into – and thus was having to question far more fiercely my own neat and perfectly-formed prejudices.

In truth, it seems to me that if we are to survive the next decade or so with any degree of kindness, humility or accuracy – if England, the UK and a wider Western democracy is to perpetuate its better aspects in any convincing way – we will need to recover a face-to-face society which broadcast politics, social media, online communication and other latterday technologies have almost battered into non-existence.

It might yet be possible too.  This statistic could be telling:

The poll also asked respondents: “Thinking about any local newspapers published in your home town or county, do you think they are on balance a positive or a negative force in your local community?” The majority,  53.3 per cent, said they were positive, 8.3 per cent said they were negative and 32.7 per cent said they were neutral.

I don’t have the data to hand, of course, but I would be happy to assume that local radio, TV and newspapers are generally less aggressively overbearing in their behaviours than the more cocooned and distant national media.  More middle-of-the-road, less extreme in their posturing.  Inevitably so, when your neighbours get to know who you are and where you live.

Hardly counter-intuitive, anyhow.

It may of course be that the distancing effect of social media and networks is something we in Anglo-Saxon countries are actively pursuing.  Who’s to say, after all, that we would like to continuously communicate like the Spanish seem to want to?  But I bet my very last peseta that if you ever properly got the opportunity to find out what it was like, then to live and work in an environment of friendly and intelligent “relationship professionals” would be far more finally fun and productive than in a landscape of pesky “time-keeping trolls”.

As well as leading to a far less destructively cruel, inefficient and partisan politics.

Of mice, social democracy and idiots like Liam Walker

 hierarchy of power, in a hole, neoliberalism, New Labour, social democracy, social media, social networks  No Responses »
Apr 252013
 

This story from the Mirror today does really make manifest the idiocy which abounds at the moment:

A young sidekick of David Cameron has claimed hard-up families are turning to food banks because they’ve wasted their money on booze.

The Twitter outburst by Liam Walker caused outrage in the Prime Minister’s constituency.

We’ve had this kind of rank insensitivity – where not inaccuracy – before and we’ll clearly have it again.  Now we could argue, as I did recently, that this was essentially a result of a kind of psychotic relationship with reality at the very top of government.  But I’m beginning seriously to consider whether the real explanation lies elsewhere.  As I tweeted a day or so ago:

Our social-democratic society, in its kindly appreciation of all human beings, has allowed ambitious idiots to climb to the top of the pile.

In a sense, then, we might wish to conclude that the Liam Walkers of this world are the product of social media’s zero hierarchies, which in themselves are the products of our dearly-, and perhaps lately-, beloved social democracy, in its long-pronounced labour and aim to value everyone equally.

If I am at all right in what I suggest, we’re not seeing the result of us all being a product of a hierarchical neoliberalism, where cruel announcements, decisions and outcomes tumble out of the mouths of the vicious; no, not at all.  Instead, what we’re seeing is the results of those “everyone is a human being” socially-democratic mindsets, where everything anyone thinks or says is to be contemplated, understood and considered with a judicious and egalitarian care.

What the Liam Walkers of this world are visiting upon us now is precisely the consequence of what the Liam Walkers least appreciate in their upbringing: they have grown up with the feeling that they have every right to “blurt out” this stuff, because the society, schools, environment and political legacy they respect so little has taught them that hierarchy, meritoriously achieved, has zero importance in the 21st century.

Am I reverting to type then?  A “weirdy-hippy” thinker, perhaps, who spends a decade proclaiming the virtue of flat hierarchies – only to suddenly discover the downsides of their prevalence in the words of a government hanger-on?

Maybe so.  Though I think it more complex than that.  The key is in the phrase “meritoriously achieved”.  This “merit” process, as previously defined by social democracy, and then by New Labour’s more complicated – perhaps more confusing – re-engineering of its implications, was never really achieved.  The society of aspiration and opportunity as thus described ended up simply as more smoke and mirrors to hide the graft.

I suppose what I’m really looking to promote in all of this is that via mice (social media), social democracy (a meritorious society) and idiots (like social you and me), we might fashion a different way of communicating amongst ourselves: a way where each of us, through a little-by-little learning process, acquired the skills that Walker clearly doesn’t have when using the power that flat hierarchies clearly offer.

The Walkers of this world deserve our scorn, it is true.  But we’ve all done similar stuff, driven by the prejudices none of us can ever shake off.  Before social media, we did this stuff behind the scenes and in private.  Now the private has become public, maybe we need a different approach to life.  Maybe what we really need to start doing is filtering out the idiocies in all our pronouncements, as we focus on controlling the terms and natures of the debates which most affect our lives.

Yes.  We will continue, as human beings, to be publicly idiotic.

But maybe knowing we are all so will lead us to a kinder and more respectful place.

We can only hope.

And, also, try.

Even as trying is clearly never quite enough.

The POV Machine

 Easter, Facebook, Facebook generation, Google, Google Glass, POV machine, poverty, power, social media, social networks, spying on neighbours, squeezed middle, squeezed middle class, super-rich, Twitter, unclassifiable  2 Responses »
Mar 282013
 

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been reading and writing a lot about the squeezed middle, the absolute poor and the stratospheric rich.  For those of us who are living in the United Kingdom – more precisely in my case, the North West of England – you won’t have failed to notice how the government and the governed simply do not see things eye-to-eye.  In fact, lately at least, it’s often more a case of a tooth for a tooth.


http://youtu.be/Exh8t6lUpAI

The thing is, my natural instinct is to see life from tens of different points of view.  This doesn’t make me popular – or widely read.  Yesterday, I realised the true and abiding power of ranting when itiddly, a Twitter friend of mine, asked me to edit a post of his before he posted it.  He’s a tribal fellow; a traditional political activist.  He insults and damns and blasts the Tories at every opportunity.

I resisted the temptation to help him out with his post – rather patronisingly (in retrospect) arguing that he needed to have confidence in his writing, as well as some exposure, much more than the help of a struggling editor friend.

You can read his post here.  It’s a rant and it isn’t.  There’s a barely contained fury, of course, but all the time it’s an evidence-based fury.  And whilst I rarely get above five or six tweets for my posts, in a very short time his had hit thirty-five (at the time of writing this post, it now reads a hundred).  Exposure wasn’t what was needed on his part here; instead, it was humility on mine.

Yet it is not in my nature to rant one-sidedly, even where ranting of a kind is sometimes something I do.  I would not be able, in all honesty, to write something as single-minded as the post we’re talking about.  And I wish, in some way, I were able to convey the reasons why.  I wish you could all see the ten or twenty different points of view I always see when I see the world.

People have, on occasions, even accused me of dancing around a subject.  Perhaps, in truth, they were closer to the mark than even they realised.  You dance out of engagement and concentration; a dance is a marvellous combination of emotion, precision and attitude.

That is how I see the process of writing.

Which is why I wish, perhaps by using Twitter and other social-network outputs, we could all appreciate better how each of us is perceiving the world: the pain, the glory, the happiness and joy; the misery, the fear, the certainties and hopes.  From high-and-mighty governors to humble barely-surviving governed, the world would surely become a better place if only we could see it properly through each other’s eyes.

So my question must be: is anyone out there at all interested in creating a Point-Of-View Machine?

Or are you all far more interested in setting up monolithic positions of revulsion and non-cooperation?

____________________

Further reading: I wonder, quite sincerely, whether the Google Glass project (more here) – rather than inspire our fear of a final assault on all our privacies – should make us more hopeful in the ways I describe above.  If the POV streams resulting from all those users were made available and accessible in a structured way, we would understand much more easily how each of us experienced life.  And from that understanding, perhaps a kinder governance would emerge.

A kinder world.

A kinder species, even.

We can only hope, of course.

And, maybe, pray.

For the first time in history … I give you the people!

 elitism, Knowledge Society, on a high, social economy, social links, social media, social networks, social organisation, Twitter  2 Responses »
Mar 262013
 

I know Twitter quite well.  It’s a place I get my information from; a place I practise my writing in; a place I brainstorm ideas to logical conclusion; a place I sometimes even gain a solace of a kind.

Occasionally, very occasionally (as this morning), I also wonder if it’s a place of gradual, long-term and seeping self-harm.

But only very occasionally.

What it undeniably is, without any doubt, is a place of tremendous knowledge and resource.  You find out about things way before they ever hit the headlines – if, that is, they hit the headlines at all.  In its clever online constitution, people aggregate ideas and opinions and conclusions in an ingeniously programmed sorting of the milk from the cream.  People create filters of editorial substantiveness, and so add value – almost by magic – to the mix.

This is how people who use Twitter wisely – and there are many, I can assure you – both manage to teach and to learn in equal measure.

A thought experiment, then, on the back of the above lead-in.

Let’s imagine a government, in times of severe crisis, came to the conclusion it needed to bring people together, in order that opinions, statistics and ideas be exchanged at a relatively benign and constructive level of debate.  Such a government would, indeed, be of a far-sighted mould – perhaps beyond the efforts and abilities of most politicians throughout history.  But you never know.  Just as the populace have become more educated and clever with the advent of universal education, so you’d expect their leaders and representatives to show the same improvements.  (Except that, perhaps in the event unfortunately, the vast majority continue to emerge from the private schools and elitist universities which have always run this evermore unpleasant and dirty land.)

Anyhow.  Back to the conclusion our hypothetical government had arrived at: imagine they desired a vast network of connections.  An extended sequence of brain patterns across the globe; all contributing interconnectedly these voluntary (though also quite addictive) gobbets of intelligence I mention; all sourced from essentially free agents in every corner of every region which was operating under the stresses and strains of tremendous economic fracture.  Wouldn’t such a government, if of an equally intelligent type, be looking to take advantage of and channel these tremendously useful and constructive ideas for the benefit of the future?  Instead of using the tool to bully the flailing and desperate opinions of those they were disenfranchising more and more, surely a far more intelligent approach – a far more sensible, efficient and essentially businesslike approach – would be to see how best to use productively such a resource?

At the moment, all I can see is masses of evermore informed men and women, channelling their anger – sometimes quite violently – against a useless and incompetent set of political and business leaders.  But there’s room for something else, surely.  Room for another way of doing.  Not a left-wing UKIP (more here), as has been suggested by some.  No.  A different mindset, with – and here’s the biggie, the bit where it would all stand or fall in one hugely humongous step – its correspondingly revised organisational structures.

For if Labour, or anyone else moderately on the progressive side of things, wants to win any elections in the future, they will need to begin to see their role as that of enabling progressive forces rather than leading them.  And my description of an intelligent government’s approach to the resource that is the online community of Twitter mirrors exactly how I would like to see Labour remake itself over the next five years or so.

Yes.  Twitter can be called an elite too.  An educated elite which not only governments but also opposition parties wastefully ignore, misinterpret and misunderstand.  Suspicious of the degree of absolute knowledge, of simple braininess and of commitment to truth which the beast clearly enshrines at some levels and in some interactions, such traditional ways of looking at politics can only see it as an echo chamber for the existing broadcast approaches.  But that, my dear ladies and gentlemen of the UK body politic, is precisely where you’re throwing away the value so freely provided and currently added.

In front of you, on your computer screens and phone apps various, you have the most amazing – absolutely free – political tool the world has ever seen.  An elite which doesn’t want to be an elite.  An elite which only wishes to see prioritised the evidence-based holding of opinions; the policy-making which would result; and the recovery of a society so horribly damaged at the moment that repair is perhaps the last thing on our minds.

Survival is all we can think of out there in the real world.

And only in this beautiful cocoon that is social media and its slyly communicating networks do we still, even now, encounter that solace I mentioned at the beginning.

Both intellectual and emotional, however, it needs to be seen for what it fully is: a medium through which a butterfly of progress may yet appear.

So is there anyone in politics up to the job of wasting no more?

Anyone at all?  In any party?

On Lord McAlpine’s lawyer and the redefining of social media

 in a hole, social media, social networks  No Responses »
Dec 182012
 

This video is worth your time.  In particular the very last part.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2012/dec/18/lord-mcalpine-lawyer-bbc-itv-apology-video

Lord McAlpine’s lawyer is very clear where he, and presumably other lawyers too, are to stand on this matter.  Web 2.0 and social networks – the whole affair we tend to call social media – were set up on the basis, and around the assumption, that the worldwide web was able to police itself.  The million eyes of open-source-like practice would soon hunt out evil and ensure the web remained a good place to be.

Of course, we have all had the feeling – at some time or another – that the web was more Wild West than worldwide: it took me, for example, quite a few years before I moved from the Labour Party’s intranet and ventured out to blog in full view of anyone and everyone.  Having a blog no one read did help, mind.

Invisibility does wonders for one’s ability to communicate openly.

In a way, this move from invisibility to notoriety – to being known and recognised at the very least – is part of what is affecting us all of late.

Perhaps it is now time to accept that it is part of what has affected us all for quite a while.

Andy Warhol was supposed to have said that everyone could be famous for fifteen minutes.  But that was in a time when the ether was just that: ephemeral; impossible to tape and preserve for ordinary people; seen and then unseen; a flash in the pan which was then just a memory.

Which is why I do not agree entirely with McAlpine’s lawyer.  This is not the ether as we then knew and understood it.  Yes.  It is permanent in its trail, in its aftertaste, in what the Web 2.0 and social networks choose to do with our content.  But in what we do and are directly responsible for, in its generation, it is instantaneous and split-second.  It feels and is framed far more as that casual conversation in the kitchen which you do not tape and record.

Partly because the corporations which invented it did want it to be as easy as that.

A conversation in a kitchen.

They were looking for acceptance, after all; for take up; for early adoption; for substantial and rapid market share.

If we are now to go along with the lawyerly point of view – that everything which appears on the web is a form of publishing analogous to an industry which because of that very same set of technologies no longer properly sustains itself – then I suspect that more than one social network will find its business model collapsing around it.

It’s truly paradoxical, in fact.  Just as the legal profession gets its collective head around a concept of defamation as applied to the web which has its origins in an industry of paper-based media, so that paper-based media disintegrates because of the ether it inexactly understands.

This may be all to a wider good, mind.  That Twitter, Facebook and Google+ can use – and perhaps abuse – what we believe to be our content, whilst at the same time making it easier for governments to track what we do and think almost every moment of our day, is a cliché of a truism even the less paranoid amongst us are happy to admit.  If moves by the lawyerly profession to defend reputations from attacks by the flailing dynamics of social networks go ahead to the degree I suspect the future will shortly encourage, at least one predictable result will simply be a retiral of activity by those who begin to know and hear of people who’ve been fined, imprisoned or otherwise punished for loose words out there on the web.

The celebrities, powerful figures and those in general with the resources to pursue such a protection may be rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect.

Governments and their security services, long-term, however, may be less happy with such developments.  A great deal less happy with a population which relearns the advantages of discreet communication over social-media soul-bearing.

*

And whilst it’s clear that we’re the product and not the customer at all (the customer being primarily the advertisers and their ecosystems of hangers-on), it’s even more clear that we’re fairly disposable cannon fodder.  It was, for example, explained to me recently that when someone is reported for making a suicide threat on Facebook, and as per procedures set up to contemplate such events, Facebook quickly releases to the police the IP address of the person making the threat.  In this instance, I’m sure we can all agree that this is quite admirable.  In other instances, however, who knows?  You put in place a procedure like that – and who is to say it won’t quite easily be misused in the future?

We’re losing something here – and I’m not sure entirely what.

In the meantime, life gets more and more complicated.

Quite curiously when technology really should have delivered a grand simplification.

On reporting, tweeting and posting, post-Leveson

 blogging, blogosphere, communication, cyberspace, Facebook, Facebook generation, in a hole, Internet, intertextuality, Johann Hari, journalism, Leveson inquiry, new media, news-gathering, newspapers, social media, social networks, Twitter, web, Web 2.0, websites  3 Responses »
Dec 102012
 

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.

The press vs social media – a useful distinction or not?

 blogging, blogosphere, conversation, Facebook, Facebook generation, FreeTheInternet, laws, lawyers, Leveson inquiry, on a high, open web, publishing, social media, social networks, Twitter  No Responses »
Nov 292012
 

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:


http://youtu.be/8iuxaVkfHOA?t=3m

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.

As Peter on Twitter said today:

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.

____________________

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).

Lord McAlpine, the law and the challenges we must face

 communication, in a hole, Legal Aid, new media, social media, social networks, Twitter  No Responses »
Nov 232012
 

I have just spent a couple of days away from home, mostly away from Twitter and entirely away from blogging.  Though not entirely.

I’ve written this post whilst offline, on a Blackberry Playbook, using word-processing software provided by default. It’s an interesting experience, writing from one’s thoughts without being instantly connected to that wider intelligence which is the Internet – and its visual manifestation, the worldwide web.

I suddenly discover the only resources I have to hand, for the moment, and whilst I write, are my own very private thoughts and uncertainties.  I can check nothing, for the moment; I can only write what I am sure of.

And yet perhaps the situation I find myself in is not all that different from writing online.  Who can say that what we read and watch is ever as true as it might be?  If we cannot believe that a BBC current affairs programme of international renown is capable of usefully fact-checking its own content before it broadcasts, where and how can we ordinary people realistically check anything an honest desire to engage with democratic debate would – as a result – require us to do?

On considerable reflection, I find myself siding with Lord McAlpine’s instincts to sue those who besmirched his name.  But I do so with a desire to add the following caveats for the future.  For if the events that have surrounded his calvary are to impact positively on democracy, and if his case and this moment in our body politic are not to be seen historically as a turning-point where an unhappy and impositional establishment brutally re-establishes itself, we must do something more than acknowledge his right under current law to act as he does.

I was, you see, going to write a post about how it seemed to me that the McAlpine case, and the fury with which he was pursued in some sectors of social media, and even in what is now less accurately called mainstream media, was a case of referred anger more than a desire to do away with the reputation of a man very few people even knew existed.  This referred anger would relate to the last two years of Coalition government.  Unable – as the constituency in question was – to stem the government’s impositional instincts, this – that is to say, Twitter – has been a frustrated and figurative rattlesnake of a medium, thrashing evermore futilely away at an evermore desperate set of circumstances.

If my thesis is correct, the Lord McAlpine accusations were simply the unhappy blue touchpaper a hot and angry group of people alighted on in the absence of being able to get political satisfaction elsewhere.

Now I may be right or I may be wrong.  Either way, once Lord McAlpine has achieved his goals as per our existing laws, we need to ensure his legacy will not be that of an establishment grossly re-establishing itself but, rather, much more usefully and productively for our democracy, of a body politic and public discourse renewing itself.

And so I come to the point of this post.  The caveats I mentioned above in relation to the McAlpine case?

It’s true, as this post from the Economist indicates, that if we now live in a world where everyone can publish, we now live in a world where everyone can be sued.  But if this is the case, and legal matters are potentially to enter every sitting-room in the land, surely it would only be reasonable to expect the law itself to democratise itself – that is to say, make itself easier to be understood, complied with, used and exercised.

Whilst the real mainstream media – with its legal departments and journalistically-trained professionals – essentially interfaced with what was seen by many as the more oppressive forces in our society, as well as supposedly on our behalf, it did not seem to matter so much that the law was, for most people, an opaque and arcane matter.  But if we are all to publish now, as indeed Twitter, Facebook and blogging before them would have us do (for without the product, that is to say ourselves and our occurrences, social media would have zero business model to operate with), and if we do feel that Web 2.0 has more upsides than downsides, then we do really need to make it as easy to understand and use the law as it is to go to a supermarket and purchase a week’s worth of groceries.

If publishing is to become as easy as 140 characters and a “Send” button, or simply one retweet, and the implications of getting it wrong are to be criminal investigations by the Metropolitan police, then as a society we cannot, on the one hand, allow the honesty, sharing and the jobs and income social media generate – as well as a whole host of other upsides which such a technologically-linked world provides – to lead, on the other, to the complex and awful risks of prison sentences and prohibitive fines for its participants when forwarding on the equivalent of a simple English sentence.  We cannot allow it, that is, unless we change quite radically its framework.

And if there are malicious people out there looking to witch-hunt others, to act as lynch mobs, to pursue in industrial quantities the reputations of others, then maybe governments too – especially the current one (but not only the current one) – need to ask themselves if there’s anything they can do to make our society less unhappy, less bitter, less desirous of revenge and less violent in its discourses.

A final couple of requests, then, from and to those of us who still wish to act in good faith on behalf of a better democratic society:

  • Lawyers, as perhaps the final profession to open its doors to 21st century society, it is your turn to accept that a wider applicability and use of the law by ordinary people must lead to its democratisation: both in terms of its understandability and in terms of its accessibility.  We need to be able to comprehend it without having to go to law school and we need to be able to pay for it without taking out a loan.
  • Politicians, as perhaps the final profession to want to accede to the desire which 21st century society has to share almost everything with almost everybody, we need you to accept that the importance of conducting reasoned and properly devolved debate requires us to have a system of government and justice which allow for legal actions that do not generate the fear of bankruptcy in ordinary people looking to sustain their right to free expression.  Removing the scope of Legal Aid for so many elements of legal action, as here in England the current government has so recently decided to do, does not indicate any real wish to support democratic instincts in the civilisations we are building.  I would ask you, therefore, to rethink this approach to guaranteeing the realistic exercise and defence of of legitimate rights to free expression.
  • Social media wonks, as perhaps the final profession to care to operate through legislatures across the world, your impatience with the inability of virtually everyone else to properly understand the implications of your genial inventions and online constitutions leads you not to worry too much about the very real legal implications for your consumers of the design decisions which you take behind closed doors, every day of the week – and very much outside the scope of most parliaments and governments.  At the very least, then, I would ask of you to lobby far more firmly on behalf of transparent and less costly libel processes in those jurisdictions where you generate your not inconsiderable incomes.  And at the very most, as I have already suggested on these pages quite recently, you might wish to consider drastically redesigning your software for the needs of what – almost certainly – will become a far more libellous age.

Now whether the above reflections will help anyone out of the morass I perceive as encroaching very soon on the few civil liberties we thought we had here in England, I really cannot say.

But I do hope that someone or some institution will hear my pleas; that these pleas may be understandings which other democratic individuals might share and care to sustain; and that such persons or organisations will be sufficiently intelligent and foresighted enough to comprehend exactly what a vibrant and sustainable body politic really needs: not a long-term slide into an atmosphere of libel and reputational aggression but, rather, cogent debate, accessible public forums, proper and informed dialogue – and as little intervention by the heavy-handed laws and costs of yore as the 21st century can possibly engineer.

Why is Twitter’s social-media software not legally responsible for the content it enables?

 content, form, social media, social networks, Twitter, unclassifiable  4 Responses »
Nov 202012
 

For a rather long time, I’ve been thinking about the subject of:

 [...] the hijacking of the benefits of the knowledge society by those who have created the social web.

Let’s just rewind and see how it could’ve been: a society where brains, applied to ideas, developed and implemented technologies on a massive scale – technologies which became cheap enough for everyone to remove drudgery from their ordinary lives and so release the human mind for much better things.

What do we have instead?  Poorly paid – or even unpaid – worker bees (that’s you and me on Twitter and Facebook) inputting data for the software code of such a social web to generate outputs which fascinate companies and allow them to better identify their markets.

Yes.  We are now generating the data for corporations which not only make money out of us directly through advertising (Facebook and Twitter) but also sell our personal details to other organisations (food and consumer-durable manufacturers for example) in order that they may better sell their products to us.  We are now an outsourced part of this latter group of companies’ marketing departments.  Instead of costly opinion polls and focus groups, all they have to do is pay a modicum amount of money to examine Twitter’s firehose (its full complement of content to which the rest of us cannot have access beyond about a maximum of seven days of search) and thus use our freely inputted data to better sell us their products.

I go on to conclude:

[...] The problem is that these software companies have worked out a way of attracting us to sit down for free in front of our monitors and screens, and input devices various, and create content which substitutes the stuff they promised us fifty years ago was going to release us from the drudgery of manual labour.

Essentially, it would seem the long-promised knowledge economy has been hijacked and dumbed-down by the requirements of the social web.  And, right now, I really cannot see our way around it.

In reality, what we have here is a social-media software which first makes uncomplex the requirements of inputs from ourselves and, once harvested, proceeds to automatically put it all back together in order to make it sufficiently re-complexed to be of interest.

Arguably, without the software to give automated form to the content so produced, we wouldn’t have anything anyone would really want to witness.  Random 140-character text messages which related in no way to any other?  Who’d care to enjoy an afternoon of that?

So why do I return to an issue I did to the death a while ago?  Because, in the light of quite reasonable demands for defamatory reparations, it occurs to me that, in social media, we have a less than clear division between publisher and distributor.  Now I’m quite unaware if – in previous court cases in relation to, for example, obscenity trials of books or other historically significant offline content – distributors of such books ran the same risks as the publishers themselves.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if the history of our country had thrown up prior examples of both parties being asked to carry the responsibility can.

In this case, however, in particular in relation to Twitter, which is what seems to occupy our minds most vigorously at the moment, I would argue that the division between the two roles of publisher and distributor is far more difficult to delineate.  Twitter’s current Terms of Service make it very clear that each user is entirely responsible for their own content:

You are responsible for your use of the Services, for any Content you post to the Services, and for any consequences thereof. The Content you submit, post, or display will be able to be viewed by other users of the Services and through third party services and websites (go to the account settings page to control who sees your Content). You should only provide Content that you are comfortable sharing with others under these Terms.

They then go on to say:

You may use the Services only if you can form a binding contract with Twitter and are not a person barred from receiving services under the laws of the United States or other applicable jurisdiction. If you are accepting these Terms and using the Services on behalf of a company, organization, government, or other legal entity, you represent and warrant that you are authorized to do so. You may use the Services only in compliance with these Terms and all applicable local, state, national, and international laws, rules and regulations.

So far, so good.  Content thus generated is under the jurisdiction of – presumably – where one is resident.  Or, alternatively, one’s nationality.  Or, perhaps, where one has tweeted from.

But in any case, wherever the rules and regulations are applicable.

:-(

Form, however, is quite a different matter.  As far as the software is concerned, and Twitter’s own corporate liability, Californian law is judged to rule everything else:

These Terms and any action related thereto will be governed by the laws of the State of California without regard to or application of its conflict of law provisions or your state or country of residence. All claims, legal proceedings or litigation arising in connection with the Services will be brought solely in the federal or state courts located in San Francisco County, California, United States, and you consent to the jurisdiction of and venue in such courts and waive any objection as to inconvenient forum.

And the liability in question is limited thus (the bold is mine):

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE TWITTER ENTITIES SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS OR REVENUES, WHETHER INCURRED DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, OR ANY LOSS OF DATA, USE, GOOD-WILL, OR OTHER INTANGIBLE LOSSES, RESULTING FROM (i) YOUR ACCESS TO OR USE OF OR INABILITY TO ACCESS OR USE THE SERVICES; (ii) ANY CONDUCT OR CONTENT OF ANY THIRD PARTY ON THE SERVICES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY DEFAMATORY, OFFENSIVE OR ILLEGAL CONDUCT OF OTHER USERS OR THIRD PARTIES; (iii) ANY CONTENT OBTAINED FROM THE SERVICES; OR (iv) UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS, USE OR ALTERATION OF YOUR TRANSMISSIONS OR CONTENT.

IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AGGREGATE LIABILITY OF THE TWITTER ENTITIES EXCEED THE GREATER OF ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS (U.S. $100.00) OR THE AMOUNT YOU PAID TWITTER, IF ANY, IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS FOR THE SERVICES GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM.

I would rule this significant and almost certainly deliberate.  I’m no expert in law, much less in Californian law, but I’m pretty sure it’ll make it easier to sell and distribute software which makes more complex and interesting dumbed-down content without running foul of legal complaints about issues of free speech than, say, its European counterparts.

What I’m really saying with all of this is that Twitter’s Terms of Service attempt to argue that its software simply distributes and does not publish.  It takes no responsibility for the bringing together of such content – and it consequently allows form to come under one legislation and content, thus defined, to belong entirely to the user.  (Though we know that even this is not true: a user cannot normally access more than a limited number of tweets back in time, whilst companies pay Twitter good money to access on a massive scale such ancient thoughts and occurrences.)

My argument, however, would run as follows: deliberately dumbing down individual ideas into 140-character gobbets and then bringing them together automatically to create interesting streams of thought involves not just the process of distribution but also the process of transformation.  We are not just talking about giving someone else the tool to publish off their own bat: microblogging (ie Twitter) is essentially different from its much more discursive and single-authored precursor – which is to say, the blogging you see in front of you right now.  Microblogging, essentially, is collaborative writing which involves many many others – and in order for it to work someone, or something, needs to sort and filter the information.

That is to say, give it shape.  Edit and give sense and sensibility to what would otherwise be a morass of idiocies.

So who are the authors who write in a microblogging site like Twitter?  Obviously the individuals who post.  But also, surely, if we’re being realistic, the software which joins as a seamless whole the activities of so many busy worker bees; which is programmed and designed from ground up to prioritise speed of transmission over reflection; and which aims above all to indicate the latest over the lasting.

Which is why we finally come to the question I pose at the top of this post: why is a company like Twitter’s social-media software not also legally responsible for what it – basically – creates? Or at the very least enables?

The software, that is – and, by extension, the company.

For if the form which it gives involves fundamental transformation of the content its “employees” end up generating, the line between content and form is far more blurred than any post-modern attempt to confuse our senses could ever achieve.

So think about it.

And then ask.

And then come back here, in order to tell me what they said.

On the return of the Cold War (or Communist oppression by the backdoor)

 Cold War, Communism, repression, social media, social networks, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Nov 202012
 

I recently pointed out how Apple’s success with its iPhone could be a case in favour of bringing back command economies.  The sort of centralised, structured and free-market-free structures that used to rule the lives of so many unhappy East Europeans.

My mother for one.

Only, as we follow the path of Huxley’s “Brave New World” into a gentle nightmare of consumerism, suddenly we realise that the Communist command economies of yore are perfectly suited to corporate capitalism.

They actually work.

And yes.  It’s true.  Whilst 20th century Communism was unable to analyse properly the complex demands of a society which depended on such a centralised proposition, latterday techniques of organising masses have so advanced in the intervening years to actually make it possible.  That we now have a variegatedly-branded Communism instead of the uniquely-recognisable hammer and sickle makes little difference: we have choice, that is true, but the choice is consumerist – and therefore finite.  As Paul so wisely points out in his above-linked-to post on dystopias:

The consumerism is something that the current government – and indeed most previous governments in this country – would immediately recognise, but there are other elements which match our government’s vision. The first is the mantra of ‘choice’. In Brave New World, everyone thinks they have choice – to play Electromagnetic Golf or Escalator Squash or Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy. Lots of ‘choice’, but all those choices meaningless, and designed to manipulate people into doing what’s to the benefit of the elite. Ring any bells?

Of course, “anything that you want as long as it’s black” is a meme that runs right back to the very start of the production-line revolution.  And whilst we fought the original Cold War on the basis not only of consumer freedoms but also other far more profound ones such as freedom of speech and expression, it seemed an honourable – indeed, quite necessary – battle we had no alternative but to engage in.

We were, of course, unhappy with the police state of a kind we had to construct on our side in order to fight the manifest evils of the likes of the Soviet KGB and the East German Stasi, but the long haul, the final defeat of oppressive Communism, did seem to reach a demonstrable resolution with the final fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent decline of puff-pastry body politics across Europe’s eastern flanks.

There then came another revolution: the social media revolution of baring one’s soul, being public about so many of one’s thoughts, communicating with one’s fellow man and woman – essentially, engaging with one’s democracy.  This, so we were led to believe, would usher in a whole new way of thinking and doing society: we would be open, honest and sincere; we would tell the truth; we would create a modern 21st century vision of capable consumer-producers – able and willing to exchange the fruits of the Knowledge Society ingeniously and creatively.

Only it hasn’t really turned out like that.  Not only are the old hierarchies of command and control in Apple’s iPhone ecosystem being reproduced in many corporations across the world – post-Communist order – they also find their mirror images being re-established in political systems in democracies as old as the British.

This is what has happened: we have bared our souls as no Communist citizen would ever have dared to, in the expectation of a truly brave new world.  And what we have got in exchange for all that honesty is what would appear to be a rolling process of Communist-style oppression by the backdoor.

I don’t attribute conspiracy as the main driver.  I don’t think this is fashioned or engineered.  I just think that a sad human tendency, of which 20th century Communism was a perfect example, is now recovering its poise and power in a 21st century which initially promised so very much more.

Oppression is the symptom of exaggerated hierarchy.  And hierarchy tends to reinforce itself, thus exaggerating even more the disparities.

That is all that’s taking place.  Nothing more unhappy than that.

Communism – or its capitalist playmate – has simply played the long game, and – as a result – won out handsomely over all the lovers of freedom who once populated our civilisation.

Nor is there anything we can do about it, really.

Except, perhaps, get used to the idea of making one’s way once again under the historically ever-returning yoke of oppression.

Life was ever thus.

It’s now our turn to experience it for ourselves.

Is it time to get serious about free speech here in England?

 England, English, Facebook, free speech, in a hole, libel law, social media, social networks, Twitter, USA  1 Response »
Nov 192012
 

I finished a recent post on the subject of social media with the following realisation:

Given that the above-mentioned corporations are all nominally American in approach, mentality and ways of thinking, if nothing else this all goes to show us how difficult and challenging it can be to transplant at a global and online level behaviours which other legal jurisdictions take for granted.

I always thought when we spoke of oppressing freedom of speech that we were talking about developing countries in the Third World.

I now realise that there is a reason people call the United States the “Land of the Free”.  In many freedoms, they do clearly fall down on what their people deserve.  But in speaking their minds, they clearly do not.

We here in England have a lot to learn.

Too much for us to properly learn it in my lifetime, I fear.

Now in that piece I chart my sudden awareness that the figure of free speech in my homeland is highly limited by English law on defamation, where the onus in any case is on the defendant not the plaintiff to prove the truth or otherwise of any statement.  The most recent example whereby free speech is clearly not contemplated in such an environment is obviously in relation to the Lord McAlpine case, where it would appear his lawyers are operating entirely within legal structures many of us simply did not realise existed.  An overview of one aspect of what is being pursued here can be found at this interesting post, which examines the technicalities of – in this case – Twitter retweets: the forwarding on, and implied (or otherwise) intentionality behind such a forwarding, of other people’s remarks to your followers.  It would appear that Lord McAlpine’s legal team are looking to argue that retweeting implies acceptance of and agreement with the content so communicated.  The frame which is presumably being used is that of newspaper publishing – with all that such a frame implies from a legal point of view – but I am inclined to believe this is wrong for several reasons:

  1. Twitter is in many cases the online version of that gossipy office or neighbourhood grapevine – only globalised somewhat.  That the offline world generally tolerates without recourse to due legal process such gossip should make us think twice about making the virtual equivalent tougher than its progenitor.
  2. Twitter is – more and more – also a vast debating chamber of hugely beneficial democratic input.  That ministers and governments various across the world are finding it resistible should make us think twice about limiting its freedoms.
  3. Twitter does not earn, for its users and generators of content, very much – if any – tangible income.  Yes, it’s great for networking, which – arguably – leads onto tangential money-making opportunities.  But unlike the newspaper model so many online lawyers will at the moment be eager to allude to, the vast majority of tweeters who might amateurly fall foul of English defamation legislation will not be making a living out of doing so – nor will they earn anything directly from their continued stream of tweets.

But more important to a wider constituency than the McAlpine case mentioned above is surely the fact that these recent events – as well as those to come – show us that speech in England is anything but free.  And I wonder, as a result, whether we shouldn’t ask the following question: is it time to get serious about free speech here in England?

Will future libel and defamation cases on Twitter, Facebook and other social media need a two-pronged defence of erstwhile and clearly ignored freedoms here in England?

Firstly, that the onus and burden of proof about the incorrectness of a statement should fall on the plaintiff and not remain the responsibility of the defendant.  That is to say, we should be innocent until proven guilty – not guilty until proven innocent.

Here we need, then, to change the law.

Secondly, that those companies which have turned the erstwhile client (that’s you and me, I mean!) into product – product which generates income for the former on the back of the latter’s freely created tweets and input, produced in those environments such companies deliberately enable – should also face a certain kind of music when it comes to legal action, given that their business models rely on interesting and even scandalous information being continually generated by their product.

Without such software, nothing – of course – could be republished.  Without such algorithms or ways of connecting people, directly engineered by such corporations, nothing would become visible.

Here we need, then, to change the focus of our legal action.

And with a degree of substantial urgency, I think.

*

Alternatively, of course, we could simply decide to follow the US tradition of almost incontinently free speech.  The downsides are clearly manifest, of course, but in the light of recent revelations in England, and our creeping understanding of how many rights we don’t actually have, I think I’d rather follow the Americans down their route of incontinence than continue with this very English constipation of public discourse.

What say you?  A wholesale re-examination of what free speech should mean – rather than what it has, wearily, come to mean?

The freedom to self-censor – and what Twitter & Co should do about it

 Facebook, Google, in a hole, libel law, social media, social networks, Twitter  1 Response »
Nov 182012
 

Paul’s recent piece on defamation in social media – in particular Twitter – has brought home to me the reality of free speech in England: it doesn’t exist.  What’s more, if you’re trying to keep on the right side of the law – however much of an ass it may appear (to unpractised eyes) to be – simply aiming to tell the truth isn’t enough to work out what you can and what you shouldn’t be saying and/or writing.  As Paul points out, quite terrifyingly to my way of thinking:

The basic principle is that a statement is defamatory if it substantially affects, in an adverse manner, the attitude of other people to the complainant or has it has a tendency to do so. This definition is very broad ranging so many ‘nasty’ statements about another person come into the range of potentially defamatory statements. Note there is no need to show that the statement does actually affect what other people think of the complainant: it is enough that the words have a tendency to do that.

The terrifying bit then comes next:

Many true statements about a person are defamatory. So to say of a convicted murderer that he is a murderer is defamatory but true. If you, and you have the burden of proving this, can prove what you said was true then you MAY have a defence available of ‘justification’. Can you prove it? See defences below!

It’s that MAY that really terrifies me.  What kind of a rule of thumb does that prove to be?  How, with such an uncertain yardstick to hand, could one ever be sure one wasn’t potentially breaking the law?  And what implications might this have for democratic discourse in our politics?

Read the rest of his post, if you want to find out more.  I’ve already linked to it on two previous occasions – it’s obviously something that, at least in my case, is proving worthy of cogitation.

And to boot, this is clearly one case where the virtual world is toughening up on the real world.  Throwaway language in a pub over a pint will have generated far worse things than the last month has thrown up on Twitter here in Britain.  Yet I don’t see too many such drinking chums finding themselves the object of the beady gaze of legal eagles looking to extract their pound of flesh – or wad of compensatory cash.

As I said some months ago, part of the problem may be Twitter’s own business model (the bold is mine, today):

[...] It seems to me that the big issue with Twitter and the law lies precisely in a question of framing.  And the framing has been done by agencies quite outside the common populace.  So whilst we suffer the consequences of the confusion thus engendered, we really are not to blame for overstepping the multitude of marks.

Twitter, Facebook and all the rest set up their stalls with the idea that the casual throwaway over-the-garden-fence kind of conversation could be replicated online with virtual tools.  Most of us thought, when we ventured onto such terrain, that we would have the freedom to extend our local village globally.  The rules would remain the same – the right to irreverent, racist, sexist and beyond-the-pale remarks would continue to be a par for the course.

What we didn’t realise at all was that our ephemeral occurrences were actually part of Twitter and Facebook’s business models.  There was absolutely no intention for the ephemeral to be treated as such.

We were indeed, long-term, the product not the customer.

These were not – as we had been led to believe – tools the common man and woman would use to exchange peer-to-peer information in the comfort of their privacy settings but, instead, tools the advertisers would use to communicate their latest sales pitches: tools which allowed such advertisers to get to know us so precisely that even our deepest prejudices would be laid bare for them to press the appropriate buttons.

So no wonder we’re getting it all so very wrong – and feeling unhappy as a result.  Twitter and Facebook are actually as resilient and permanent as an interrogation and signed interview sheet at your local police station.

As a result of this fundamental and conceptual confusion, then, deliberately perpetuated by the creators of the software constitutions in question, more and more ordinary people are going to find themselves at the very business end of double-barrelled legalese.  In truth, if we examine a little more closely the subject of defamation under English law, we suddenly realise that the democratic state we thought we lived in is heavily weighted in favour of those who have mighty reputations to protect (the bold is mine):

English law allows actions for libel to be brought in the High Court for any published statements which are alleged to defame a named or identifiable individual (or individuals) in a manner which causes them loss in their trade or profession, or causes a reasonable person to think worse of him, her or them. Allowable defences are justification (i.e. the truth of the statement), fair comment (i.e. whether the statement was a view that a reasonable person could have held), and privilege (i.e. whether the statements were made in Parliament or in court, or whether they were fair reports of allegations in the public interest). An offer of amends is a barrier to litigation. A defamatory statement is presumed to be false, unless the defendant can prove its truth. Furthermore, to collect compensatory damages, a public official or public figure must prove actual malice (knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth). A private individual must only prove negligence (not exercising due care) to collect compensatory damages. In order to collect punitive damages, all individuals must prove actual malice.

English defamation law puts the burden of proof on the defendant, rather than the plaintiff, and is considered an impediment to free speech in much of the developed world. In many cases of libel tourism, plaintiffs sue in England to censor critical works when their home countries would reject the case outright. In the United States, the 2010 SPEECH Act makes foreign libel judgements unenforceable in US courts if they don’t comply with US free speech law, largely in response to the English laws.[1]

To be honest, I never realised my homeland was quite so unfree.  I never realised that any defendant could be considered guilty until proven innocent.  I never realised that in what is the essence of a healthy democracy, the figure of fair comment could have such a stony ground of burdensome proof for those who are accused and considered automatically culpable until proven otherwise.

Little is left us, it would seem, as the veils of self-delusion fall from our eyes.  I thought I lived in a country where everyone was nominally equal.

I do not get that feeling any more.

The only freedom, perhaps, that we now share altogether is the freedom to self-censor our public thoughts as we begin to remake our own shaky reputations.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and a whole host of social media tools have encouraged us quite aggressively over the past decade, with their most specific and intentioned software constitutions, to reveal and bare our innermost thoughts as they occur to us, reveal themselves to us and struggle to emerge.

English law, it would seem, will now begin to roll all that back.

What an awfully confusing world this has become for anyone trying to engage with their democracy.

Especially for those who try and do it with any kind of integrity.

In the light of encroaching libel actions various, and as a final thought tonight – that is to say, in a Columbo-esque parting shot kind of way! – maybe we should begin to conceptualise the idea of a huge class action against those social media corporations I’ve mentioned: corporations which sold us their social media tools as ephemeral expressions of our least careful thoughts – and yet did so with the ever-present intention to use them quite permanently.  That people can now arguably be accused of libel and defamation is in part – just as arguably – due to these two-faced software environments.  After all, if you deliberately encourage and make it attractive for people to republish or “like” the wildest assertions at the click of button, you are – are you not? – in some way to blame for the consequent behaviours.

You chose what to allow or not to allow when you defined your software objectives.

Shouldn’t those who create a virtual environment from scratch also take some degree of ownership for the activities that take place as a result?  It would, after all, be so easy to program in a pop-up screen which warned any tweeter of the potential legal dangers of a particular text in a particular legal jurisdiction.  For as we have all been rather aggressively reminded over the past fortnight or so, content is being automatically monitored on behalf of plaintiffs-in-waiting.  Which begs the question: if that can be done by content-scraping organisations on behalf of their own clients, why can’t Twitter, Facebook, Google and the like engineer into their systems similar support – but at a preventative level which would serve to avoid any problems in the first place?

That they’ve chosen not to, for very clear business rationales (my opinion there, asserted out of very good faith!), surely makes them a degree more responsible for this mess we’ve beginning to find ourselves in.

At least, to the extent that they haven’t done quite as much as they easily could have done to ameliorate a predictably complex set of social circumstances.

Given that the above-mentioned corporations are all nominally American in approach, mentality and ways of thinking, if nothing else this all goes to show us how difficult and challenging it can be to transplant at a global and online level behaviours which other legal jurisdictions take for granted.

I always thought when we spoke of oppressing freedom of speech that we were talking about developing countries in the Third World.

I now realise that there is a reason people call the United States the “Land of the Free”.  In many freedoms, they do clearly fall down on what their people deserve.  But in speaking their minds, they clearly do not.

We here in England have a lot to learn.

Too much for us to properly learn it in my lifetime, I fear.

Social media: a throwaway register we lose at our peril

 in a hole, register, social media, social networks  1 Response »
Nov 152012
 

I’ve always argued that blogging (and by extension, these days, social communication such as Twitter and Facebook) was quite unlike newspaper journalism.  In its heyday, blogging’s register and function was more akin to a chat over a pint or a natter over a garden fence than serious and solemn incantations of establishment and counter-establishment positions.

Yes.  There was that problem that it used the written word rather than the spoken.  But anyone who’s been through an old blog will come up against a frank reality: broken links are very much a thing of the present.  Whilst books may last centuries, digital content is very fragile.  I’m pretty sure no one cares too much about this blog, for example, to care too much about its future – even as my intention, as I started out, was to document my view and feelings of the 21st century for as long as I was lucky enough to inhabit it.

Even so, it would appear – with Internet archives various – that the disposable nature of some of the web, especially that bit which may relate to legal actions further down the line, is becoming less the case than it used to be.  Scraping content automatically as a service to the litigious sorts out there must be a profitable business model for some, I am sure.  If you lost something of real value, and wanted such services to get it back, they probably wouldn’t care to help out.  But if you said they could have a cut of any future legal process, you’d probably find they’d suddenly recover their virtual memories.

It’s the wearisome way of the world.

Anyhow.  It would now appear that it will soon be the case that even retweeting on Twitter holds two parties liable to being sued: retweeting being, for those of you unfamiliar with the beast, forwarding on a person’s comment to all the people who follow you.  And the two parties liable?  Not only the person who does the retweeting but also the person who made the original comment.  Yes.  The voluntary action of the former – to retweet or not, that is the question – may be the responsibility of the latter.

Which is why I just tweeted the following (now please don’t retweet!):

You know when Google specs come on the market and they’ll be able to see what we’re seeing? Will they be able to sue us for seeing? #legal

For it does seem to me that if you can be sued for retweeting a comment – and I’ve yet to see it proven that a retweet necessarily equals conformity with the content – and then some way down the line the technology also allows us to track what each user is seeing, there will eventually arise some legal eagle specialising in web-related circumstances who’ll argue that somebody is responsible, maybe both parties too, for the mere act of allowing something to flit past our field of vision.

I really do think we are getting to the point where a kind of mock-Roman Catholicism (my experience of Christianity) is violently reasserting – in virtual terms, I mean – its most profound manifestation of morality: that even to think something is to commit a terrible sin and deserving of severe punishment.

Something really isn’t working any more.  Democratic engagement with public debate should surely entrance us all.  And yet it’s becoming more and more a question of a quasi-religious fervour as we look either to strike down the next public figure in line or – equally – be struck down by a wealthy and properly aggrieved party precisely for having said something inexact.

It seems we are moving the dysfunctionality of mutual excommunication from the political arena to the social one.  And it almost feels as if the politicians and other public figures – unhappy with the dynamic of greater information exchange that blogging initially, and Twitter and Facebook latterly, have recently afforded ordinary and unprepossessing people – are now looking to ensure that such people when amongst themselves should be as constricted, terrified, tribal and solemn as public positions require of their occupants.

If hierarchy must exist in society – and our makers and shakers seem to be as one on this matter (though I do not necessarily agree) – then let that hierarchy work to the benefit of both parties.  You want the right to rule but must be publicly cautious?  Be so.  But let the rest of us who want to enjoy our lives feel free to comment with our friends and family as we might.

Allow that chat over a pint and that natter over the garden fence to continue to operate in online contexts.

If you do not, we will be losing something very precious: the ability to follow untrammelled a precious thought to its ultimately unpredictable conclusions.

And since that is probably the only process which can now save 21st century civilisation from the serious implications of historical mistakes, we would do rather better – do ourselves a massive favour, in fact – to preserve it with intelligence and love than to toss it carelessly away.

____________________

Update to this post: I’ve just read an interesting overview by Paul Bernal of defamation and Twitter.  You can read it here.  And probably a good idea if you do.

Truth it would seem, at least under British legislation, is no reliable defence when making statements.

A “WYGSIWYRGP” society

 in a hole, justice, Labour, social media, supposed to be a joke  No Responses »
Oct 092012
 

The quote of the day has to be from this background story on the Spanish riot police (in El País‘s English section).  After describing some of their training methods and behaviours, it concludes by explaining how the police themselves justify the infiltration of protester groups with the following chilling sentences (the bold is mine):

The police admit officers infiltrate protests to gather information. Their bosses use the data to make “critical judgments for educational purposes.”

Who is being educated, and exactly why, isn’t clear from the article – but we can surely assume it won’t be the protesters themselves.

Meanwhile, two cases today in Britain make it all too clear how we’re living in a “When You Get Seen Is When You Really Get Punished” (WYGSIWYRGP) society.  Back to the medieval stocks of old, perhaps – only with a telling virtual makeover.  First, we have a celebrity gentleman called Justin Lee Collins who’s been convicted of the following:

[...] harassment causing fear of violence between January and July 2011.

The court heard Collins began a “campaign of abuse”, keeping a dossier of Ms Larke’s past sexual experiences.

The sentence involves 140 hours of community service within 18 months and the payment of prosecution costs.

Meanwhile, in a quite different case, whose infractions were apparently much more publicly conducted, sick jokes on Facebook have just led to three months in jail.

Now if you click to the detail which the Independent publishes in relation the latter case (it’s really rather distressing – in fact, I’d advise you not to click if you don’t have a stomach for these things), three months in jail could appear to be really rather small beer.  But a “campaign of abuse”, sustained over seven long months, can hardly have had less impact on the personal integrity of the woman who found herself its object.  So comparing emotional like with like, why such a grand difference between how we sentence sick jokes on social media and how we sentence abuse carried out behind relatively closed doors?

Are we really back in medieval-stocks-land after all?  Do we only care about rabid and vengeful public opinion?  Is the number of offended, rather than the nature of the offence, the most important tool now to determine sentencing policy in our courts?

*

There’s a wider issue which worries me here, actually.  Whilst in purely political terms I applaud the strategic sense of One Nation Labourism, I do wonder if long-term it mightn’t contribute to a singularisation of public spaces – a singularisation our current government is, any case, already promoting (which is why perhaps, in part, One Nation strategies kick the stool so cleverly from underneath it).  And in my multicultural experience (I mean multicultural in all its senses), this would not be a good thing.  Whilst I believe in people and nation states working together to common objectives, I don’t believe in the value of encouraging them to think alike.  Nothing new ever came from a culture of sameness in the past.  The 21st century is hardly going to prove that tenet wrong now.

A society which demands that in public spaces we all act the same – the same affectations, same mores, same sense of humour, same attitudes – is shortly a society where cultural dissonance will disappear.  Not only will this lead us to condemn without self-awareness behaviours which begin to appear self-fulfillingly unusual, it will also lead to a more general impoverishment of imagination, ideas and creative hunches.  In a WYGSIWYRGP society, surfaces become everything.  And – conversely – what happens out of public sight loses its power to affect our opinions.

I do fear this singularisation.  I do fear what it might do to our ways of thinking, to our legal systems.  I do fear that the massive spiking nature of social media, where scandal dramatically stumbles over scandal and then disappears just as suddenly into the ether, is not properly appreciated by our judges and justice professionals.

For in a sense, social media is the short-term memory of our times.  And this is not completely understood.

The long-term memory – what one man can do to a woman in the secrecy of their relationship – is quite another matter.

And yet where it’s difficult to relive, we punish less severely.

Even as the goldfish bowl of social media leads us to send people directly to prison.

So to take an example and lesson from the teaching profession, let us not commit the error of evaluation systems everywhere: let us not test and punish that which is easy to see but – rather – that which is right and necessary to investigate, understand and reveal.

Please.

“Thank goodness it’s Friday!”

 Iraq, Iraq-ification, on a high, phone-hacking, police, publishing, Rupert Murdoch, social media, social networks, Sun  1 Response »
Sep 142012
 

Yes, I know.  It’s pretty hackneyed to say so.  It’s a cliché – yet, even so, a truth.

Is that why publishing empires like Murdoch’s have grown to such a size?  He has, after all, specialised in giving people what they allegedly want.  And perhaps, for some decades, what people have wanted is precisely not the truth.  The truth consists in the following:

  1. Those in charge will always remain in charge.
  2. Those in charge are not those best suited to rule.
  3. Those in charge will always try and make your life more miserable.
  4. Those in charge are there to win every bloody battle.
  5. Those in charge are there to win every bloodless battle.
  6. Those in charge are bloody, full stop.
  7. Those in charge are greedy and money-grabbing.
  8. Those in charge are always lying.
  9. Those in charge feather their nests at our expense.
  10. Those in charge are permanent cuckoos in the nests of democracy.

Mind you, one truth that Murdoch does sell runs as follows:

  1. Given the chance, we’d all love to be like those in charge.

Or so, at least, I used to believe.  But I do truly think things are changing.  My last post kind of reaches, in a nakedly rambling sort of way, a quite precise conclusion:

I don’t know about the civilisation you live in – but it seems to me that something really dirty is about to unspool out of the civilisation I habitually inhabit.

It’s probably a consequence of all that social media honesty.  If you start doing it for fun in your everyday life, how can you avoid not ending up doing it for real in your work?  We’re all, little by little, acquiring whistleblowing instincts, aren’t we?  Even those people in the middle levels of organisations, who generally find their job is to filter away reality from both the public and workforce’s gaze.

Who said Facebook and Twitter couldn’t conquer the world?  Maybe what’s really happening here is that these environments are actually retraining us all in the twin, unassailable and universal virtues of honesty and good faith!

With truth becoming a natural instinct again, perhaps there really is a chance for hope on the horizon.

Perhaps we are seeing a changing of the guard in the publishing world.  Murdoch’s penchant for avoiding the truth in his papers, that hackneyed clichéd boring truth which no wage slave on a daily basis would be able to survive, is being undermined by the amateur realities we generally honestly transmit in our social media communications.  And even when you avoid your truth in such communications, it’s eventually clear to the gathered audience what you’re really about – as well as where that truth is to be found.  So whether you tell the truth or not, the multi-directional nature of social media makes it impossible to convincingly sustain for any length of time a posture which does not approximate to reality.

Think of the tabloid empires throughout history and how they managed to support establishment inexactitudes.  Think of phonehacking and the police; think of certain MPs’ outrageous privileges; think of Hillsborough and maybe the miners too; think of Iraq and other points of intellectually brutalised conflict, wiped out in a tide of impositional politics.

The age of editing reality – without a productive and immediate comeback from those who might know differently – is coming to an end.

In a sense, therefore, so is traditional newspaper publishing.

The future lies once more in the hackneyed and clichéd realities that fairly paint our world as it actually is – instead of as the powerful would have it be shaped.

Thank goodness it’s Friday, eh?  Thank goodness it’s Friday.

On embassies, ghettoes, naked gamblers and hope

 disabled, economic abuse, econopocalypse, Julian Assange, on a high, open web, people with support needs, social engineering, social media, social networks, USA  No Responses »
Sep 132012
 

Start with the most lurid item first, I guess.  This story, about a man who believes in rambling naked, is tragic.  It may be incompatible with polite society, but it’s tragic all the same.  In his own words:

[...] “There’s nothing about me as a human being that is indecent or alarming or offensive. That’s where I’m coming from, which is deep inside,” Gough said.

He continued: “It’s me, standing up for what I am. [Because] all of us are human beings too and we have children and our children are beautiful and we’re beautiful too, because we’re human beings – all the same. I have nothing to be ashamed about. I’m just a bloke standing up for the truth of what I am.”

Before Original Sin, nakedness was unconscionably beautiful.  After Original Sin, it’s just sin.

What a journey.

So as our society condemns a repeat naked-rambler to five months in prison, naked gamblers of our unsustainable economy get away with a figurative murder.  And although in a 24-hour rolling-news kind of world it’s a cliché to repeat such things, the fact that, days after David Cameron smooched his way into the Paralympians’ closing ceremony, a Paralympian should have his application for disabled support rejected because he’s not disabled enough – whilst at the same time the BBC reports disabled hate crime has risen by a third – well … this surely should make us think hard and long again about the society we’re allowing to fall apart.

*

A final thought – not in my mind unconnected, though in yours it may be so tangential as to be totally out of the ballpark.  Embassies have been getting a really bad press of late.  A few weeks ago, we had Julian Assange entering an Ecuadorian safe haven against the will of the British, US and Swedish governments.  Now, sadly enough, and apparently as a result of a YouTube video being posted online, various US embassies have been the subject of attacks on the sovereign nature of their territory.  (More on the recent attack in Libya can be found here and here via abetterpeople.com.)

It does really seem, however, that in a world of growing openness – at least when seen from the point of view of an expanding citizen usage of soul-baring and community-networking online tools – we should begin to question, in this globalising planet, the almost isolating nature of embassies.  There will come a moment when embassies become fairly redundant: and that moment will arrive when we all not only subscribe to general principles of human rights but also manage to apply them.  What then will be the point of sovereign space on another’s soil – especially if such a space is converted into a ghetto which only serves to concentrate the occasional ire of contrary foreign subjects?

On the other hand, and in a century where a British judiciary allows financial-sector whizzkids to survive unpunished for actions which are destroying ordinary people’s lives – even as the powers-that-be simultaneously find they can imprison a man for wanting to ramble in the nude and deny a one-legged person his due support because he’s got one leg too many – perhaps maintaining the highest symbol of secrecy in our society, the embassy of a sovereign state, is actually quite the most coherent and cogent decision the establishment can take.

I don’t know about the civilisation you live in – but it seems to me that something really dirty is about to unspool out of the civilisation I habitually inhabit.

It’s probably a consequence of all that social media honesty.  If you start doing it for fun in your everyday life, how can you avoid not ending up doing it for real in your work?  We’re all, little by little, acquiring whistleblowing instincts, aren’t we?  Even those people in the middle levels of organisations, who generally find their job is to filter away reality from both the public and workforce’s gaze.

Who said Facebook and Twitter couldn’t conquer the world?  Maybe what’s really happening here is that these environments are actually retraining us all in the twin, unassailable and universal virtues of honesty and good faith!

With truth becoming a natural instinct again, perhaps there really is a chance for hope on the horizon.

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