In his book Public Parts, How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves The Way We Work and Live (Simon & Schuster 2011), Jeff Jarvis writes about the potential of protest on social media to strike fast and hard on a massive scale. He describes how Facebook was rocked in 2006 by a wave of opposition to its News Feed service when it began automatically forwarding mini-press releases of every user update to “friends”. He tells how one of the 500 online protest groups that arose against Facebook attracted 700,000 supporters on the first day alone (Jarvis credits the numbers to David Kirk Patrick’s Facebook Effect).

Yet as of today, after weeks of high-profile and sometimes violent protests, the main Occupy Wall Street Facebook page has 287,000 registered as “liking this” and 67,000 “talking about it” (Occupy Tokyo has 4,130 listed as “liking this”; Occupy Hong Kong 1,300; Occupy Stockholm 502; London 4,700).

For an indication of what the 99% of the public are most interested in one must review the Top 100 Most Popular Facebook Pages In The World 2011. Starbucks, CocaCola and Disney are in the top 30. OWS does not enter the frame among the remaining 70 and most likely wouldn’t feature in the top 250.

Signs of support are even less impressive on Twitter. The official Twitter stream of the Liberty Square protest in New York has pumped out 5,081 tweets, attracted 98,000 followers and has been listed by 2,337 Twitter users.

For comparison, OWS’s nemesis at the Wall Street Journal has around 12 times as many followers (1,186,341) and is listed by more than 40,000 Twitter users.

Moreover, OccupyLSX@OccupyLSX, the official twitter stream of the protesters camped outside St Paul’s Cathederal in London, has just 16,000 followers. Meanwhile, London’s Time Out magazine has 77,000 followers on Twitter (I know it is not a like for like comparison, but it does highlight the insignificance of the protesters in the eyes of Londoners using social media).

The signs of interest in OWS activities on YouTube are equally anemic. The numbers of subscribers to The LibertyPlazaRev Media Committee’s YouTube channel stands at 1,845 plus 115 friends who have left just 127 comments. Though it has to be said that one of its video clips received around half a million hits.

Elsewhere, the largest number of OWS-related hits on YouTube that I could discover was a video of a ranting US Marine complaining about supposed police brutality (“It’s not a war zone,” he tells the New York police), which received more than 2 million viewings. This still indicates a modest level of interest when one compares it with the most popular video ever on YouTube that garnered more than 600 million hits; even a dancing dog attracted 11 million.

The main worldwide website and organisational hub of the OWS protests is http://occupywallst.org. Yet according to the internet ranking agency Alexa, this leading website against corporate greed and capitalism is merely the 8,024 most hit site in the world. It is also ranked the 768 most popular site in the US.

By contrast, according to Alexa, the Financial Times website ranks at 795 in the world (WSJ ranks 195) and 540 in the US (WSJ 66). For further comparison, the Swiss newspaper NZZ’s online offering, representing the banking class, writing in German, ranks at 4,472 on the world stage – far higher than OWS.

Of course, my round up is far from conclusive, exhaustive or scientific. But it does, I think, capture something that we can see on the streets at the protests: the numbers involved are far from impressive. Of course, activism takes commitment and is risky. The advantage of social media over street protest is that it requires low commitment to get involved. But even with such a low threshold of participation, there’s little evidence that the 99 per cent is interested in even providing OWS protesters with that minimal level of passive support online.

Related posts:

1. New muse on social media in Egypt
2. Social Media

The most potent myth of all is that by hounding and denouncing Rupert Murdoch we are somehow helping clean up British politics, its police and its journalism. I’m predisposed to say that instead of doing any such thing we are in danger of indulging in humbug. We risk laying ourselves open to swallowing a load of dodgy claims from Murdoch’s rivals and from politicians seeking the moral high-ground.

Only this weekend Britain’s Business Secretary Vince Cable called for an end to media moguls, as if the real problem was that Rupert Murdoch had too much power and influence over British society. However, that’s just not so.

We live in age of digital fragmentation when the media is global in reach, not just local. There are myriad opinion-forming sources today. The world’s media is just a click or two away from anybody with online access. We live in an era in which media barons have less power than they’ve ever had.

One cannot compare the power that Lord Northcliffe (a former owner of The Times) had over British public opinion in the early 20th century with that held by Rupert Murdoch in the early 21st century. For example, Winston Churchill criticised Northcliffe’s role in the First World War, saying he: “wielded power without official responsibility, enjoyed secret knowledge without the general view, and disturbed the fortunes of national leaders without being willing to bear their burdens.”

Certainly, in Northcliffe’s day – the high tide of print media – his influence was not challenged by competitors such as multiple radio and TV channels, and the near infinite content of the internet. Though, of course, Northcliffe did have competitors in the print realm, such as Lord Beaverbrook, who became Britain’s Minister of Information in 1918.

So, once upon a time there was perhaps truth in the notion that media barons of the likes of Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane) and Lord Northcliffe were overly-influential. But one can hardly claim credibly that such a state of affairs applies today.

The idea that Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers were responsible for Margaret Thatcher’s victories and for Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party’s humiliation in the 1980s beggars belief. It is also hard to believe that Murdoch was responsible for Tony Blair’s victories or for Gordon Brown’s defeat.

The evidence suggests that Murdoch’s newspapers swung this and that way with the tide, pulled not by the moon but by the bright glow of the side most likely to win. For sure, there was no Murdoch-led swing to Cameron at the 2010 General Election so much as crumbling support for Gordon Brown’s New Labour. This allowed an almost-electorally-stagnant Tory party to form a coalition government with the Lib Dems, whose seats in parliament declined despite gaining positive media endorsement from virtually every publishing house in the UK.

The question then is why did Britain’s political elite, not to mention its police, get so entangled with Murdoch’s empire and so desperate to court its favours? I see two main reasons:

1. For the political elite Murdoch’s camp was the only major media house not permanently tied to any particularly party of the so-called left and right divide. In contrast, the likes of The Daily Mail, The Guardian, and even the BBC, were much more fixed in their ideological and political outlook and loyalties.

2. Britain’s Establishment, including the elite in politics and the police, genuinely over-estimated Murdoch’s and the media’s influence. They lived in fear of it. In response, they sought to mingle with it, schmooze it, neutralize it, and to co-opt it and thereby gain access to its popular appeal. Collectively the Establishment displayed a lack of nerve, not to mention a lack of nous about the relationship between public opinion and the media (we can put some of the blame on poor PR advice from PR pros).

This is not to say that the media is without influence or unimportant. It is to say that politicians and the police have exaggerated the media’s powers and underestimated their own. If the public has not become subservient to sections of the media, some of the elite certainly have.

The elite delusion that garnering headlines is a short-cut to winning popularity with the public provides the only logical explanation as to why David Cameron took the known risk of hiring Andy Coulson as his media guru. In my view, Cameron’s number-one concern was containing and managing the media, in particular Murdoch’s media. It is an approach to engaging the public that unravels again and again

Unfortunately, the current crisis has not seen politicians regain their sense of self-worth. Neither has it taught the police to hold their nerve in the face of a media onslaught.

The political class now seems set on intruding into the media’s realm. The House of Commons Select Committee has totally over-reacted. It has, as my friend Richard D North points out here, gone way beyond its remit. It has in the process brought down elite police officers of the class of Yates and Stephenson without good cause. It is in danger of victimising the entire Murdoch empire in a vain attempt to court popularity with Murdoch’s formidable rivals in the media world, not to mention the Twitterati.

So what lessons do I think we learn from this hacking scandal? What PR advice do I have to offer to (a) Murdoch (b) MPs and (c) the police? Well here goes:

What we should learn?

First, media competition is alive and well, if not always well behaved. The crimes at the News of The World were exposed by its rivals. The upshot was that rather than revealing how powerful Rupert Murdoch is, it revealed how fragile his influence was.

However, the elite are now in danger of exchanging their faith in Murdoch’s illusory grip on public opinion with a misplaced faith in the liberal media’s and the Twitterati’s grip. In other words, politicians and police are now seemingly bent on trying to please yet another set of media influencers led by The Guardian.

In today’s increasingly disterintermediated world institutions can communicate directly with the public. As for the established media, firms and institutions of all sorts would do well to keep their media relations much less intimate and much more formal. The truth is that the media gets close to its marks in order to rip them apart whenever it desires. That’s a lesson that we need to take to heart.

What should Murdoch do?

He should do what he’s doing: grovel. He must be open and honest and clean up his house and rid himself of the rottenness, but also the poor governance, in his empire. (See the difficulties facing FIFA.) That is going to hurt. It might even bring down his own son. It is most likely going to send some of his employees to prison. But if he gets it right, News International could restore its reputation and perhaps make it more robust than ever.

What should politicians do?

Politicians should also own up to the truth. They share much of the guilt with News International. From Prime Minister David Cameron downwards, the relationship between politicians and the media – that’s with the entire media – has been grubby. They should apologise for that. They should seek forgiveness. At the same time they must set out in a new direction based on a new strategy that they communicate clearly.

To begin with they should stop the witch hunt against Rupert Murdoch, which is a trap that merely favours one set of media players at the expense of another. Instead, they need to get a sense of perspective over this whole messy affair. They must demonstrate their independence from the media by setting their own agenda. Disintermediated communication is what they need. Back to the soapbox, lads. That’s an approach which is far more likely to demonstrate integrity and to win the public’s respect than any amount of media schmoozing could ever achieve.

What should the police do?

First, they should reject the notion (put about by critics and even some friends) about how it is working class coppers who cannot fathom the complexities and subtler roles of today’s world. Let’s not forget that it was Oxbridge and classy coppers such as Sir Ian Blair (see here), Sir Paul Stephenson, John Yates and Brian Paddick who all messed up their affairs most embarrassingly precisely because they became obsessed with becoming part of the new political and media Establishment in order to manage public perception.

In contrast, I advise: the police should recognise that the media are animals; newsrooms are sausage factories; and that nevertheless, sometimes, they have their uses. But coppers have to accept that theirs is an unpopular role and that poor public perception comes with their beat. Just like judges, they need to keep their distance if they are to maintain their integrity in the face of the public. Sorry to say, but coppers just have to come to terms with the fact that theirs is a lonely role. They cannot expect much thanks from anyone, least of all politicians, for doing a great job.

In short, coppers should become more obsessed with being professional and much less concerned with being popular, which is an obsession that paradoxically has done more harm than good to their image.

It was the likes of the Labour politician Keith Vaz who hounded Yates and Stephenson so much that they felt obliged to resign. That had all the hallmarks of a hunt for scapegoats. Both coppers had distinguished records. They were “guilty” of little more than poor judgement and poor PR instincts. They forged some embarrassing personal links and made the odd omission etc.. A slap on the wrist at some point in the future might have been much more in the public interest than chopping off their heads. I believe that Stephenson and Yates should have resisted the pressure to resign. That leads me to my major observations on the whole affair.

The Big Picture

The time has come for institutions of all sorts to hold their nerve in the face of Grub Street’s rants and raving. Society does not require more controls over the media. Rather the elite requires more self-control and stronger nerves.

It is time for PRs to recommend forging a new relationship between their clients, the media and the public. It is time that PRs helped leaders lead. It is time to take back control of the reputations of public institutions from the media.

No related pages.

Trivially, it’s worth mentioning that the ex cathedra utterances of Charles Wheeler were in their way as crushingly orthodox as those of James Cameron, that even more famous and worshipped lefty. Too many of us were steamrollered by their brand of liberalism. Let’s have no golden-ageism here please.

I am not inclined to take lessons on media seriousness from Alastair Campbell, whose own persona I do hugely enjoy, in a sleb way. He was part of the process of reducing politics to gossip. And anyway, I think we have a more serious, more substantial, more substantiated, media now than ever we did. To take one example, The Times has more slebbiness than it used, but no more than is necessary to draw in a female audience to its rather serious material.

I imagine The Times’s quotient of gossip is no worse or larger than in any organ of 18th Century journalism.

More importantly, I am a too-lately admirer of Joseph Addison. I have my late father’s battered copy of the essays by my bedside now. I can say that Addison’s, “The Royal Exchange” (if that is the source of Dr Calcutt’s Addisonian adumbrations) does not really say or imply that trade improves morals, though any self-respecting supporter of capitalism believes it does. Rather, it seems more in the manner of the economist (as opposed to the moralist) Adam Smith in saying that trade produces a miracle of specialist co-operation across trades, climates and nations. Yes, Addison does say that this is a peaceable and amiable process, and yes, he has the idea of a “citizen of the world”, but the improvement he sees in all this is material more than moral. I may be wrong, but I think you need to get to later thinking (Hayek, David Landes, and now Matt Ridley) to get the full-on idea that trade generates the class of co-operation which is the conduit of intellectual and moral exchange.

I dimly recall being taught that “commonality” is a Marxist idea, along with its better-known stablemate, alienation. Anyway and whatever, I don’t buy this bit of Dr Calcutt’s case either.

Indeed, we do need an explanation of why the media is more excited by ordinary (and only notionally “illicit”) sex than by murder these days. I don’t think we’ll find it in Marxist theory. See below for a stab at an explanation.

On the appetite for news in general, I’d recommend going back to Addison. His “The Newspaper” is a brilliant account of the way the medium is the message: create the means of disseminating new gossip, and people will become addicted to it. But even hard, serious news has always been information which someone is prepared to pay for. And nowadays, frankly, the supply has outrun the demand. Or, more precisely, the organs of dissemination are multiplying like crazy, and they all have the same sources. What’s worse, almost all news-makers can publish their own information: the organs of the media are becoming more and more obviously derivative. No wonder the media complains the business model for serious journalism is broken. No wonder they seek to stay afloat by being better at showbusiness than their many rivals.

And here I think Dr Calcutt is on the right track (Marxist or not).  I think we like celebrity stuff because we want to prey on the privacy of famous people. I mean that just as we once liked to fantasise that we were hacking at the bodies of the Ripper’s victims, we now want to hack at the souls of poor Brittney or Giggs. I like this sort of account because it is, I think, more spiritual and sound than any cod-Marxist account is likely to be. We think celebrities have made a Faustian pact with us, and when they falter in any way, we want to inflict pain on them as best we can. It isn’t pretty, but it’s human alright. It’s a bloodsport for readers.

No related pages.

Lindsey Hilsum

Campbell issued this warning at the University of Westminster, following a short ceremony in which the Charles Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism – in memory of the distinguished BBC correspondent who died in 2008 – was presented by his widow, Lady Dip Wheeler, to Channel 4 News reporter Lindsey Hilsum. In her acceptance speech, Hilsum remembered a time when Wheeler had praised her reporting and she ‘walked on air’ for days afterwards. Following in Wheeler’s footsteps, Hilsum’s reputation rests on coverage of world historic events.

The event was attended by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who arrived late.

The Charles Wheeler Award not only recalls its eponymous hero, it also calls up journalism’s preferred image of itself – humane and high-minded, accurate and analytical. Wheeler himself really did embody these qualities: he took accountability to the public so seriously that even in retirement this world-renowned reporter had himself openly listed in the London phonebook as ‘Wheeler, Charles: Journalist’.

Meanwhile, on the streets outside the award ceremony, the day’s headlines added strength to Campbell’s dire warning.

Charles Wheeler

The biggest-selling morning papers had led with further personal details about ‘sex cheat’ Ryan Giggs. The Manchester United footballer was said to have undergone follicular replacement therapy following stress-related hair loss.

Later in the day, the London Evening Standard plumped for the personal presence of Mayor Boris Johnson at a police drugs raid in Tottenham – this made the front page. When a suspected drug dealer awoke to find the Mayor of London in his flat, along with police officers, he is reported to have said: ‘What the f*** are you doing here?’

‘I don’t think this chap was pleased to see me’, the Mayor later said. But Johnson must have been pleased that his celebrity status was affirmed by media coverage associating him with decisive police action.

We once thought Ryan Giggs led a passive sex life; but it is none of our business either way

The hairs on Giggsy’s head were headline news. Imagine the front page splash (and the follow-up pages inside) if CSI-style reporters had bagged the pubes from his mistresses’ beds! But the forensic fetish for personality goes way beyond philandering footballers and their ‘wagms’ (‘m’ added for mistresses). It extends to public officials such as Johnson, now known much less for their politics and far more for their personal presentation (in BoJo’s case, the mop of tousled, blond hair which says ‘public school but people-friendly’).

The way his hair is distressed is BoJo’s mode of address: I’m half-way between Hugh Grant and Ron Weasley, and it just so happens I head-up the government of London. Celebrity is the medium, there’s not much message besides, and many journalists seem happy to carry it – the lighter the better.

BoJo is an “hairlarious” politician

In the same vein, subsequent press coverage of the Charles Wheeler Award ceremony featured the banter between the two biggest celebrities in the room. From the stage, Campbell joshed Johnson for arriving late and for going out early on the drugs raid.  Though dedicated to the public role of journalism, even this event was partly colonised by the media-bred, scandal-fed, all-embracing, self-referencing cult of personality.

So Campbell’s warning could not have been more timely; and when I heard him issue it, I really thought I had found a kindred spirit. Charismatic, too, even if his claret and blue is a wrong ‘un (Burnley instead of West Ham).

Recognising that journalism’s recent regression is relative rather than absolute, Campbell used the same phrase which I had made use of in an academic conference the day before: British journalists are defaulting to ‘a new centre of gravity’ (my conference paper proves prior usage). He called upon journalists to re-discover what they are for – as I and my colleagues have done in Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org , and again in the recently published book Journalism Studies: a critical introduction. He even agreed with my proposition (I know this because I asked him) that journalists should stand up and say: Giggsy, celebrity, even (for the time being) the ‘question of privacy’ – it’s all sheer follicles! These are non-events, they should be non-stories, and we just have to drop ‘em and go after the ones that matter.

So Mr Campbell and I agreed on four of journalism’s famous Ws: who should do what, where and when. But we parted company on the fifth. Why the compulsive downshifting to molecular celebrity? Campbell came back on this question with the 2Ts answer: time and technology. As he sees it, new media technology drives journalists to churn stuff out all the time, so they have no time to do anything else. But this is like saying that politicians are overtaken by events: it’s true and it’s a truism, with no explanatory power.

Yes, journalists under time pressure will stay within existing tramlines, but that does nothing to explain why tracking celebrity has become the line to follow. Furthermore, it’s by no means certain that online journalists are generating content more rapidly than, say, Harold Evans sitting under the clock at the subs’ desk of the Manchester Evening News, writing and re-writing reports of the 1952 Harrow train crash for successive print editions.

Even if there really is more new stuff today (rather than different ways of cutting up the same old), why should journalism’s expansion have to end in journalism-lite? We might have expected more to mean heavier.

Alastair Campbell had Tony Blair's ear

Though criticising journalism for its default mechanism, Campbell himself was defaulting to technological determinism, which alongside environmental determinism and the new neurological determinism, now constitutes the centre of gravitas on why people do/should not do the things they do. This is a silly place for intelligent people to find themselves in, though not because it contains elements of determinism. Anyone who thinks we simply make our own history must have lost sight of the circumstances we didn’t choose – to coin a phrase. The problem is one of misattribution: the wrong sources (digital media, brain chemistry, the Earth) are being identified as determining factors; and dodgy determinisms such as these can only have a damaging effect on the subjective, collective determination to raise our game.

It’s socially determined, stupid!

Instead of technology, neurology and nature, the following, brief episodes – flashes from the history of news – are intended to show that journalism has been socially determined; and so too is our capacity to change its centre of gravity. Revealing the real elements of compulsion can only make the case for concerted change more compelling.

‘News’ – to be distinguished from something which has happened, that happens to be new – has various preconditions, one of which is the position from which to report it. This position was fully established 300 years ago in the merchant city of London, where it was personified in the Spectator magazine, co-edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

Lloyd’s Coffee-House

In an enormous variety of essays on all aspects of city life, Addison was consistently striving to establish standards of behaviour. The deliberately self-regarding style of his essays reflected new manners and morals, and the Spectator helped to compose well-mannered deliberation into a whole way of life for the emerging bourgeois class. If such refinement seems far removed from the rough and tumble of eighteenth century markets, with fortunes lost and found as tides turned and ships went down to the bottom, it turns out that Addison identified the London Exchange (one of the city’s leading markets) as the most uplifting place in the world. For Addison, valuating commodities and evaluating human behaviour were one and the same habit of mind.

In their mind’s eye, members of his mercantile milieu habitually met at an agreed point of comparison, from which to carry out a continuously comparative study of the world’s worth. Their valuations applied to people as much as things; and their meeting place was also the starting point for a new approach to common values – moral as well as commercial.

To arrive at their shared position, London’s traders were obliged to divest themselves of some personal interests, while investing something of themselves in the creation of common interests, or the public interest. Commonality such as this can only be an abstraction from strictly personal existence; yet it also materialised in London’s eighteenth century coffee houses and in the publications that these traders went there to read. Thus the first, fully fledged reporter, standing aside from particular interests and standing in for the common interest, was called into existence by the unstinting gaze of the merchant. Eighteenth century London had to have its own embodiment of this combination. In the form of the Spectator, founded in 1711, the merchant city acquired the press it deserved.

Professional journalism’s obsession with murder

With hindsight, it appears that the Spectator was a reporter in slow motion: he had the time to compose essays at a time when, relatively speaking, every day was a slow news day. In the 1900s, two centuries later, journalism was already 200 times faster. Not because the associated technology was so very different (nota bene, Alastair Campbell); instead, the whole world was turning like never before.

Meanwhile, the press had become a murder factory: not often a killing machine (though wartime propaganda often amounted to indictment, excitement and incitement); more that the newly established, professional news industry ran on a murderous diet.

‘Get me a murder a day’ was the watchword of popular newspaper editors from the end of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twenty-first. This staple was said to keep the accountants away. Tabloids especially, though they contained a variety of entertaining and informative content, defaulted to the murder story. When facts were sacred, morbid details were the holy of the holy. Even when a reporter’s copy did not begin with someone enjoying the peace of the grave (in news, what happened last comes first), his approach often verged on the murderous. ‘Newsmen’ – in those days it was customary to style themselves as such – were used to looking down on events, and the people in them, from the same vantage point as Lee Harvey Oswald overlooking the presidential motorcade in Dallas.

Nothing but wannabe celebs, confessions, sex, drugs, murder and fire on the front-page

If professional news reporting contained more than a whiff of gunsmoke, it was not because objectifying human subjects is always an act of epistemological violence, only matched by the pathological arrogance of abstracting from their personal particulars. These are the complaints levelled against professional journalism by critical theorists and, latterly, self-doubting journalists; but this does to journalism just what journalism stands accused of, namely, character assassination.

Western journalism was professionalised towards the end of the nineteenth century. It had to be. By that time there was so much more to human life that only a trained observer could hope to encompass it, itemise it and formulate news items before something else came along. At an unprecedented rate, human beings were making more things, making more of themselves, and, in the same process, producing new ways of objectifying themselves, including professionally produced, commercially viable journalism.

Insights into the age of stereotyping

Though journalism was trying to capture the liveliness of human beings, character assassination did indeed occur whenever journalists wrote off being human by reducing it to a formula. Thronged with stock figures and predictable personae, many ‘news’ stories amounted to typing, not writing, i.e. stereotyping rather than character development.

However, the hack’s propensity for the hackneyed results not from objectification but from human subjects being alienated from this process. Our alienation from making the world of objects – making the world our object, is how we came to lose a crucial part of human life – a loss of life which has to be acknowledged in contemporary culture. Popular journalism registered this loss by finding itself in the murder story; hence the editor’s craving for murder, and the reporter targeting his subjects as if about to commit one. This suggests that professional journalism’s quest for murder, was as much the sign of its own times as Addison’s earlier search for morality.

In the meantime, the Spectator’s mercantile habits – evaluation, evaluation, evaluation – had been extended from already finished objects on sale in London’s markets, to include the human activity of making new objects for sale. This is a shorthand description of the transition from merchant capital to industrial capitalism, which took place in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The development of industrial capitalism not only entailed the production of millions more things and millions more people to produce (and consume) them, it also introduced a new level of commonality between all things and all people. From now on, anything anyone did, automatically existed in comparison with everything everyone else had ever done. Each human action occurred twice over: in its particulars, and in relation to human activity in general.

No mere repetition, this was an historic achievement. By virtue of their comparability, human activities were liberated from their local settings in time and space. Unleashed in this way, our productive activity served to mobilise even more activity. In the further development of both personality and commonality, there was more to being human; and a wider spectrum of humanity for reporters to report on. Furthermore, there was greater demand for a multi-faceted continuum – art, politics, media – that could hold it all together.

Yet togetherness was promised rather than fulfilled. The same process which brought people together to make the world, and prompted them to consume journalism’s re-making of the world, also contains that violent moment when productive activity in both its aspects (the general and the particular) is forcibly transferred over to the thing which prompted it – capital, and taken over by the people who own capital – the capitalist class. In this moment, when what we do together is commonly privatised, those who have been active are suddenly alienated from their own actions, estranged from the things they have made but no longer own. As millions of people are separated from the actions they have performed together, so we lose the life we have lived together. Aside from productive activity, there is still another life to be lived, but this is typically biased towards personality rather than commonality. Fully associative life is repeatedly destroyed – so many times over that we hardly recognise its destruction.

What’s really changed in the last thirty years?

This carnage, which is as widespread as capitalist production, was indirectly reflected in journalism’s passion for murder. We were misdirected, however, by the indirect nature of this reflection. Though professional journalism has continually spanned the continuum between personality and commonality, when describing the world exclusively in terms of personal experience, it presents both commonality and its violent destruction as a straightforward function of personality. Such misattribution amounts to another obituary for the independent life of our shared humanity.

In the twentieth century, morbid tendencies within popular journalism were offset by mass participation in democratic politics, with its (limited) tendency to move along the continuum in the other direction, from personality towards commonality. However, after the demise of mass political participation in the 1980s and early 1990s, the path was clear for further separation of the productive life of humanity from the rest of our lives. In this instance, separation has occurred literally – along geographical lines.

After two decades of further estrangement, the Western way of life now largely depends on the actualisation of labour in far-flung places, increasingly in the East. Even if we are not directly involved in financial speculation, the personal existence of ‘Wessies’ is increasingly derivative: we derive our existence from the creation of value elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in their restricted leisure time millions of ‘Essies’ prefer to speculate (non-financially) on the lives of those with more time to cultivate their personality – us ‘Wessies’. We duly oblige, securitising our debt to the East by performing a continuous spectacle, trading representations of ourselves – merchandising the self – on the various media platforms which now comprise ‘contemporary Western culture’.

How too much attention turned to sex-cheating celebs

Pamela Anderson announces she’s going on Big Brother

In these circumstances, do not ask why the bell tolled for Big Brother. The show ended and the house was shut down in 2010 (it’s due to be revived on Channel 5 from August 2011), but, from the p-o-v of the industrialising world, you and I have taken up permanent residence in UK Reality TV. We’re all (minor) celebrities now.

Yet life in the spectacle is an impoverished form of existence. As we are further removed from the commonality occurring in production, we tend to fall back even further on our personal life, which tends to become yet more superficial just as we pack ourselves into it, frantically networking in the forlorn attempt to derive more significance from it. Worse still, we cannot but feel that being so dependent on interpersonal existence amounts to betrayal of that other life which we might have had in common.

The fact is we are cheating on an important part of our humanity – our commonality, the other-half-life which ought to partner our personal existence. It’s been so long, we might not know what it is exactly, but we know we are betraying it; and from where we are, we feel compelled to do so.

Hence the newly compelling attraction of storylines based on intimate, personal betrayal. This type of saga has supplanted the murder story because it represents, indirectly, the most important, recent development in world history – the betrayal brought on by the further separation of personality from commonality. In journalism, this estrangement has been translated and contained within narrowly personal terms, i.e. transposed into suitable terms for a local audience whose centre of gravity has moved along the human continuum towards the strictly personal. Thus for Western news editors, today’s must-have is a personification of intimacy, self-presentation and alienation: enter the celebrity sex-cheat!

Bill Hagerty, editor, BJR, left. Lady Dip Wheeler, far right. Lindsey Hilsum centre.

But we need not be utterly compelled by the dish of the day. That humanity’s two halves have drifted further apart, may mean it’s harder to realise their connection. However, if more journalists can be persuaded to perform like Charles Wheeler, buoyed by a proper account of why they have been asking so much less of themselves recently, that in itself will add to the measure of humanity.

Dr Andrew Calcutt teaches journalism at the University East London. He is editor of Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org; and co-author, with Dr Phil Hammond, of Journalism Studies: a critical introduction (Routledge).

No related pages.

Marshall McLuhan as portrayed by Playboy Magazine

There’s a lot to be admired about the “prophet of the electronic age” who said “if it works it’s obsolete.” Marshall McLuhan coined the term the “Global Village.” He also produced classic phrases such as “the media is the message,” “the media is the massage”, and the “Age of Anxiety.” And he’s credited with conjuring “turn on, tune in, drop out,” over lunch with the 1960s advocate of LSD trips, Timothy Leary.

McLuhan was the archetypal-media studies guru. Not only was he an icon of the 1960s counterculture, he also went on to become the “patron saint” of the newly launched Wired Magazine in 1996. They identified with McLuhan’s vision of decentralized, personal, and liberating electronic technological development that transcends time and space. They warmed to his vision of how electronic media would wipe away contemporary society’s traditional values, attitudes and institutions.

There is after all, as Andrew Keen has pointed out, much in common between the wired generation’s utopianism and the communal ideals of the hippies. As McLuhan told Playboy Magazine in 1968:

“The computer thus holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.”

That language, in the form of “one world, people and planet,” is endorsed by much (too much because it’s complete nonsense) of the mainstream corporate and PR world today: see here and here.

McLuhan: still Wired

Still, for some good reasons, McLuhan remains an inspirational thinker to a new generation of youth. He appeals to those who want to break free from looking at the present in the rear-view mirror. He appeals to those who wish to create something completely different to what’s gone before and to those, including corporations and politicians, who wish to appear “in touch” and “cool.” In McLuhan’s words:

“These kids are fed up with jobs and goals [traditional ones, anyway], and are determined to forget their own roles and involvement in society. They want nothing to do with our fragmented and specialist consumer society. Living in the transitional identity vacuum between two great antithetical cultures, they are desperately trying to discover themselves and fashion a mode of existence attuned to their new values; thus the stress on developing an “alternate life style.”

In Wired‘s launch issue interview with a virtual McLuhan, whose consciousness they said had been preserved in a programmed bot, he says that the real message of media today is ubiquity. It is not something that we do. Rather it is something we are part of from the outside that excites all our senses. It is, he said through Wired‘s medium, as if we have amputated not our ears or our eyes, but ourselves, and then established a total prosthesis – an automaton – in our place. He (ok, his cyber-ghost) adds:

“Postindustrial man has a network identity, or a net-ID. The role is now a temporary shift of state produced by a combination of environmental factors, like in a neural network. This possibility has always been latent in the concept of role, but in the machine age this was perceived as a danger, while today it is simply a game – we no longer see shifting roles as dangerous and taboo and therefore theatrically compelling. Rather, we follow these shifts as if we were doing a puzzle or kibitzing a chess game. Yes, the medium is the message, but this does not mean and never meant that the content of the medium is a conscious reflection on itself. The medium is the message because it creates the audience most suited to it. Electronic media create an audience whose shifting moods are as impersonal as the weather.”

So, regardless that McLuhan’s name is no longer household fare (unlike, say, Warhol’s), his influence remains as significant among cyber-nerds as it was among beatniks. In fact his thinking is arguably more significant today, given the amount of hype that surrounds the cyberspace, Web 2.0 world.

So what was he really about?

He sought to explain the world through the prism of communication and its tools. He ruminated on the drivers of human progress from its primitive tribal, oral preliterate cultural forms through to the invention of phonetic language, the Gutenberg printing press and the modern electronic age. His work explored the relationship between technology, forms of thought and different types of human organisation.

He probed the relationship between the physical senses and tried to assess how their interaction in different ratios modified how we perceived ourselves and our world.

McLuhan’s insights were in many ways visionary and intuitive rather than theoretical. Sometimes they were comical. For instance, he tried to explain to readers of Playboy Magazine how it was not naked women or those in high-definition mini-skirts that turn us men on most, but women with glasses and open-mesh silk stockings. He rightly, in my view, suggested that us men tend to turn low definition images of women into our ideal form. In contrast high definition images (use your imagination) do not engage us to the same extent. He also once remarked:

“I have no theories about anything. I make observations by the way of discovering contours, lines of force. I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer.”

But we shouldn’t let his tomfoolery fool us. He was a Canadian professor of literature and philosophy with a doctorate from Cambridge University in grammar, logic and rhetoric (otherwise known since antiquity as the Trivium).

John and Yoko Lennon supposedly discussing Marshall McLuhan

He maintained that whereas the invention of the phonetic alphabet opened up closed societies, which had depended on the product of speech and ear, and then detribalised them, the modern electronic age would end our focus on the visual image (more later).

Viewing all forms of technology as media, or what amounts to extensions of ourselves, he was fascinated by the social consequences of innovations. He described, for instance, perhaps presumptuously, how the jet-plane’s speed rendered old national groupings of social organisation unworkable; perhaps the way Twitter supposedly does to national laws and institutions.

Picking up on a theme beloved by social media enthusiasts today who claim all PR is online (whether it is internet based or not), McLuhan stated:

“Once a new technology comes into the social milieu it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated” [Understanding Media, page 161]

He added, with some feel for its liberating potential, that typography:

“…created a medium in which it was possible to speak out loud to the world itself, just as it was possible to circumnavigate the world of books previously locked up in a pluralistic world of monastic cells.” [ibid pages 161/162]

So his focus was holistic, in the sense that he was interested in how typography, for instance, came to influence every phase of the arts and sciences.

McLuhan studied the dynamics of human communication at the level of experience. He looked at the relationship between how our senses perceive the world and how technological progress changes our mental processes and how we think. He tried to trace how different social organisations, beliefs and politics arose as a result of the mediating influence of new channels of communication.

His intention, though on this he falls short, was to explain how human consciousness developed.

McLuhan argued that the technology of a period creates the human environment. In that sense technology is not a neutral force, but a transformative one. In his view, media and the other tools humans invent are active forces that shape the human galaxy in unexpected ways.

Of course, he was right to point out that new technologies create new possibilities and new realities. The railways, for instance, brought the townspeople to the countryside and country folk to the towns. Railways opened the American West more than horse and cart ever did. Besides taking the travail out of travel, they narrowed the distance and time between places. They altered how we lived our lives in myriad ways, from commuting to holidays to the movement of freight. Later they served as highways for the high-speed telegraph.

McLuhan is perhaps best known today for saying that the medium is the message:

“This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

He saw media as being like a Russian Doll: the content of a medium is always another medium:

“The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is to be asked, ‘What is the content of speech,’ it is necessary to say, ‘It is an actual process of thought which is itself nonverbal.’”  [Understanding Media pages 23/24]

McLuhan over-eggs his media

The problem that McLuhan never really engaged was to try to explain the content of thought. According to him, the formative power of the media are the media themselves. But it is tautological to believe that thought’s content equals the media’s content and vice versa. Explaining things that way begs the question where ideas really spring from in the first place, and leaves the influence of the rest of society out of the picture. Surely, though the two clearly shape each other.

Indeed and here is my big contention, and where it differs from the techno-Utopian view: thought shapes media more than media shapes thought. (Later, I will argue this a lot. But for now I will say that on the big stuff, we are not unlike, say, the Greeks in our thinking.)

That’s not how McLuhan saw it. He believed that we cannot remain immune from the influence of what we observe in the media. He said, and it is a compelling viewpoint, that humans make their tools and are then remade by them.

McLuhan as conflicted dystopian

The key intellectual issues in McLuhan-studies probably come down (as so often) to the irreconcilables in his thought. He was conflicted as to whether increased media was building a great society or destroying it.

McLuhan was supposedly interested (and here’s a useful explanation of what follows) in the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French priest and paleontologist who believed that God had created an evolutionary process, which had produced the “noosphere“. This was a sort of globalised consciousness (but also a spirituality) which God was pulling toward himself as a sort of final purpose of Creation. Give or take your appetite for this sort of thing, you can probably see how it fits the increasingly mediated world that McLuhan was pondering and is an idea of shattering (and maybe dangerous) optimism.

But McLuhan also seemed to accept a set of old-fashioned anxieties about the power of media. What’s not widely known is that, as a religious man, McLuhan was influenced by Pope Pius XII’s views. The Pope believed that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depended upon maintaining “an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction.” This prompted McLuhan to comment:

“Failure in this respect has for centuries been typical and total for mankind. Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users.” [Page 34, Understanding Media].

Indeed, that fits with what we have identified as one of McLuhan’s great faults: he over-estimated the media’s power and influence. That’s not to say they wield an insignificant influence in society, not at all. It is to say that I cannot agree with his media-centric view of the world, particularly when he starts trying to explain the success of the Nazi’s in Germany thus:

“That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to the radio and to the public address systems. This is not to say that these media relayed his thoughts effectively to the German people. His thoughts were of very little consequence. Radio provided the first massive experience of electronic implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of literate Western civilisation.” [ibid page 262]

He said that radio encouraged “webs of deep tribal involvement” and that the message of radio was “one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.” He was saying: never mind the content, take a look instead at how something (radio, TV or the internet) engages our subliminal emotions because it represents a primitive extension of our nervous system that can strike long-hidden chords. In his words, in the non-visual world of subatomic physics, radio encouraged a newly found human involvement that bred anxiety and insecurity and unpredictability. Radio (for that read any new media) lowers our horizons and dulls our brains. If it were not so, we would never allow the media to influence us, said McLuhan. Therein lies a common theme that still dominates debate today about the destructive power of new technology.

Of course, he said that radio’s malevolent influence in Germany and places such as Russia did not stretch to the United states of America:

“Radio, the medium that resuscitated the tribal and kinship webs of the European mind in the 1920s and 1930s did not work in England or America. There, the erosion of tribal bonds by the means of literacy and its industrial extensions had gone so far that radio did not achieve any notable tribal reactions.” [ibid page 274]

But in the US and UK he turned his (over-serious) ire on TV instead. McLuhan worried that it wouldn’t help Johnny learn to read. He lamented that it gave Johnny a whole new set of perceptions instead, which he described as the “psychic and social disturbance created by the TV image.” He also accused TV of introducing a kind of rigor mortis into politics.

He remarked:

It is the extraordinary degree of audience participation in the TV medium that explains its failure to tackle hot issues. Howard K. Smith observed: ‘The networks are delighted if you go into a controversy in a country 14, 000 miles away. They don’t want real controversy, real dissent at home.”’ [ibid pages 269/270]

He also worried, unnecessarily as it happens, about the impact of TV on the future of comics, national magazines, and the movies.

McLuhan really did believe in the power of the media to control society. He cited Fidel Castro as an example of the new “tribal chieftain who rules his country by a mass-participational TV dialog and feedback.” He said that Castro controlled his country on camera (not by force or fear or restricting free speech, mind you) by giving Cuban people the impression of being directly and intimately involved in the process of collective decision making. Arguably, Col Muammar Gaddafi, Kim Jong-il and Saddam Hussein tried the same trick and found it wanting.

McLuhan’s misplaced angst about the power and potential threats and corruption of society by new media has a long pedigree. It even turned Plato against written texts, which were a new fangled inovation in his time. He said they robbed us of our ability to use our memories and risked making us lazy. It also informed Cervantes’ hilarious character Don Quixote who set out on his mad adventure having been first hypnotized into helplessness by trashy novels of galantary and wandering Knights.

McLuhan’s pessimistic outlook that suggests we live in a “post-literate” society is mirrored today by people who argue that the internet is destroying our culture. Supposedly all today’s youth can do is scroll, skim and scan. Meanwhile the internet is undermining existing media, and reducing everybody’s capacity to concentrate and read books (see a useful critique of Nicholas Carr’s new book The Shallows, which is very much in the McLuhan clan of thought). And, yet, McLuhan’s writing also fuels bloated thinking of those who claim that the Arab Spring was sparked by the internet rather than home-grown discontent.

McLuhan on public vs private sphere

There is a rather lovely thought at the heart of McLuhan’s thought. This is that communication created individualism. Or, put another way: the mass media allowed both the public and – more surprisingly – the private sphere to flourish. It’s an over-egged thought, though.

He explains well how the media’s influence developed. He describes how script and papyrus were the mediators of the ancient world. But they lacked the reach to enable mass communication, and in so far as they were consumed by the mass, that was done in public when texts were read aloud. However, that changed with the advent of the mechanical revolution that began with the mechanization of phonetic script in the form of the Gutenberg press. It was this invention that was more important during the Renaissance than any rediscovery of the ancient text of rhetoric and the wisdom of the Greeks, he said.

The man at work

What’s really interesting about McLuhan is his examination of how the public sphere became separated from the private one. I think it is true, as McLuhan says, that the modern private sphere – as distinct from its public counterpart – came into existence in the 13th century. He believed it came about with, and only because of, the introduction of mass media and the ability of people – for the first time – to read and think in silence in private.

I don’t dispute McLuhan’s view that in the age before the private sphere came into being, opinions and roles in society were mostly fixed by the fortunes of birth and the rigidities of the ancient or feudal hierarchies. That was a time when people knew their place. Until books and manuscripts were reproduced in large quantities on mechanical assembly lines, the means of communication did not have the power of extension to create a mass public. In McLuhan’s words:

“Printing from movable types created a quite unexpected new environment – it created the PUBLIC.” (ibid, introduction)

But was it technology that sparked the paradigm shift? Or was it one factor among many, such as history, war, serendipity and culture? In his book Mind, Self and Society George Herbert Mead said that language was the content of our minds, and added that that “is only a development and product of social interaction.” His was a more rounded sociological approach that highlights, I suggest, how narrow McLuhan’s methods of thought were.

Besides, plenty of classical scholars argue convincingly that the Greeks invented the private sphere (the mind) and did it, in public, in theatres. They did it by starting to have characters addressing, as persons, individuals in their audience, as persons. The idea of private, separate interiorities, each of which has ideas, was (rather oddly) explored in public.

Of course, the planned effort to influence the public sphere by influencing the opinions of people in their private refuges cuts to the heart of what PR is about. Individuals and organisations have conflicting opinions, interests and experiences. In the public sphere such differences have to be reconciled in a battle of opinion for influence and power. Otherwise decisions-making cannot take place in a consensual manner.

I say, in contrast to McLuhan’s account, the rise to prominence of PR in the world can be accounted for by the clamour of an emergent public’s struggle for a voice in society’s affairs. In my view, the study, practice and arguably the perfection of rhetoric as a tool of persuasion, is firmly rooted in ancient Greece’s democratic forums. That was, after all, the period when opinions, reputations and winning debates determined outcomes for the first time in history. But as we know, ancient Greece’s democracies were a peculiar and temporary phenomenon. (I shall explore at another time how the public’s voice came to matter historically).

But there is something else missing in McLuhan’s narrative that should not go unremarked. There’s no mention of Max Weber’s protestant ethic and little said about Adam Smith’s or Karl Marx’s explanation for the formation of capitalism and the market economy. And when it comes to explaining the relationship between the modern public and private spheres, I suggest that Jürgen Habermas is much more useful than McLuhan.

So, McLuhan ignores the emergence of new social categories of civil society that separated the public from the private spheres. He gives scant attention to the emergence of the modern state, commerce, wage labour, and the formation of the nuclear family. Instead, McLuhan’s reviews the different mediums of exchange and communication, such as money, typography, film, radio  and ads etc. and focuses his attention on how the phonetic alphabet magically created our state of mind, the modern state and world.

While I reject some of his reasoning, there’s no doubt that when books, pamphlets and newspapers became mass commodities which could be owned, reading in private became a mass pastime. This in turn changed how humans experienced the world of ideas. It also changed how they interacted with each other. It did, as McLuhan claims, encourage, if you like, the internalisation of the thought processes that a private and individualized outlook requires to take root in the human psyche. It created a new sphere of human existence from which major social changes in the fabric of society flowed.

Does digital kill the individual?

It is perhaps ironic that McLuhan, a devout Catholic, who was worshiped by the individualists attending the Summer of Love festivals, where God was proclaimed dead, should be the bearer of the news of the imminent demise of individualism. The modern dilemma that troubled McLuhan most was that while the printing press had made individualism possible, the electronic age rendered it dead. He described the present period as one of transition toward retribalization.

Society, he said, was moving from individualism to “corporate interdependence.” But he warned that instantaneous mass communication and mass consumerism were creating a new crisis in human history. The changes were moving faster than people’s ability to cope. With such observations (or probes as he called them) he caught in the embryo the emerging angst of what became the anti-globalisation lobby.

He described advertising as  a “self-liquidating form of mass entertainment,” and said that it created the impression that a woman could “iron shirts without hating her husband.” He observed that far more time and thought went into creating them than was expended on writing features and editorials. He wrote:

“They (advertisements) are subliminal pills for the subconscious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists. [Understanding Media 202/203]

This is all pretty much what we see in Moan (sorry, Noam) Chomsky and Naomi Klein.

Indeed, he also seems to have seen the pitfalls of identity politics, with its Tyranny of Small Differences and the endless modern litany of “memory, identity and loss”:

“As man is tribally metamorphosed by the electric media, we all become Chicken Littles, scurrying around frantically in search of our former identities, and in the process unleash tremendous violence.”

Massaging the message

He also perhaps overstated the changes, while capturing something worth noting, when he said provokingly:

“Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and physically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent.” [Marshall McLuhan, "The Gutenberg Galaxy, page 5]

He saw the media as an extensions of our senses. And, just as many social media buffs describe the internet and cloud computing as a near-sentient network, McLuhan said that electronic media was a sort of planetary-wide nervous system that produced a group or global consciousness. Of course, in reality, computers even at their most advanced and most highly networked are not anything like a human brain or conscious of anything whatsoever.

Nevertheless, from many angles, he correctly foresaw how the demarcation line between our private and public lives would increasingly become blurred. He said that a century of electronic media had reduced time and space in a planetary embrace that had caused the implosion of human society. He said of the electronic age:

“All our alienation and atomization are reflected in the crumbling of such time-honored social values as the right of privacy and the sanctity of the individual; as they yield to the intensities of the new technology’s electric circus, it seems to the average citizen that the sky is falling in.”

He also sensed in 1964, in a visionary flow of thought that makes him sound like a 21st-century Google executive director, that:

“Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media” [Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, page 19]

McLuhan thought that the new electronic interdependence would recreate the world in the image of a global village. He obviously said that before China blew such notions (including his argument about the phonetics being at the heart of progress) out of the water by doing its own thing to boost globalisation in its own unique undemocratic manner.

There is also much New Age angst buried in McLuhan’s thinking;

“This book (The Gutenberg Galaxy) will try to explain why print culture confers on man a language of thought which leaves him quite unready to face the language of his own-electo-magnetic technology.

“..certainly the electromagnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous “field” in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a “global village.” We live in a single constricted space resonant of tribal drums.” [Gutenberg Galaxy, pages 30/31]

The problem here is that McLuhan pits man’s creation against man: as in the machine strikes back. Moreover, the logical implication of his notion of the “global village”, a useful expression if ever there was one, is that national divisions in a globalised world would dissolve (it was very much in tune with John Lennon’s Imagine, except that McLuhan believed in Heaven above and Hell below us). But, paradoxically, our increasingly globalised economy has more nations today than ever; certainly there’s many more than when McLuhan was writing in the 1960s.

I’m not suggesting for one moment that Marshall McLuhan books should not be read. On the contrary, they remain classics worthy of exploration for the many insights they contain. But that’s no reason to buy into his main technological determinist message.

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This playground spat was sparked by some leaked emails to the blogosphere. It seems Facebook wanted to traduce Google’s new Social Circle offering for violating users’ privacy rights without being identified as the shit-stirrer. The cause of the media “outrage” was an upfront admission from BM in an email trail that:

“I’m afraid I can’t disclose my client yet.”

One supposes the reason for non-disclosure was that Facebook’s reputation on privacy matters is arguably worse than Google’s. BM added, however, that the full facts of the case they were advocating were already in the public domain. In other words, they were inviting somebody to follow up some pointers.

So, never mind that BM has apologized for their role in this; I’ll criticize that in a moment. I’m going to argue that their two PRs behaved pretty well (see here for leading PR Steve Earl’s similar opinion).

In this instance, BM were dealing with somebody who knew the agency were being paid by a third party for PR work. The PR agency also believed that their potential advocate supported the views they sought to spread. They outlined some lines of argument which were already in the public domain and not unreasonable. The blogger they approached was advised to check BM’s facts for accuracy and for the degree to which he agreed with them. What does it matter who was paying BM? Would it have mattered if it was the Devil? I think not.

Sure, BM broke their own ethical code of practice. They did not walk the moral talk they spout. But the worst thing about this whole episode was playing the blame game. Questioning a client’s integrity is not a good image for our trade. The denial from Facebook also did the firm no favours. Facebook is now, anyway, once more the main target of the media’s angst about the “betrayal” of user privacy rights.

The best response from both parties to the exposure of their relationship would have been simply to admit to it. Silence might have also sufficed. Unfortunately, my beloved “so what?” would have been problematic given how BM was flouting its own code of conduct.

But let’s not let the media off the hook. Their outrage is bluster. The media rarely tells their readers which story was sparked or parked by a PR working on behalf of a particular client. Readers are mostly left in the dark about the who, the what and how of the birth of a story. If it were not so, the names of PR agencies, political insiders and their staff would be all over nearly every story published.

Quite rightly, the best media – just like the best PRs – look to the accuracy, veracity and fairness of what they say, write and advocate to establish their credibility.

The fact is a writer might have all sorts of interests and prejudices – including commercial – when he states this or that opinion. He might have shares, or old grudges, or – yes – a payment directly from a party to write a particular piece. Does it matter? The answer has to be, up to a point and depending on the circumstances. For instance, a paid employee writing about their firm cannot pretend to be an independent bystander. An analyst or financial journalist recommending a share as a buy, and who has a personal financial motive for doing so, must declare it openly etc..

Nevertheless, as a reader, I am most interested in a writer’s opinion. If I find it interesting (well-argued, peculiar, entertaining, whatever), then I’m likely to be influenced by it. If I see a writer’s byline, I will be drawn to it if he was interesting in the past. Their new bit of writing will either continue to amuse, or fail to, on its merits. I can usually judge those myself. But sometimes I depend on the authority of the writer’s editors for my sense of the writer’s merits. That’s where the reputation of the likes of The Economist or WSJ etc. matters most.

So let’s keep this real. BM did not really sin. Our industry should come clean about how it and the media really functions and about on what premises trust and integrity really rest.

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Misguidedly everybody right now is focused on what can only be termed as a technological determinist account of what’s gone on. Yesterday’s Sunday Times, for instance, raved in its leader column that “More revolutions will be fuelled by Twitter“. It said the free flow of information, which it rightly urged us to welcome, changed the game not just for dictators but also for the West. It opined:

“We heard, through Twitter, Facebook and good old-fashioned reporting what was happening on the ground. This was much more, however, than technology providing the outside world with the opportunity to witness an important global event. This time it was technology that drove the change and it did it through the free flow of information, passion and opinions.”

I’d rather stress that it is the social conditions that influence the content and usage and meaning given to technology (social media etc.), than the other way round.

As Norman Lewis, an expert on user behaviour around voice and messaging and digital lifestyles, rightly pointed out when he commented on my views last year:

“The debate about the social media, by concentrating on an exaggerated technologically-determined sense of change, misses these critical points. Yes, the introduction of these technologies is going to have an effect (and has some enormous potential). But the outcomes will not be determined by the technologies per se, but by the underlying social context. This remains paramount and understanding this will allow us to gain an historical perspective so lacking in the contemporary debate.”

Lewis added, the history of technological innovation is the history of unforeseen transformations:

“Technologies clearly invented or conceived for one clearly defined use have acquired other unexpected uses over time and have become part of the social evolution and progress of human society. When humans have created tools they have excelled at finding new usages for them. As David Nye puts it in his excellent Technology Matters: ‘latent in every tool are unforeseen transformations’.”

I couldn’t agree more.

It is my view that while everyone gets excited by new media as though nothing could have been achieved without it, old media – and the social conditions in Egypt – were very important to this revolution. TV news from elsewhere (that means overseas) seems to have popularised it in the mass mind. TV news may well have been very important in the degree of daily support the protest in Tahrir square was given. So TV was an energiser of an already rebelliously-minded public.

SM looks to have been important also, especially to some of the hard core leadership of young dissidents. Indeed, we are told that, as we shall explore below, they have been formulating their cause and plotting, perhaps with friends overseas, their approach on Facebook.

There’s no doubt that in Egypt social media did indeed provide some of the most inspiring symbols of the uprising in the form of murdered blogger Khalid Said and his Facebook page “We are all Khalid Said”, not to mention the imprisoned Google executive Wael Ghonmin.

Nevertheless, we should also note that whatever social media’s role in setting things off, when Mr Mubarak fell it was old-fashioned TV that brought the news to the masses. It was old-fashioned print material and word-of-mouth networking that distributed the opinions of the protesters to the people. It wasn’t social media.

It would appear that in Egypt TV remains the most powerful journalistic influence that shapes the mood of the masses. For sure, the most viewed news programme across the region, and in Egypt, is Al Jazeera in Arabic. Reaching millions of Egyptians, it is available even to the poor. Its radical reporting-style has made regional events, such as the uprisings in Tunisia, accessible and transparent. It has won admiration for doing so:

“Long live Al Jazeera!” chanted Egyptian protesters in Tahrir Square on Feb. 6. Many Arabs — not least the staff at Al Jazeera — have said for years that the Arab satellite network would help bring about a popular revolution in the Middle East. Now, after 15 years of broadcasting, it appears the prediction has come true. There is little question that the network played a key role in the revolution that began as a ripple in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, and ended up a wave that threatens to wash away Egypt’s long-standing regime.”

Mubarak recognised that threat. During the protests, the network was dropped from the government-run satellite transmission company, Nilesat. In an act of self-preservation, Egyptian Information Minister Anas al-Fiqi ordered the offices of all Al Jazeera bureaus in Egypt to be shut down. The accreditation of all its network journalists was withdrawn. Six of its journalists were detained, others were beaten. Mustafa Souag, head of news at Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language station, told Arabia Today:

“To the rescue came at least 10 other Arabic-language TV stations, which stepped in and offered to carry Al Jazeera’s content. They just volunteered…. They were not paid, and we thanked them for that…”

I would argue that that act of solidarity by Arabic TV channels was much more significant than Google’s clumsy – but nevertheless admirable – efforts to circumvent the internet’s shutdown using landlines and answer phones.

But as the uprisings went on things got really hot for Al Jazeera. It was accused of being an alien enemy of the state (along with the US and Iran):

“One supposed ‘foreign agent’ was shown on Egyptian state TV with face obscured, claiming that she had been trained by ‘Americans and Israelis’ in Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based.”

There’s some evidence that foreign hands – including the positive influence of Al Jazeera – were in some form encouraging and aiding the protesters.

For instance, we all now know, something which WikiLeaks higlighted, that the US government staffers had been meeting with social media activists from Egypt since 2008. It all supposedly began when an Egyptian activist was invited to attend a conference in the US. It was organised by James Glassman, under secretary of State for Public Diplomacy under George W. Bush, and Joe Rospars, Scott Goodstein and Sam Graham-Felsen, Obama’s top social media gurus.

US foreign policy at the time was seemingly pro-Mubarak, though the US has always also advocated the spread of democracy. When questioned about the meeting’s aims, Glassman described the event as “public diplomacy 2.0” and said it fitted:

“…into an overall strategy in Egypt, which was to support civil society and to encourage people to promote democracy as much as they could.”

Perhaps the US was aiming to be useful to the Egyptian middle class’s dissidents. However, exactly how far it was prepared to go remains a mystery.

Right now all we know of the US involvement is what the leaked cable says. For example, the activist attending the 2008 conference was offered advice about maintaining internet security. But it seems that the activist told the organisers that April 6 members did not own computers. The cable also mentions that the same activist alleged that several opposition parties and movements had accepted an unwritten plan for democratic transition by 2011. However, the leaked cable reveals that US officials doubted that claim.

We also know that the conference in the US the cable refers to was never secret. The agenda was publicly available. Whoopi Goldberg even added some high-profile celebrity glamour to the proceedings.

Was the US in some form actively backing the online protesters? I don’t know. Certainly, the Egyptian SM activist, from the influential April 6 Youth Movement, who attended the meeting in the US, denies it:

“This is so ridiculous….They [Mubarak's regime] are going to try to [portray this as] an American conspiracy, and so forth”

Though given that he said this in the middle of an uprising, his statement may have been a matter of expediency. Time will tell.

So I’m sceptical but not dismissive. If it turns out that SM did importantly help the tiny proportion of the protest which was its leaders, and did so for years before the eruption, and if even only some of the eruption was aided by SM, and if it was spurred on by George W Bush and then by Barack Obama, then SM and the two Presidents will have had their historic moment.

Meanwhile, the clerics in Iran have been trying hard to win acclaim for their so-called conspiratorial role in stirring up the public in Egypt. On the 32nd anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, they view events in Egypt (more for home consumption than anything else) as an extension of their overthrow of the Shah.

I think it is fair to insist that it was not foreigners or new technologies that set out to actively overthrow Mubarak: it was the courageous Egyptian masses, informed mostly by 20th Century TV, which played a surprising new role in their world, and somewhat by SM. Of course, they were backed – eventually – by real-world international politicians who recognise generational change when it’s slapping them in the face.

Now let’s review briefly the real state of Egypt’s on-line world. The truth is that Egypt has only one and a half million broadband subscribers out of a population of 84 million. A Euromonitor International report issued in July 2010 found:

“Household ownership of broadband computers remains amongst the lowest in the region and is hindered by low incomes and illegal sharing of internet [meaning that most broadband subscribers have poor quality connections].”

Even the multi-media mobile phone connectivity to the internet in Egypt is extremley backward. As one report that’s just six months old commented:

News last year that Egypt would issue triple-play licenses — for companies to offer the voice, data and video service — excited analysts and firms, but their limited scope and reliance on Telecom Egypt infrastructure later muted interest.

While common in the UAE and other Gulf countries, as well as the US and Europe, triple-play is yet to be offered in Egypt.”

Broadband connectivity in Egypt remains an upper middle class tool. The masses of Egypt, a large percentage of which are on low incomes – an average annual disposable income of LE 12,429 ($2,240) per capita in 2009 - and illiterate, are excluded. Of course, one of the real drivers of the uprisings recently has been that Egyptians have been getting poorer, not richer.

The idea that unreliable and low-level connectivity could be used to coordinate an uprising among 84 million people is just farcical. There might be 4 million Facebook users in Egypt but if even one-tenth of them wanted to interact at once, they couldn’t do so effectively for technical reasons to do with bandwidth.

As to Twitter, well, there’s just 14,000 Twitter registered users spread between around 120 million people in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. Its significance has to be more in the Retweets made by foreigners than Tweets from Egypt interacting with each other while attempting to organise the masses in their own land.

Now let’s look at how Zdnet reported on how the internet was used to circumvent the censorship when the government cut off connections to the Web:

“Thanks to dial-up modems, some Egyptians are able to login to international modem pools outside the government’s control. Internet activist groups like Werebuild and Telecomix are publishing lists of international modem-dial up numbers. While there are several Egyptian ISPs that offer dial-up, these, at best, still keep their users locked in Egypt. I’m told by sources in Egypt that these sites often don’t work even for connecting with other Egyptian sites.”

So while it was very romantic to imagine how innovative Egyptians were side-stepping the censors, one has to remain sceptical about how much that meant in practice.

The middle class, many of them Facebook users, I acknowledge, hit the streets first and took first blood. However, now the struggle involves wider forces including the Egyptian masses (the ones who rallied to the middle class’s aid in Tahrir square) under the management of the military.

Nobody knows where Egypt will go next. But it will be also interesting to see how influential social media remains in Egypt as it redefines how the country is ruled and how it moves toward democracy.

It is my dream that the new Egyptian government does what the old one never did: enables freedom of speech by investing massively in a broadband infrastructure that delivers a ubiquitous service the masses can afford to purchase. (BTW: for a good exploration of these issues, see Charlie Beckett’s blog, who happens to be a fellow West Ham United fan.)

Related posts:

1. Muse on Egypt and SM

Here’s an example from the WSJ of 2 February 2011:

“Opposition activists rallied around a Facebook page called We Are All Khaled Saied [sic]. To call for a protest, Mr. Saied’s death became the focal point for people who hadn’t been involved in the rights movement before, says Ahmed Gharbia, an Egyptian activist associated with the page. “He was an everyman, and it was very difficult for people who wanted to paint him as an outlaw to do that.” In the past week, supporters of the page swelled from 75,000 members to over 440,000.”"

Besides “misspelling” (I recognise that there’s more than one way to spell a translated Arabic name, however on Facebook it is spelled Khalid Said), we should note that the WSJ fails to mention that many, perhaps most, of the page’s followers are, understandably on a global network, not Egyptian. Moreover, as Wired reports:

“Ever since Mubarak restored internet service on Wednesday, the most important dissident Facebook page has seen a curious flood of pro-regime Wall posts, sowing disinformation.

“Some of the new up-with-Mubarak commentary at the Facebook page We Are All Khalid Said is classic concern-trolling: people wringing their hands over how Egypt’s dictator deserves better than calls for his downfall. Some is pure abuse, questioning the loyalties of the page’s administrator. And some are blatant attempts to disrupt the protests by claiming upcoming rallies have been canceled.”

Meanwhile the Twitter page Jan25 Voices, which leveraged plain old telephones to get around the blocked internet, has 7, 600 followers, most of them foreigners. And what’s interesting is that there are just over 14, 000 Twitter users identified as being located in the three countries of Egypt (pop: 84 million), Tunisia (pop: 10 million) and Yemen (pop: 23 million). Nevertheless their rebellious protests are routinely cited as being led by social media, particularly Twitter. Disregarding the glaring absence of factual support for the claim, Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas, sent a Tweet to his 300 000 followers saying:

“One Egyptian says, ‘facebook used to set the date, twitter used to share logistics, youtube to show the world, all to connect people’ #jan25“.

What’s amazing is how Cohen’s narrative has spread credibly through mainstream media. In addition, Google’s initiative in Egypt to hook up a few thousand Twitter users to answer phones has repositioned it as a social media champion. But as the CEO of betaworks, John Borthwick, one of the most influential architects of the social web, explained recently, Google is no such thing. Its IT architecture and business model are antithetical to social media. Though there’s no doubt that its response to Egypt’s protests was a PR coup, and maybe also a very decent and clever thing to achieve.

For instance, Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Group, felt provoked to explore, in The Times, the responsibilities of Google and Twitter that arise from their new-found influence in battles between “the rulers and ruled”. In his piece, Google and Twitter enjoy a freedom denied to others, he opined:

“Google and Twitter are not just technology companies developing algorithms and using others’ content [they are, he says, really owners of new media]. They must understand that with incredible power comes incredible responsibility. You cannot stick your head in the sand and say you are only providing the pipework: you are responsible for the information that flows through it.”

He makes a point that we should only accept in part. When either Google or Twitter decide to actively circumvent censorship or other state interference, they make de facto editorial and political as well as commercial judgments. That, as Mr. Sorrell remarks, can have unintended consequences. One is that Google has much to lose from over-selling what it can do to protect its users. The reality is that Google – more often than it might like – may one day need to say at some point to some protesters:

“Sorry, we would have liked to help you, but we curtailed our normal service because we were threatened with the loss of our license to operate in your country; we didn’t think we should take that existential risk, and as much for your long-term sake as for ours.”

Google knows that if it loses either the trust of its customers or the cooperation of nation states, it no longer has a viable business. That’s a conundrum I examined in Google comes of Age in China, where I pointed out how Google’s idealism is tempered by its dependence on open access to an internet infrastructure it does not own or control.

In contrast, the trust that truly social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook require comes from their total commitment (not something that they dare mess with) to allowing freedom of expression behind their closed walls. Defending that freedom has seen them both banned in China, and there’s been bans imposed also at some point in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh.

Yet the first duty, surely, of the rest of us must be to retain a sense of perspective. And building on that point, here’s an example from an Egyptian media studies student, based in London, who has chronicled her struggle to stay in touch with events using mainstream and social media:

“As I open my Facebook [once the internet was restored] I find an overflow of information. Every person had a view on what was happening in Tahrir. Some were calling for an end to the madness and for a peaceful transition of power. Others were thinking that anyone who wants a peaceful transition was a coward and a traitor. Others were still calling for more people to go to Tahrir Square. Others posting videos and pictures of what happened in Tahrir.

“To my surprise there were peaceful demonstrations calling for the peaceful transition which was not at all covered by all the networks I watched. With hundreds of statuses and videos and pictures, I had no clue what is actually happening in Egypt. It was just as if every person of my 956 friends were pulling in different directions giving there own perspective of what they think should happen.

“One thing was clear no one was listening to what the other person was saying and I too stopped. I just completely shut down I didn’t know what to think or what to believe or who is in Tahrir square fighting who.”

She left Cairo for London on January 17, so she can hardly be accused of not being in recent touch with her homeland (she even went to school in Tahrir Square).

My point is that too many commentators have been too quick to pre-judge events and what is driving them based on evidence that does not amount to much.

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Egypt’s population is more than 80 million. According to the ITU, internet penetration stands at around 21 percent, much of it narrowband or very poor broadband. According to a comScore survey, there were just five million users of Twitter in the whole of the Middle East and Africa in August 2010.

Facebook, according to internet World Stats, is more popular than Twitter, with more than four million users in Egypt alone, some of whom are bound to be radicalised campaigners. Early on in the crisis a Facebook group attracted 80,000 members pledging to protest on January 25. It has influence, then, but hardly a major one.

The masses in Egypt are not connected to the internet. They are not social media users. Of course, the early protesters in Egypt were, as US Vice President Joe Biden said, mostly middle class. So, yes, they are the ones with most internet access.

Meanwhile, the much more massive working class stood back, restrained, perhaps, by the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, which wishes to avoid provoking the army. Even now that they are more visible, reports suggest that the crowds are large rather than huge. We are seeing tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, but not millions of people on the streets: so far, anyway.

Now, when it comes to IT, the really powerful communication tool in Egypt is the mobile phone. In common with many developing countries mobile phone penetration is above 100 percent. That’s because most people have more than one phone from more than one provider. Moreover, a combination of 2G, 2.5G and 3G services allows for a measure of multi-media interaction between users; particularly when it comes to sharing videos and pictures.

The most effective application for organising protests, however, is low-bandwidth text messaging. Texting is fast. It is mostly written in street-speak on the street. It is difficult for the authorities to monitor or control its influence in real-time (a lesson the British police learned when Prince Charles’ car was recently attacked by students in London). But phones – like the internet – are easy to cut. They also leave a trail that can be traced.

Rather than being a revolutionary’s ideal hub, social media forums are a secret security service’s dream haunt. They are asymmetrical in an unexpected way. Though guerrilla in some respects, they allow spooks to observe and track down users without being noticed; eliminating the risk that following people on the street poses. On social media virtually everybody is undercover, or seemingly anonymous, in the sense that you can never be sure people are who they claim to be. The state, though, can find out nearly anybody’s true identity. This gives them ready-made lists of people, knowledge of their intended actions and actual opinions, not to mention their network connections.

In short, social media allows a dictatorial regime to deactivate activists at will, as this Egyptian case highlights:

“Khaled Said was a shy, soft-spoken 28-year-old who ran a small business in Alexandria.

“Last summer, he came across a video that appeared to show local police officers dividing up the spoils of a drug bust, so on June 6, he posted it on his blog.

“A few hours later, two plainclothes officers emerged from a nearby police station to pay Mr. Said a visit. They found him in an Internet café [internet cafe's are not safe havens] by his house, just off the harbour, and dragged him to the street.

“Twenty minutes later, Mr. Said was dead, his head smashed against a marble staircase in the lobby of the building next door.”

Of course, that incident itself provoked a backlash on Facebook. Around 30 000 people joined a page which proclaimed “We Are All Khaled Said”. So, undoubtedly Facebook has been become a rallying point for some activists and a means for them to spread their word at home and abroad.

But what’s really striking to me is how outside Egypt social media users have become voyeurs. Some of us have also become delusional cheerleaders of other people’s struggles. We feel involved – even when we are not really even aware of the real issues or possible outcomes – because we’re all apparently linked via social media, or because we saw some appalling violence on YouTube or here.

There’s something very narcissistic (not to mention morbid) about watching video-clips of demonstrators getting tear-gassed and shot. Commenting on it all has become a kind of social media sport. It is not about Egypt, but mostly about us and how we feel about the supposed power of our new toys. The complexity and the nuances and the shades of grey – the fact that we mostly know virtually nothing about the forces, or who the good or bad guys really are, behind the protests – gets obscured in our social media forums and self-obsessed minds.

But let’s not get carried away. According to Jared Cohen, based in New York, a former State Department tech guru and now Director of Google Ideas, ”one” (yes, just one) Egyptian claimed: “facebook used to set the date, twitter used to share logistics, youtube to show the world, all to connect people”.

Well, contrariwise, I’ll give my expert opinion on organising protests and taking on the police; my credentials are (the insight of a misspent youth) fairly credible on this point.

The reality of revolt is that old-fashioned word-of-mouth communication is the best form of communication in any confrontation with one’s nation state. That communication takes place in real-life social networks inside living communities, rather than in virtual online ones. It takes place between people who look each other in the eye and then trust each other on the street when the going gets rough. Of course – and  I don’t know how much experience I had of this – protesters may be subject to deep undercover observation by the state. (And even, to be vulgar for a moment, and apropos the UK’s climate protest, the prospect of deep-throat undercover treatment by the organs of authority.)

Soon, I hope to post on the important role of new-old technology: Al Jazeera may be spreading a wholly new understanding in the Arab world. It is communicating vividly and continuously that the state may attempt to be omniscient, and is powerful: but it is not – perhaps – omnipotent.

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