As long as the Murdochs have a certain sort of enemy, bright young things of the right are tempted to pile in blindly on their side. That’s fair enough for almost everyone except people in government, whose job – boringly – is to be scrupulous. They are, in the buzzword of the week, quasi-judicial. They need the unfashionable qualities of the bureaucrat: they write, and need to live by, the rule book. So the Hunt issue seems to be an example of a quite modern problem.

Let’s suppose that it turns out that Jeremy Hunt’s office were too closely allied with, and chatty with, the Murdochs. It would be a perfect case of a striking new failure of modern politicians, obvious under Blair’s sofa-government and hardly less so under Cameron. They don’t “get” government; they prefer Special Advisers to Whitehall; they prefer hands-on decision-making to the institutional democratic process.

One suspects that the Leveson inquiry will say little that is new about the ethics of the media and its relations with power. The good judge will probably propose some reforms. We may have a media whose corporations are more disciplined even as the blogosphere becomes more unruly. But we don’t need Leveson to tell us that politicians and police need to become more serious about their own dignity and role in life. It is, or should be, as plain as day that they need to be more grey and more accountable to democratic institutions and processes.

For anybody who wants to read more, here’s my review of the core PR issues:

So, we’re all agreed that bribing the police and hacking the phones of celebs, dead soldiers and murdered schoolgirls is immoral, and some of those seem to have been the unique preserve of the Murdoch empire. (We’ll see.) We can probably agree that if the Murdoch empire obstructed police in their enquiries, that may turn out to be the longest, deepest issue of all. But there is no consensus on what we should learn from this sorry saga. In fact, I fear the wrong lessons are being drawn.

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.

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 the press baron 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.

Writing this piece has forced me to reread Norman Levitt (1943 – 2009), professor of Maths at Rutgers. He was among the first warriors to take up cudgels in the Science Wars against left-wing postmodernists in the Academy. He maintained that their social constructivism, epistemic relativism and cognitive pluralism is in reality reductio ad absurdum.

Professor Norman Levitt

Levitt was clearly polemical in style. But he confronted some equally robust opponents. After Levitt died, Professor Steve Fuller, an American sociologist now based at Warwick University, opined that Levitt had been a pioneer of “cyber-fascism”. Fuller accused Levitt of having lived in a parallel universe, in which he positioned postmodernists as playing the role of Jews in need of extermination. Sticking the knife deeper in the man’s corpse he said that Levitt’s major contribution to the debate was a steady stream of invective. He added that Levitt’s robust defence of science was merely the noise made by a loser who felt disenfranchised from the mainstream. So this debate was not nice or polite or for softies.

Of course, what should be remembered is that Fuller blamed Levitt for being behind the Sokal Affair. This, for those new to this stuff, refers to Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, who wrote Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity for an academic journal devoted to postmodern cultural studies. It was full of intentional howlers, such as claiming that quantum gravity was a social linguistic construction.

The resulting furore was a major embarrassment to the journal Social Text, which published Sokal’s baloney in its special edition devoted to what it dubbed the Science Wars. Professor Fuller was especially outraged because he had one of his own papers in the same edition of the journal. The Sokal Hoax seemed to underscore Levitt’s argument that for narrow-minded reasons, ignorant left-wing academics wrote and published nonsense about science.

Professor Alan Sokal

In reality this was much more than a squabble between left- and right-wing thinkers. Levitt was actually on the left of the political spectrum and he had no time for right-wing conservatives who wanted to teach intelligent design and creationism in schools. Sokal also shared Levitt’s distaste for Derridean deconstructionism, which he still decries as fashionable poststructuralist drivel. Yet what really united the likes of Levitt and Sokal was not their politics, but their shared understanding of the essence of science. In contrast to the postmodernists they stated that there was no such as “left-wing science”, no more than there was such a thing as “right-wing science” or “feminist Algebra” (no, I didn’t make that last one up and neither did Levitt).

Their concern was that postmodernist academics promoted a disdain for scientific principles, which struck at the heart of what science was about. They argued that this had negative consequences for society at large because it spread distrust about science, scientists and the benefits of the Enlightenment. They accused left-wing academics of promoting, what Levitt called, muddle-headedness:

Thus we encounter books that pontificate about the intellectual crisis of contemporary physics, whose authors have never troubled themselves with a simple problem in statics; essays that make knowing reference to chaos theory, from writers who could not recognise, much less solve, a first-order linear differential equation; tirades about the semiotic tyranny of DNA and molecular biology, from scholars who have never been inside a real laboratory, or asked how the drug they take lowers blood pressure. (Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels With Science, by Norman Levitt and Paul Gross)

Levitt robustly defended the integrity of scientific works which had been misunderstood and misrepresented by postmodernists. One example of this was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was denounced by Professor Fuller as a Cold War narrative. In his book on Thomas Kuhn, Fuller even goes as far as to say that Kuhn’s work helped dupe scientists into supporting Western militarism in the fight against Soviet and Chinese communism. In short, Fuller’s representation of science leans toward explaining it as little more than a conspiracy organised by the Establishment.

For sure, when Levitt criticised postmodernism he fully understood that how scientific knowledge was used was indeed a social and political issue. What concerned him, however, was the suggestion that scientific methodologies and theorizing itself was a social (subjective) construction that produced little more than metaphors. Levitt said repeatedly, mathematical equations are anything but metaphors. He rightly pointed out that mathematics and science have a substance and complexity, which metaphors can’t really capture.

So, that’s enough background. Now let’s take a step closer to understanding what might be attracting PRs to take a serious look at chaos theory. One of the great attractions of chaos theory to social theorists, and in PR to critics of Jim Grunig’s work, is its emphasis on the importance of nonlinear mathematical and scientific enquiry in its search for patterns and associations in seemingly complex and chaotic systems. But what I’m not putting under the microscope today is chaos theory in its scientific incarnation. I’m questioning how chaos theory has been exploited for other purposes by people with no understanding of, or respect for, scientific methods.

Chaos theory appealed to social scientists of a particular type because it appeared to provide scientifically-sourced ammunition in support of cultural relativism. As one reviewer of Levitt’s work puts it:

To cultural theorists, the word ‘linear’ represents relentless sequentiality, single mindedness and the triumph of the instrumental — all components of the supposed Western ethos of conquest, domination and objectification. ‘Nonlinear’, on the other hand, for them suggests many-sidedness, multi-culturalism, polymorphism and the effacement of traditional disciplines — a world where multiplicity reigns in culture, sexuality and ethnicity and where old barriers may be freely crossed.

In books such as Katherine Hayles’ Chaos Bound it was argued that Newtonian thinking had been overthrown, when in fact it had been subsumed, which, as Levitt said repeatedly, is something completely different. Hayles – in common with many other postmodernists – popularised the fallacy that Newtonian physics was mechanical and linear in its fundamentals. In fact, as Levitt pointed out, Newton’s laws of celestial mechanics and his equations of planetary motion are nonlinear to their core.

Levitt’s critique of Hayles’ book cites her poor grasp of basic scientific principles. On virtually every subject she discussed from Newtonian science, quantum mechanics, logical positivism, to the special theory of relativity, right through to her understanding of mathematics, Levitt found fundamental errors.

Just how ridiculous this postmodernist muddling of maths, science and culture can get is illustrated by Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism, which condemned Newton’s Principia Mathematica for being a “rape manual”.

So the red lights started flashing when I started reading Priscilla Murphy’s influential paper Chaos Theory as a Model for Managing Issues and Crises. My pen-friend Heather Yaxley had already informed me that Murphy’s critique of Jim Grunig’s two-way symmetric model had been partly responsible for persuading him to rejig it as a mixed-motive model that took more account of asymmetric reality. To my despair I quickly discovered that Murphy’s understanding of chaos theory was firmly rooted in Hayles’ Chaos Bound. For instance, Murphy makes the following observation:

“In fact, chaos theory generally represents a postmodern departure  from the social science worldview that unfolded from theories about  the physical universe articulated by Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton. According to this tradition, the universe actions is like a vast machine governed by unchanging laws that can be deciphered  through scientific  analysis. This view leaves little to chance,  for reality is basically static [sic, she's referring to Statics here which she thinks means fixed or static, so she completely misconstrues Newton] and tautological. Time is ‘reversible,’ meaning that one could go forwards or backwards at any point  and the same essential laws would be in operation. In contrast, chaos  theory urges us ‘to reinterpret the universe as being constituted by  forces of disorder, diversity, instability and non-linearity.’” [Chaos Theory as a Model for Managing Issues and Crises, page 96, by Priscilla Murphy]

Her mistake, besides not understanding science, was to ever have supposed that our understanding of the human world could be built around what Newton and Einstein and others discovered about the material world. And just to illustrate how gross errors of reasoning and understanding get repeated, here’s Murphy repeating Hayles’ fallacy uncritically:

The ‘reality’ that describes a given phenomenon is determined, not by its  universal qualities, but by the observer who chooses the scale. Such concepts have created a convergence between chaos theory and the postmodern realization that what has always been thought of as the essential, unvarying  components of human experience are not  natural facts of life but social constructions. [Murphy cites Hayles here for her viewpoint's "credibility": see page 99]

The problem here is that science itself is being accused of being little more than a subjective, social construction. The charge is that science has little to no claim to objectivity. Accepting such premises would make dismissing Global Warming easy and dismissing Creationism and defending Darwin difficult.

One of my points today is merely that when PRs try to wrap their crisis management expertise and their cultural insights in the language of chaos theory and complexity theory (which also interests Priscilla Murphy) they are undermining our trade’s reputation.

Of course, there is much more to say on this subject. That brings me closer to what’s going to become my core proposition; one which I shall highlight by interrogating the thoughts of some leading PR academics. For example, in the near future I intend to review Jim Macnamara’s The 21st Century Media (R)evolution in which, Richard Bailey reports, he writes:

Emergent media owe as much to chaos theory as to evolutionary systems theory.

For reasons that I hope are becoming clear in this piece, Macnamara is wrong on both points. Amusingly, in the same post on his blog Bailey quotes from Martin Thomas’ new book Loose: The Future of Business is Letting Go, in which he analyses the chaos and ambiguity of modern life. Thomas is quoted saying, perceptively in my view, that:

We are witnessing the unravelling of the most fundamental building blocks of the commercial world and a collapse of faith in tight, empirical rational models and ways of thinking.

Bailey also mentions how Grunig and Hunt’s Managing Public Relations drew on systems theory. Bailey adds that systems theory once seemed as solid as Newtonian physics - until some new theories came along (Relativity, String Theory) to change the way we think about the world. But Newtonian physics, remains as solid and as relevant and as scientifically robust as in Newton’s day: see here for a layperson’s explanation of my point. Moreover, the eclectic “systems theory” Grunig drew on had nothing whatever to do with Newton’s theories on kinematics and systems, but is an unscientific, wobbly, flexible and elastic construction (see here) drawn from the world of social sciences, which absurdly tries to wrap itself in the language of the physical sciences in an opportunistic and often hilarious mix and match approach.

Well, if PRs take Fuller, Hayles, Murphy and Macnamara seriously – and I’m not claiming Richard Bailey does just because he quotes some authors – one wonders what it will do for evidence-based PR. Perhaps it means R.I.P. Burson Marsteller?

Indeed, I shall be arguing in my book On Message: Propaganda, persuasion and the PR game that both the linear and nonlinear bods in PR circles fail to bring science to their cause. I shall explore why Grunig’s theory of Excellence has as little right to claim scientific credibility as does the display of ignorance that emanates from his opponents in the asymmetrical, relativististic postmodernist camp.

So, let’s remain grounded. The good news is that chaos and complexity theories, postmodernism and Jim Grunig’s symmetrical model of Excellence, have very little to do with proper PR. Thankfully, most PR professionals in the real world don’t consider such theories as being relevant. Discussions about what it all amounts to for PR professionals remain marginalized among PR academics and a few practitioners they educated or have influenced. However, if we left it at that that would require conceding the high ground to the spreaders of hogwash.

So in conclusion, I maintain that we need to interrogate the usage and possible misuse and abuse of real science by PR academics; not least because they mostly do so in the name of PR and often in association with some of our leading practitioners. It is necessary, therefore, to raise the profile of this debate about science within the PR community and in wider circles still. I hope you agree.

Recommended further reading:

Here are some links to what my fellow PR bloggers have had to say about chaos theory recently here here and here

David Ruelle’s Chance and Chaos, New Science Library, 1991

Harmke Kammingen, What is This Thing called Chaos? New Left Review, 1990  (Kammingen writes “…claim that chaos theory is the new paradigm for science should, at least at this stage, be viewed with considerable caution.”)

Heather Yaxley’s I’m a PR person, let me read your mind

Paul Seaman’s Psychobabble will not make PR credible

Paul Seaman’s What could “neuro-PR” do for our trade?

Note: since this was first published in June 2011 it has been updated to take account of the useful criticism Heather Yaxley made of my conclusion (see remarks in comments). It also corrects my understanding of Martin Thomas’ quote, which again is a criticism captured in the comments below. I have also incorporated a few other changes. Not least one from Professor James Woudhuysen who set me straight about one of my loose remarks on Newton. Of course, any remaining errors or points of contention remain entirely my responsibility.

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PRs representing bankers need not concede much ground to the moralists. Instead they should recommend their clients come out fighting. The advice from financial PRs should be: stand your ground; defend yourselves; get the rest of the business community behind you.

If banking clients have doubts about the merits of this approach, PRs should remind them that so far they have been very bad at making a serious case for themselves, which has made it hard for PRs to do so on their behalf. Moreover, bankers need not worry about going out on a limb. There are positive signs that the British business establishment is more than prepared to back British bankers and to condemn the anti-business rhetoric being spouted by the media, protesters and politicians.

This week a leading group of business folk, including Sir Michael Rake, chairman of BT and Easyjet, Sir Andrew Witty, chief executive of Glaxo Smith Kline, and Paul Walsh, chief executive of Diageo, will tell Prime Minister David Cameron to stop bullying CEOs. According to The Sunday Times, one of them will state that if Cameron’s government keeps bashing business:

Eventually companies will leave, and those that stay will not be able to recruit top talent.

That’s the bottom line. The British Establishment’s liberal courtiers are in danger of making the country Mickey Mouse about all this: scapegoating Fred Goodwin, whinging about rather ordinary pay and bonuses for HSBC, Barclays and other bankers.

Hence bankers should tell politicians and the media that the British people and City of London need thriving financial institutions more than they need them. That’s an arrogant message, perhaps. But it has the compelling merit of being an honest one.

PRs have to say forcibly that we need Hester to stay at RBS, and we need HSBC and Barclays to look like credible global businesses capable of attracting the very best to work for them: end of. The rest is noise.

It is unlikely that the public and media can be persuaded to agree with such messaging right now. Yet I doubt that the masses will be pleased over the long term if the liberal commentariats make the moral hazards of doing business in Britain too much for the banking sector to bear. So David Cameron (who can be convinced and needs convincing now) needs to be told that he won’t gain anything by banker-bashing. That pious positioning should be left to Ed Miliband, who is blindly stuffing his portfolio with this unelectable puff.

As several people have remarked, the public will be slightly more in favour of bankers etc. when in a few years’ time, Britain is the world centre of world class bankers. But if we lose this fight to the other side because Britain does not embrace banks and business, Switzerland, where I live, is one of many countries that hopes to profit from the UK’s demise.

Swiss bankers have never been popular in Switzerland. Instead, the Swiss grasp the truth about who needs whom more and why. They have long-acknowledged, however reluctantly at times, what drives business success. They value the benefits that accrue to the wider population as a consequence of allowing their financial institutions to function properly in a global market place.

So as I close this piece, here’s my insight gained from observing Swiss bankers. Bankers need to be trusted more than they need to be popular. To win trust they need to speak straight about the realities of their business. That won’t make them popular. BUT: there’s never been an era in history when bankers and money lenders have been popular. So get used to it; get over it.

Canny PRs have long seen this stuff clearly. To those that don’t yet get it, I say be careful which side you support because the stakes are very high indeed.

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In a letter to the FT last week, she criticises PRs who worked for Col Gaddafi and any who wouldn’t mind working for Iran. Setting out her own ideas, Fiske gets into a muddle and contradicts herself without shame or perhaps without realising it:

We [Public Relations Society of America] believe every person or organisation has the right to have its voice heard in the global marketplace of ideas. But for PR firms to represent dictatorships that do not afford that same freedom to their own people is disingenuous towards the liberties of a democracy and to democratic societies’ reputations as marketplaces for dissenting ideas.

Well, she can’t have it both ways. Either everybody has a right to a PR advocate, or they don’t. Her position, if we take what she says seriously, is that only people who run their countries according to the same democratic principles as the United States deserve PR counsel from the Western world. Moreover, Fiske writes in her letter:

Ethical public relations places an emphasis on counselling reputable organisations and individuals in developing and maintaining beneficial relationships with concerned stakeholders.

Nice work if you can get it.

Leave aside for the moment that Fiske is positioning the PR industry as the arbiter – which we are not qualified to be – of which person and organisation or country is “reputable” or what stakeholders are “concerned”.

Surely, the point of some very important PR is that it helps people who are considered (or may self-evidently be) unreputable. If they were of good reputation, they’d have scant need of our work. Oil companies need a lot of PR when their pipes and ships leak. Tobacco companies presumably need good PR all the time. (See Thank You For Smoking.) Ditto, professional downsizers. (See Up in the Air.) You get the picture.

The point isn’t that so-called sinners should be denied PR. Surely it is: what class of rogue is so utterly roguish that PRs shouldn’t take their money? Of course, we all have our limits, but they’ll likely be different.

A moment’s thought suggests that famous, outed, seemingly obvious rogues have a strong claim to PR’s efforts. They are the targets of huge, prejudiced, tediously liberal, right-on attacks, which are often unjustified. Why shouldn’t they have a defence? Besides, such media “victims” come with a huge risk for PRs, and that makes defending them an act of some courage, and therefore of some merit on those grounds alone.

I can easily imagine why for selfish reasons most PR agencies might reject Col Gaddafi’s reputed two million pounds sterling to launch a belated lobbying campaign against NATO. They would be right, I suspect, to assume the contract would do their reputations more harm than it would do his any good. Though if anybody does take the job, they should not be condemned by fellow PRs living in glass houses. (See PR Week).

There are far murkier waters than these, though. What about the covert-rogue? That’s the one who has a good and undeserved reputation and employs PRs to keep it that way. Is that acceptable work for a PR? The answer depends in part on how nasty the rascal is and how much the PR knows. (See “Deadly Spin” is mere spin.)

It is no good for PRs to argue that they don’t have to be any more picky than a defence lawyer. While courts of law might be symmetrical, the court of public opinion seldom is. In reality, the balance of opinion and media coverage is often tipped unfairly against clients. Hence we rightly assume the prosecution is competent and well-resourced: its best shot is likely to be pretty good and merits as good a response as is available. (See A new moral agenda for PR.)

It seems pretty obvious that Ms Fiske’s position is obviously way too saintly. She suggests that even if the US government was working in the past to repair relations with Libya and Syria, American public relations firms should have cold-shouldered them. Her qualification for our endorsement appears to be “people like us”. But that would exclude Saudi Arabia, China and Russia and many other countries in which PR is booming.

Of course, one could argue that in China PR firms mostly represent Chinese companies, rather than the state. Except that would be dishonest. In China the state owns most major companies and still commands the economy. It also gets its claws, admittedly indirectly, into the Western firms which operate there. (See Google comes of age in China.)

Ms Fiske works for the Public Relations Society of America. I imagine that it would like PR to be a respectable profession. Presumably its members believe that obeying a rather strict code is good in itself or good for business or both. I am interested in the merits of that sort of scheme. (See: When “friends” fallout over “dirty tricks”.) But I also admire the PR firms that say they don’t want to be part of the public relations industry’s hypocrisy.

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My first instinct is that it is very hard to give general advice in a list of three that won’t fall apart at the first hurdle. So from the off I’m pretty convinced he’s going to make the biggest mistake of all. Error #1 being pat. In addition he made three other simplistic errors:

#2 asserting that perception always trumps reality;

#3 advocating the grovel;

#4 advocating over-reaction.

Levick says that in a crisis the first 24 hours are critical. But that’s far from always true. Plenty of proper crises unfold over days, weeks and even months. There is often nothing to be done in the first 24 hours bar trying to find out what’s going on (whilst issuing numbingly dull statements of concern).

Levick says people get (1) stuck in fear (or rather believe that they’re the good guys); (2) stuck thinking more of what they always do will work in a crisis and (3) won’t make the radical changes which are needed. These amount to firms being in denial, and sometimes that’s a problem on all the scores he mentions, I agree.

But none of these general truisms implies or validates the formula Levick advocates. In short that’s that firms at the outset of a crisis should collapse into grovel mode; throw out the good with the bad of their culture (and sort it all out overnight) and shoot anything that limps providing it’s in their own camp.

Levick rightly remarks:

“You can never underestimate how much emotion plays a part in those crisis situations, in those critical 24, 48 hours.”

While that’s often the case, one of the commonest errors in a crisis situation is to pretend those emotions can be capped at the outset by PR spin and hasty action.

Of course, sometimes an immediate dramatic reaction is exactly what is required. In groceries, an instant product recall is a great move when E.coli bacteria is suspected to have contaminated produce. But in cars, it might be the right move only after days or weeks. (Why cause unnecessary panic, which can cause its own crisis?)

In the case of strife-ridden countries, which Levick says his advice covers, the full meaning of a challenge is seldom visible within days. Events rarely require knee-jerk responses so much as considered strategies and smart tactics. To say otherwise would be to put leaders at the mercy of impressions, which change like the wind.

But let’s get one thing clear. When things explode, when people get harmed or killed, property damaged and the environment polluted, organisations had better be penitent (but listen to their lawyers too) and never arrogant. This leads me on to take a closer look at Levick’s second distorted observation:

“Well, in a crisis perception always trumps reality 100% of the time.

“And one of the things that we need to recognize is that it requires a paradigm shift. We need to think and act differently.”

The point about PR is to certainly to stress to bosses that perceptions matter, and that action may be required to create a better perception. But PR does its best work when it bends false public perception into something like alignment with reality. If all we have to offer is to tell clients to accept whatever perception the media have painted, it reveals that we are not up to our job. The Levick line implies that all the paradigm shifts are on the bosses’ side: I say that we may need paradigm shifts all over the place, and they take time.

I do agree with Levick that lots of firms are often almost as awful as it’s possible to be at managing their PR hazards. Actually, their problem is threefold: thinking about risks in order to minimise them and thinking properly about how to deal with disasters when they arise and thinking about the PR dimension of the latter.

Companies – their CEOs and boards - ought to be stress testing the worst cock-ups they can imagine. Banks ought to have assumed that their run of good luck might be a bubble, and one of their making. Even saying this reminds us that at the highest level firms tend to be in denial about the risks they face. So it’s hardly surprising that they end up in denial when things go tits-up (as I know well, nuclear core meltdowns are a classic example of an industry falling into that trap). That leads me to question the last aspect of Levick’s advice:

“The third reason are the following three words: ‘why we can’t'…. everyone has been trained and paid to avoid risk. And now you are asking what risk should we take. And every one will always come up – no matter what the opportunity is. Should we recall the product, should we get rid of that division, should we fire that individual responsible. And everyone will come up with why we can’t. Why we can’t do it for financial reasons. Why we can’t do it for company morale reasons. Why we can’t do it for legal reasons. And the end result is that the opportunity early in a crisis to make a sacrifice and to do way with the brand, or the division or the person that is the cause of the problem ends up being lost…”

Fire a person? Get rid of a division? Do away with a brand? Make a sacrifice as a way out of a dilemma? Does he really believe that in most cases in most crisis-hit bodies they should take such drastic action in the first 24 to 48 hours of a crisis? Regardless of the facts? Regardless of whether one has just cause or not for doing so? I say that’s mostly rotten advice.

Though, as I said earlier, I agree that sometimes his advice might be exactly the right thing to accept. For instance, if the causes of a crisis are transparent, remedial action is obvious, if painful, and occasionally so if only for precautionary reasons.

Yet let’s not panic. Most firms could survive either following or ignoring Levick’s advice. There’s never been a car company ruined by a product recall. There’s never been an oil company wiped out by the consequences of an accident. The truth is that most so-called crises are not crises at all, but dramas. That’s life. Nothing gets done without hazard, and cock-ups come in all flavours. Hence, I maintain that case by case, the wheels fall off generalizations when it comes to crisis management guidance. That means that organisations and their PRs have to be canny and flexible – and certainly not pat.

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Here’s what Mr Blatter had to say at a press conference yesterday to his critics who were calling for his re-election to be delayed:

“Football is not in a crisis, only some difficulties… If governments try to intervene then something is wrong. I think Fifa is strong enough that we can deal with our problems inside Fifa… If you see the final match of the Champions League you must applaud… We are not in a crisis. We are only in some difficulties and these will be solved inside our family.

“The executive committee of Fifa was very pleased to receive the report of the FA regarding the allegations made by Lord Triesman at the House of Commons… We were happy that we can confirm there are no elements in this report which would even prompt any proceedings.

“If somebody wants to change something in the election or in the congress of Wednesday, these are the members of Fifa… This cannot be done by the executive committee, it cannot be done by any authorities outside of Fifa – it’s only the congress itself that can do it. Congress will decide if I am a valid or non-valid candidate.”

Spoken like the bold realist and constitutionalist. Very good “stag-at-bay” stuff. I also thought Mr Blatter was brilliant to say that he wanted to sort out governance - especially on the pitch, and then in his committees. First things first, he implied.

I know: he clearly lost his rag at yesterday’s press conference. He’s an old-style Swiss apparatchik. He is sometimes prone to control-freakish outbursts when faced by a hostile crowd. His PR advisers need to drill in to him that he must keep hold of his statesman-like mask in such situations. But, overall,  it was a very good performance.

His down-to-earth frankness was admirably refreshing. He made it crystal clear that he is, at bottom, accountable to his members (call them his core stakeholders). They have procedures and methods, which he is following, for handling elections of FIFA officials. Only his members, not the media or British prime ministers or the English FA, can unseat him or set the agenda.

Mr Blatter was surely right to say that he dealt with the executive committee members the world’s countries sent him. It was, however, a politically risky remark for him to make. In an ideal world, it was a statement of truth that would have been better coming from someone else. But it wasn’t an ideal world for Mr Blatter yesterday, and I guess he couldn’t hold himself back.

The really good news is that for once the media have not re-set the main agenda; they have not been allowed to take control. Indeed, my beloved British media lacked grace and wisdom perhaps especially because they realized that they were going to lose this battle against him. They behaved liked spoiled rats robbed of a feast. I say they are in denial about the realities of the game. Anyway, it was nice, solid stuff, a glimpse behind the mask.

The truth is that football’s reputation (here I mean its popularity) does not depend on FIFA’s reputation (here I mean its squeaky-clean image) so much as on FIFA’s competence to manage big events and the game’s general affairs. The fact is that FIFA does a good job of managing both.

It is the product that’s FIFA delivers that is loved, not FIFA. And, yes, like the referee FIFA sometimes unavoidably becomes the center of attention and that’s tough.

But in the eyes of the fans, the owners of football clubs and the game’s administrators are a necessary evil. The UK has many club owners who could be considered dodgy, but their money and enthusiasm are more than welcome in the game. Anyway, our English FA hardly sets a shining example of competence that would give it any moral authority over FIFA – see here here and here.

As for sponsors such as Adidas and Coca-Cola, they are not dumb. Sponsors know all about football’s quirks. There have been no surprises. Their recent tut-tutting to journalists is humbug. It will come to nothing because the likes of Coca-Cola and Emirates need the game as much as it needs them.

Of course there may well be a case for reform. Like the EU, the UN, the Olympics and other international bodies, FIFA is a candidate for corruption and for pork barrel politics. Corruption and manoeuvres are always a risk with federal systems where the periphery sends representatives to the centre. Corruption also thrives in situations in which big money, power and reputations are at stake but where there is little scrutiny.

FIFA has a major hand in how a big pot of money is spent and where it is spent. Naturally, FIFA has many supplicants. And, yes, there’s been poor oversight by media and member countries over many years.

It is also true that the British media, which are now screaming loudest at Mr Blatter, are always more agressive than any other when they smell a story. They have a courageous history of tracking down malfeasance in their own abrupt, sometimes rude manner. They are rightly feared by plenty of international bodies which are used to a complacent press.

Still, and contrary to what the British and other media say, Mr Blatter may be exactly the man to put FIFA right, provided he understands how to get the Corporate Governance and scrutiny right in future. Of course, I’m presupposing that he is good at this job, but my gut says he is. He probably knows where the bodies are buried. Besides: one was hardly ecstatic about the main rival candidate, Qatar’s Mohamed Bin Hammam.

I don’t say he’ll make either FIFA or himself lovely or loved, but they may both survive and do pretty good work.

Here’s my parting message:

Are you listening CEOs and PR gurus in crisis-hit organisations? Mr Blatter has shown you all how to come out fighting and win by sticking up for reality and by repelling media freeloaders from taking control of his ship. He won’t be bullied no matter how big the headlines get decrying him and his organisation.

The lesson from this struggle is that firms and institutions don’t have to let the media take control of the agenda during a crisis…. all it takes to win is some PR nous and some balls.

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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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I know that the worst case “media-generated scenario” for Fukushima goes on getting worse every day, nevertheless, we ought to be bold. Indeed, dammit, I’ll risk being cocky. Nuclear PR professionals – but also disinterested intelligent bystanders – need to communicate in a relaxed, mature and non-defensive tone:

• Fabulous new-improved nuclear plant will suffer calamity of some sort at some point.
• Media fallout is the biggest nuclear hazard.
• People work hard to increase their risk of cancer.
• Nuclear has been pretty safe so far, and better than the greenest source.
• We can have it all – nukes, coal, oil, hydro, wind, wave, solar and every other alternative energy source you can envisage.

See talk tracks, proof points and soundbites below…

“Fabulous new-improved nuclear plant will suffer calamity of some sort at some point.”

There’s no reason why nuclear spokespeople should say otherwise. They can even add that whilst science, engineering and risk analysis suggests it is extremely unlikely, the extremely unlikely will as likely as not turn into some kind of reality. But so what? Particle physics meets sod’s law, like everything else.

The point that nuclear PRs need to repeat is this: we will go on getting better at developing nuclear technology. We shall go on getting better at creating nuclear plant suited for the environment in which they are located. Fukushima is the same age of technology as Chernobyl and TMI and they provide us with lessons for the future.

“Media fallout is the biggest nuclear hazard.”

For a few days or weeks some population (like today’s Tokyo) will face some uncertainty. The media will make it as bad as possible. Maybe that’s the point. Almost all the media have talked nonsense about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl since they happened. As the media’s eclipse of Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami victims in preference for speculation over Fukushima reveals, it’s like a disease with these people.

“People work hard to increase their risk of cancer.”

Maybe things will go wrong and they’ll face an actual higher cancer risk from nulcear power as well as today’s “merely” feared one. But the most concerned type of citizen already works hard to create increased cancer risk: they diet and jog and meditate so as to live longer. After all, longevity is their biggest cancer risk (and almost everyone else’s too), and, in the nuclear age, we are living longer lives than ever, thanks to nuclear medicine and obsessive lifestyle anxiety.

“Nuclear has been pretty safe so far, and better than the greenest source.”

Regardless of Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now (with luck) Fukushima, nuclear energy has an unsurpassed safety record among the major electricity-generating sources. For instance, there have been 0.006 fatalities per GWe year of nuclear electricity produced compared to 15 times as many fatalities per GWe year for natural gas; and 1000 times as many fatalities per GWe year for coal, oil and hydropower.

Here’s a few examples for hydropower. In China around 170,000 people died when Banqiao and Shimantan burst in 1974; almost 30,000 immediately and the rest because of latent effects. A decade earlier Europe also had its fair share of similar accidents. In 1959, 400 people died in France when the Fréjus reservoir ruptured; and in 1963, 2000 died in Italy because of crumbling ground at the Vajont reservoir.

We shouldn’t forget the explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform killed 167 people in 1988. BPs recent problems must be fresh in all our minds, too.

If the scale of a potential accident rules out an industry’s right to exist, then what are we to make of Bhopal, India, in 1984? A Union Carbide chemical plant there killed three thousand people when 40 tons of toxic methyl isocyanate gas leaked and contaminated the surrounding environment. But we all know that the chemical and pharmaceutical industries benefits many more people than they harm.

I’m not trying to spread fear here about other energy and industrial sources. All energy is bottled force. The entire energy industry has mostly handled its controlled release responsibly. But the evidence suggests that nuclear technology is low risk. Windscale killed nobody. Three Mile Island killed nobody and left no measurable long-term carcinogenic risks in its wake.

Meanwhile, we should remind the world that the Chernobyl accident killed around 50 people in 1986. Most of its exclusion zone is now being dismantled and being re-settled and farmed again safely. Though as many as 9, 000 people (4, 000 of those among the 6 million most affected population) might die a slightly premature death from Chernobyl-related cancers. However not only is that worst-case outcome unlikely, we shall never know because that statistic cannot be measured among the many millions of people it encompasses.

The biggest risk from nuclear energy is people’s fear of it. In the aftermath of Chernobyl, unfounded fear and anxiety was the most damaging consequence of the accident investigators could discover (see here for a full interrogation of Chernobyl’s death toll). But that fear is something the media helps generate.

Hence, the media also must learn from its past mistakes. It, too, must face up to its responsibility to protect the public. A little less hype and scaremongering over Fukushima would make a most welcome start. The next step would be to have an honest debate about risk and energy policy. That’s something nuclear PR can help facilitate.

“We can have it all.”

However, we can have nearly everything: nuclear (with the odd calamity); oil and gas (with more frequent calamities; bought from dictators and religious fundamentalists); solar (might become seriously lovable and economic quite soon); wind (not always, and not where you’d like it); hydro (big hazards; plenty of enemies); conservation (if we can be bothered to live like cavemen). It’s all possible, and all has real risk or drawback, including (variously) fear, guilt, patience, or tedium. Which do we prefer? Which most solves the global warming problem?

Well, clearly nuclear energy has fewer greenhouses gases than coal, oil and gas. Green alternative energy sources provide far from proven technological solutions, at greater cost than nuclear energy. Moreover they have to yet to show that they are adequate to the task of replacing coal, oil, gas and nuclear energy. The least risky route of all would be if our governments hedged their bets and adopted a mixed bag of solutions (read all of the above).

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Clearly, the pictures of the reactor building’s side walls and ceiling exploding that we all saw live on TV were startling. But it was obviously not a nuclear explosion. As Malcolm Grimston, associate fellow at Chatham House in London, remarked:

“Thankfully, although the explosion was spectacular, it wasn’t devastating and it seems the force was not sufficient to breach the reactor’s metal shell.”

Of course, the authorities in Japan rightly evacuated around 170 000 people from a twenty kilometer radius from the plant. But that was a precautionary move, not one born out of panic. There was some mildly radioactive steam and or hydrogen that needed venting from the plant. It was wise to remove people from its vicinity while the gas dispersed harmlessly into the atmosphere.

To put all this in perspective, the authorities have rated the incident so far at 4 on the 0-7 international scale of severity. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster was rated 7, with the official death toll being just under 50, though as many as 4,000 could die eventually as a consequence of that accident. The 1979 Three Mile Island accident was rated 5. Notably in that case nobody was killed or seriously injured, and no long term health consequences are expected.

Sure, the recent earthquake and Tsunami have pushed the safety defences at Fukushima to the limit. We don’t know yet whether the two troubled reactor cores at Fukushima “merely” suffered fuel damage, a partial meltdown or the near full meltdown that occurred at Three Mile Island. But we can say with some certainty that that lack of knowledge is not that important. It took years before we knew the full extent of the meltdown at Three Mile Island. That’s because it is not possible to poke one’s head, or even a camera, into the reactor core until it cools down and the radiation levels allow it.

There is something very credible and laudable about Japan’s safety-first nuclear culture at work in Fukushima. They have flooded their reactors with seawater – which effectively destroys them – to make 100% sure that they cool down harmlessly; the main threat being hydrogen and steam explosions caused by the reactor’s heat.

The picture emerging from Fukushima is “reassuring”. The onsite and offsite consequences – no deaths and just a few injuries and some dispersal of mildly radioactive gas – have been limited. That’s what a safety case and the regulatory authorities demand from a nuclear plant’s in-depth multi-layered defences.

It is my view, that the Japanese handling of this nuclear incident at Fukushima - whether they made mistakes or not – will validate the safety case for old nukes.

So there’s something very skewed, overblown even, about the media’s reporting on Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami disasters: we know there are tens of thousands of people dead, hundreds of thousands more homeless or stranded, yet everybody is talking excessively about a troubled nuclear plant that has not and most likely will not kill anybody.

However the media were playing up to stereotypes over Japan’s nuclear troubles. There’s a rich history associated with nuclear scaremongering, not least because the public has an appetite for horror stories. At Three Mile Island in 1979 the meltdown occurred at the outset of the shutdown. The media and politicians then spent weeks terrorizing the world as they speculated about the terrible impact of a meltdown that had been so undramatic that nobody noticed it had happened already with little consequence.

As I have reported extensively on this online review, while Chernobyl was an horrific disaster, it was no where near as bad as the doom-mongers claimed – see here here and here.

So the western nuclear industry now has a major PR challenge on its hands. The challenge will be to convince the world that core meltdowns do happen and that the evidence shows that they don’t matter much (Chernobyl being a unique case). That calls for some straight and upfront risk management communication, one that can show that new nukes are even more reassuringly safe than old ones.

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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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