All businesses are about relationship-building. Butchers, say, depend on it. As in: “I’ve some nice sirloin today. A bone for the dog?” One pitch of modern PR is to say that we manage the relationships other people can’t reach – or don’t spot. And indeed we are right to stress that nowadays, reputational risk is everywhere: your suppliers can let you down as easily as your managers. So, yes, PR is about a clients’ 360-degree reputational risk. We have to look at our clients’ relationship risk and its way upstream, way downstream – and all around. To some extent, we can fix those relationships, or find people who can.

But I think we’re starting to go too far, as though PRs were uniquely suited to giving a sort of therapy, or a laying-on of hands. We are at risk of not spotting that messages and influencing behaviour remain our core business.

Here’s an example from a popular blog and thought leader of the muddle PRs are currently in:

“Communicating (communications departments typically engage in: talking) is not a particularly useful skill. Relating is. Maybe it’s time to reclaim the words “public relations” and, more importantly, the philosophical principles that underpin those words. (Paul Holmes’s blog here)

Of course, I accept that our trade is public relations. But I insist that the essence of that remains preparing and communicating messages. We improve people’s relationships by ensuring they understand the value of developing their messages carefully, getting them out, and living up to them.

That means we are like diplomats, journalists and yes (blimey) philosophers. And we do indeed go further: we remind our clients, over and over, that good messages produce their own weakness and risk; we remind them that they have to walk the talk. A stated aspiration is a hostage to fortune, a challenge to our critics (stakeholders, indeed!).

You can have all the relationships you like with the media, with one’s neighbours, with one’s customers, with the NGOs, and when you don’t deliver the reality you’ve told them to expect, they’ll still all pile in on you with gay abandon and crocodile tears.

So of course, we PRs build relationships. But relationships are no sort of insurance or guarantee. They may not even be the best sort of investment. What you need is good behaviour, solidly communicated.

I’m trying to get it across that winning friends is not the necessary or sufficient condition of influencing people. The relationship of trust (which PRs may well want between themselves and their clients and the rest of the world, that great Other) is not the same as or even like the relationship of, say, friendship or affection. Reputations are about more than relationships.

Perhaps I can put it this way: I often trust people or institutions I don’t know and don’t like. I don’t have a relationship with judges, the police, firefighters, the surgeons in my local hospital, the drivers of Shell’s road tankers. I don’t want one either. I just want to be able to trust them.

By the way, new media don’t change any of this much. The people who twitter and blog may believe they are a new social entity, and PRs may believe that this new sociology requires a new sort of relationship-building. Like Harold Burson here, I doubt it.

Much was made of the new relationship Obama had forged with the American people in the new ether. Yeah, well, maybe. Right now, he seems to have gone on to hack off the floating, middling, uncommitted American centre ground. Will he get the enthused kids back? Has he got an ongoing, er, relationship with them? We’ll see. It looks to me that in important measure, what he surfed was a wave of enthusiasm, and it may have broken on the shore in a trillion sparkling droplets. His vast virtual Rollodex may develop into a relationship, but we can’t know yet because a relationship is a thing which gets a history or it isn’t anything.

Moreover, we’ve always known that the best PR is heard and not seen. That means that PR has mostly an indirect relationship to its target audiences – through the media, through third-party opinion formers and other influencers (advocates) whether that’s online or off, through the media or by other means.

PR’s hand is even more remote when, as Edward Bernays showed us with his “Torches for Freedom”, it manufactures consent by engineering events that help create a new social consensus or climate of opinion.

So I come back to the importance of asking the question, relationships with whom? Of course, most institutions and firms want good relationships with clients, opinion-formers, hacks, enemies, politicians stakeholders, neighbours and everybody else.

But, actually, most of those audiences don’t have time to have a relationship with you. What most audiences require is the right message, at the right moment via the right channel. Most of the people who determine what reputation you acquire (reputations are conferred by others) will respond positively (or dangerously). They won’t do so because they’ve been nurtured directly by PRs.

For advocacy to work, of course, people need to be persuaded to think a certain thing. Hence, it makes sense for PRs to engineer a genuine invitation to accept and meet informed challenge by the target audience – but very often still without engaging directly as the PR team – for anything controversial or requiring consent or acceptance by various stakeholders (new runways, licences to operate etc.).

Of course there are exceptions. Those are strategic and tactical considerations (Ryanair doesn’t talk to PlaneStupid, but many firms talk to Greenpeace, but some won’t talk to either and some talk to both).

There’s no love in war, competition, public opinion and the media, so why bother to be loved or liked? Being understood and trusted should be enough. That means putting integrity, truthfulness, evidence and authenticity at the heart of communication.

Note: this was first posted in 2009.

No related pages.

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

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.

No related pages.

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.

No related pages.

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.

No related pages.

For those who missed it, here’s a recap. Armando Giovanni Iannucci, the political satirist, Twittered to his 80, 000 followers:

“Still surprised that, despite their market dominance, Starbucks haven’t eliminated the slight smell of lavatory you get as you enter.”

As Kellaway reports, within minutes, Darcy Willson-Rymer, the UK head of Starbucks, replied:

“Thanks for your feedback. Which store did you visit?”

Mr Iannucci confirmed that he was at the Warwick services. He added, however, that the horrid pong was reeking in several stores and the chemical waft hits you by the front door. Kellaway says that the managing director thanked him again and promised to investigate. The satirist then tweeted:

“Good news. Starbucks are now looking into their pervasive lavatory smell.”

Now people at the highest level across the world are talking about Lavatorygate at Starbucks!

This little example highlights how Twitter’s supposedly personal format is a public trap waiting to snare the unwary. According to Kellaway, Lavatorygate raises three more important questions:

“The first is: does the coffee chain really smell like a lavatory? If it does, the MD should not have been relying on this circuitous and random route to make the discovery. Surely his staff should have tipped him off long ago.

“The second question is about reputation. Does it matter that a satirist tells his 80,000 Twitter followers that he thinks Starbucks stinks? I doubt it. As far as I can tell none of them responded and I’d be amazed if even one person had coffee that morning at Caffè Nero instead.

“Still, even if Mr Iannucci’s remarks were potentially damaging, they raise a third question: what should Starbucks have done about it?”

The answer, of course, is nothing on Twitter, particularly as the comment was not even directed @Starbucks. Replying, as she says, was a waste of senior management time. So she Twittered Darcy Willson-Rymer and asked if he did his own Tweeting or whether somebody did it for him. He replied via a tweet:

“No, all replies and tweets are from me. I think it is important to listen to customers and learn from the mistakes we make so I try to respond to all.”

So she set a test and wrote:

“Starbucks is a riddle. The coffee is weak and pricey, the decor horrid and the place often grubby. So why do we go on going there?”

Twenty hours later, there was still no reply. She comments:

“Maybe it’s because Mr Willson-Rymer doesn’t know the answer any more than I do. Or maybe because I used a Twitter account that only has 10 followers and so this disgusted, yet loyal, customer doesn’t count.”

She also followed up with other people who had complained about Starbucks on Twitter. She asked them if they’d received replies. They hadn’t. That’s the point about setting an expectation on Twitter. If Mr Willson-Rymer is serious, then he’s no longer MD, but the full time manager of satirical trivia about Starbucks on Twitter. When he starts getting picky about which ones to respond to, he risks pissing off those whom he cold-shoulders.

But why do we use Starbucks? I think it’s mostly because PLUs do. Many a product works on this crowd-induced trend-setting basis, and it trumps various inadequacies or inconveniences. It certainly overcomes the problem of over-priced merchandise, even in recessions. It accounts for a lot of Apple’s success. In short, some trends are just not rational. They are a testament to great product roll out (execution) and, not least, great branding backed by great marketing that creates status-enhancing products and or different life-styles choices. For sure, neither company’s PR is exemplary, and neither are their products – see here for Apple and here for Starbucks.

No related pages.

Browsing and Web searching are yesterday’s stuff, the next big thing is “getting” things from major suppliers on the internet via apps for a fee. In the words of Anderson and Michael Wolff in the latest Wired:

“Now it’s the Web’s turn to face the pressure for profits and the walled gardens that bring them. Openness is a wonderful thing in the nonmonetary economy of peer production. But eventually our tolerance for the delirious chaos of infinite competition finds its limits. Much as we love freedom and choice, we also love things that just work, reliably and seamlessly. And if we have to pay for what we love, well, that increasingly seems OK. Have you looked at your cell phone or cable bill lately?”

As Anderson and Wolff say, consumers will pay for convenience. How else can we explain the success of iTunes selling otherwise free music for 99 Cents a pop? And therein lies the secret of the internet.

Rather than professional content becoming valueless, it has risen – or is in the process of being resurrected – once more to become the most valued commodity of all in the media, distribution and consumer world:

“We are returning to a world that already exists — one in which we chase the transformative effects of music and film instead of our brief (relatively speaking) flirtation with the transformative effects of the Web.

“After a long trip, we may be coming home.”

Explaining how this works out in business terms, they say:

“…technologists have steered clear of actual media businesses, seeing themselves as renters of systems and third-party facilitators, often deeply wary of any involvement with content. (See, for instance, Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s insistence that his company is not in the content business.) Jobs, on the other hand, built two of the most successful media businesses of the past generation: iTunes, a content distributor, and Pixar, a movie studio. Then, in 2006, with the sale of Pixar to Disney, Jobs becomes the biggest individual shareholder in one of the world’s biggest traditional media conglomerates — indeed much of Jobs’ personal wealth lies in his traditional media holdings.”

What does this mean for PRs? Well, for starters the old top down model of influence still applies on the internet. PRs are going to have do some rethinking about how they advocate conversations, crowd sourcing and word of mouth PR. Some old-world notions of brands, reputation, quality and service are going to come back in to play (they never really went away). But at the same time, as Anderson and Wolf point out:

“…the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation, and the like. But the notion of the Web as the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt.”

And, as Anderson and Wolff also note:

“According to Compete, a Web analytics company, the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010. ‘Big sucks the traffic out of small,’ Milner [Yuri Milner] says. ‘In theory you can have a few very successful individuals controlling hundreds of millions of people. You can become big fast, and that favors the domination of strong people.’

“Milner sounds more like a traditional media mogul than a Web entrepreneur. But that’s exactly the point. If we’re moving away from the open Web, it’s at least in part because of the rising dominance of businesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms of traditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivist utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in many ways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web’s ethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back.”

So it’s not yet a done deal when it comes to who controls what and how. However the trend is certainly clear. The utopian dream of paradigm shifts is over. Welcome back to familiar reality – even if it is virtual and digital.

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Utopian PRs have been dreaming about “one world, people and planet” in which all the barriers between various publics come tumbling down. They envisage a connected world in which the lines of demarcation between internal, boundary and external stakeholders dissolve as they connect transparently and interactively in a value chain that links interdependent companies to their consumers and markets.

But such views ignore some major issues.

One is that in an open digitally-connected world, there’s more need than ever to conspire – organise, ghettoise, corral – to keep things confidential and hidden behind closed walls.

Indeed, we will see the kind of problem which Freedom of Information rules can produce: a clever, covert, closed decision making in which everything which really matters is centripetally driven to a cabal. (Remember the government of Tony Blair?)

Arguably, the more open things become and the more control bosses relinquish to networks, the more restrictions they will have to impose on those who operate in them. This might, paradoxically, lead to even tighter control on commercially sensitive information than exists today. It might lead corporates to adopt a civil service mantra of only releasing information on a need to know basis.

Another issue that the utopian PR camp ignores is competition. Companies forging various so-called value networks (I’ll argue later that PRs should avoid using the term) are as likely as not to form lots of them. They are as likely as not to value some more than others and to find themselves involved in contradictory and conflicting chains.

This will lead to lots of tension and uncertainty within corporates and institutions, such as government service providers, as they are forced to choose between their various product ranges, service offerings and partnership relationships, according to either their broader interests or their ability to sustain them. The resolution of such problems, or issues, will remain driven from the centre, from the top, by corporate or institutional bosses concerned with strategy.

Moreover, because of competition, PRs at either end of a chain, not to mention the middle, might find themselves pulling in different directions and unable to always align their interests, messages and narratives. There is no reason to believe that just because we introduce new tools into the workplace that real-world tensions, politics and commercial interests, will evaporate. We should, I warn, avoid falling into the technological determinism trap.

My point is that we should not think that corporations are about to relinquish control to horizontal or flat digital networks. We should not kid ourselves that top-down management and communication are about to die out. Neither should we imagine, as the PR utopians do, that existing internal silos, lines of responsibility and accountability, will be or should be altered very much by commercial Web 2.0 applications.

Here’s what Norman Lewis, Managing Partner at Open Knowledge UK, had to say on this when he commented on my piece There’s no social media revolution:

… it’s definitely the case that social media like any other technology does not alter the realities of the business world. (I very much like your points about the chaos that would ensue in a company if everyone could relate to sales, customers etc). This is based upon the naive hippie prejudice that enterprises can become democracies run in the interests of employees empowered to act like free agents.

Another of the problems that’s being overlooked by utopian PRs is how social media usage in the personal sphere is maturing. They seem to have missed the point that the major stumbling block for social media of all kinds is privacy, trust and control over personal data. It would seem that social media users are emerging from the blindly heady immature days of the early adoption period and starting to ask tough questions. Anybody really interested in this would do well to read Facebook challenged by ambitious upstarts on BBC online.

So already in the personal usage of Web 2.0, privacy and transparency are emerging as issues which are tempering how it is used. But in the commercial sphere the risks and drawbacks are fairly clear from the very beginning. While knowledge-sharing, collaboration and instant feedback and decision-making all have great appeal, in fact IP, confidential information and in-house knowledge lie at the heart of commercial value. The open information flows between various players presents itself both as an opportunity and as a risk.

But there’s even more reason for PRs not to get over-excited about Web 2.0′s ability to transform the workplace as utopian PRs do when they talk about paradigm shifts. Some believe that Michael Porter’s value chain model has already been replaced – or almost so – “by fuzzy (and not linear) and immaterial (rather than material) networks that normally disintegrate the distinction between internal and external publics.” But the truth is that Web 2.0′s commercial applicability is in its infancy and has yet to make a great impact.

The point the utopians miss is how much experimentation will be required to ascertain where and how to make Web 2.0 and social media applications work best in the corporate and public sector domain given the virtual impossibility of measuring their benefits accurately. But don’t get me wrong. I favour innovation and risk. I decry our current risk-adverse culture. I look forward to seeing more Web 2.0 applications introduced by business and institutions to deliver products and services. I don’t doubt for a moment that they can boost productivity and add great value.

This leads me to flag an event which I think PRs should attend, and to use it to explain why I think PRs shouldn’t use the terms networked society and value networks: International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 – Milan June 9 – 10.

The term Enterprise 2.0 was coined by Andrew McAfee, professor at Harvard Business School (Technology and Operations Management Unit). He defined it thus:

“…the use of platforms of social software in an emerging way inside the organization or between the organization, their partner and their client.”

The three building blocks which constitute E2.0 are:

• Social software: instruments which enable people to be in contact and collaborate together creating an online community of practice;
• Platforms, or rather, digital environments:  co-created interactive collaboration spaces that are visible to all users at all times;
• Emergence: the capacity to make visible the application structure and basic patterns of interactions between people.

As the event’s website explains, in McAfee’s words:

“Enterprise 2.0 technologies make the intranet similar to what the web is already: an online platform, continuously evolving, defined by the spread of independent user actions.”

I find the definitions and explanations provided by the International Forum’s organisers very useful. I’ve been arguing for some while that for PRs the terms “network society” and “values network” lack specificity and are confusing because they are in-house IT-speak. What the utopian PRs forget is that PR is and always will be about communicating with publics via networks and that society is nothing but networks personified. Moreover, all human networks are united by common interests and, or, values.

For those PRs wanting to get up to speed on social computing and E2.0 (both terms are useful and convey specific meaning in a PR context), I strongly recommend the following experts who explore – from different perspectives – this emerging field:

• The Social Enterprise – Italian blog on Enterprise 2.0
• The Business Impact of Information Technology (IT) – Andrew McAfee
• Enterprise Web 2.0 – Dion Hinchcliffe
• Futures Diagnosis – Norman Lewis

No related pages.

Before we go on, it is worth building on part 1′s theme: what exactly do the Stockholm Accords expect to achieve? Here’s what the event’s website says about their objective:

“The aim of the Stockholm Accords is to articulate and establish the role of public relations in the “communicativeorganization”[sic] within a fast-evolving digital and value-network society.”

In essence, the Accords suppose that we live in a new “networked society in which communicative organizations are vital to organisational success” (forgive the clumsy words, they’re theirs, not mine).

In essence my beef is that this exercise over-complicates everything. Most PR is an effort to help clients both be and appear more attractive. You can usefully enrich that proposition by noting that there are internal and external audiences; that everything about an organisation can be part of its good or bad messages; that building up a good reputation may be useful for when things go wrong (as they will). One may want to stress how non-stop and intrusive and persistent modern observers are. Perversely, the globalised, modern world is more like a village than ever: everybody thinks everything is their business.

As I argued in part 1, the Accords ignore the obvious: society is, and always has been, networks personified. Moreover, all human interaction depends upon communication and relationships, or nothing whatever would have been or will ever be achieved. Of course, the digital bit is sort of new. I say sort of because the internet is now second or third generation. It strikes me that the Accords’ authors are really saying that their thinking boils down to considering technology’s influence on human behaviour. This narrow obsession has sent them and their new definition of PR’s role off in the wrong direction.

There’s no wisdom in a mob, but there’s often treasure buried in crowds. So, of course, I accept there is something in Reed’s Law. (See: “The Law of the Pack”). I accept its proposition that digital networks can scale exponentially by transforming technological platforms into social networks that add value. But in the business world, Reed’s Law is just a statement of potential. It remains a theoretical construct that might prove to be hopeless if taken too far. The commercial world is in recession. It is not currently up for the risky experimentation and investment that would be required to test the weaknesses and strengths of Reed’s Law. This is something I discussed in part 1 No. 2 & No. 14 (without mentioning Reed). In part 1, I also cited SM’s irrelevance in the British General Election and its only fleeting influence on American politics.

My charge is that the authors of the Stockholm Accords lack historical or sociological insight. Most of today’s social developments from the breakdown of traditional politics, to the shift in community alignments, or the fall of religious influence, to the decline in trust in, and authority of, traditional institutions, pre-dates the internet.

In other words, the internet and social media usage were shaped in the wake of already existing currents, including the already declining mass media. That was particularly the case with SM, which is more often used as a retreat from public life rather than as its lifeblood. That’s one thing China’s SM usage has in common with the West’s. There’s mass disengagement and passivity in society, which is the polar opposite of empowerment, which so many public relations professionals (let’s just call them ‘PRs’) like to crow about. That’s not to say SM is irrelevant, or that it does not have influence or empower people, sometimes, in this or that circumstance or usage.

It is the failure of the Stockholm Accords to look at these real world tensions during the boom and now during the recession, and the Accords’ myopic worship of all things digital, which I criticise. But let me make it plain. This blog celebrates technology and advocates innovation. It is obsessed with understanding them and with exploiting their potential. But it does not endorse technological determinism, which I believe the Accords’ authors do.

So, that’s the preamble. Let’s now look at the Stockholm Accords one by one.

Stockholm Accords on governance:

“The increasingly adopted stakeholder governance model empowers board members and organisational leaders as ultimate custodians of stakeholder relationship strategies and policies, as well as of monitoring their implementation.

“In today’s value networks, a communicative organization requires timely knowledge of economic, social, political, legal and environmental developments, as well as opportunities and risks affecting the organisation, its direction, its actions and its communication.

“Public relations professionals:
• co-create organizational values, principles, strategies, policies and processes;
• constantly report on the dynamics of stakeholder involvement;
• inform, shape the organisation’s overall communication abilities;
•  measure, evaluate and account for results;
• deliver timely analysis and recommendations to ensure an effective governance of stakeholder relationships, enhancing transparency, trust and sustaining the organisation’s ‘licence to operate.’”

My reply

I dealt with the above extensively in part 1. But let me now add a few more brief remarks;

• The stakeholder governance model or doctrine is seriously flawed. An organisation can’t look to outsiders as the first source of its probity and efficiency.
• Firms, governments and institutions primarily pursue self-interest. This will include a measure of enlightened and widened self-interest.
• PR is indeed uniquely useful in our complicated, media-orientated times. But we should beware over-stating the newness of our skills and roles.

Stockholm Accords on management:

“Effective and timely decision-making related to operations and resource management are essential for organizations seeking to enhance their license to operate. These management choices must be sensitive to the concerns of internal and external stakeholders, seeking equilibrium between societal and organizational goals.
A communicative organization listens to its stakeholders, uses this input to improve the quality of its decisions, and communicates through its behavior.

“Public relations professionals:
° help understand and interpret broader societal, political and economic interests and aspirations;
° participate to the solution of organizational issues and lead those that are particularly focused on stakeholder relationships;
° help to legitimize the organization; by increasing the communicative value of products, processes, services; and building financial, legal, relational and operational capital.”

My reply

Yes, PRs are the professional diplomats of the modern organisation’s internal and external relationships. But we won’t do the job better by having theories and ambitions which are too fancy for the valuable but recognisable work they have to do. Way too much of the Stockholm Accords’ approach brings in more posy sociology, management-speak, media studies, post modern guff. This is the way to lose the interest of clients and audiences alike.

Stockholm Accords on sustainability:

“An organization’s sustainability is based on balancing today’s demands with the ability to meet future needs, based on economic, environmental and social dimensions.

“In this network society, sustainability leadership offers a transformational opportunity for the communicative organization to enhance it’s license to operate and demonstrate success across the triple bottom  line.- economic, social and environmental.

“Public relations professionals identify, involve and engage key stakeholders contributing to appropriate sustainability policies and programs by:
• interpreting society’s expectations for sound economical, social and environmental investments that show a return to the organization (the advocate);
• creating a listening culture – an open system that allows the organization to anticipate, adapt and respond (the listener);
• ensuring stakeholder participation to identify what information should be transparently and authentically reported (the reporter);
• going beyond today’s priorities to anticipate the needs of tomorrow, by engaging stakeholders and management in long-term thinking (the leader).”

My reply

Sustainability has to do with robustness and flexibility, which can be darn hard things to reconcile. We need to be modest: sustainability is about the future, a thing we know very little about. We should not pretend to know the recipe for survival (or to assume, for instance, that environmentalists are any cleverer at it than supposedly un-green capitalists).

Stockholm Accords on the new boundaries of internal communication:

“Internal communication enhances recruitment, retention, development of employee loyalty and commitment to organizational goals by ever more diverse and segmented publics.

“In the network society a communicative organization goes far beyond today’s traditional definition of full-time employees, understanding that internal stakeholders now include full-timers with tenure generally shortening, part-timers, seasonal employees, contractors, consultants, suppliers, agents, distributors, volunteers and more.

“Public relations professionals constantly address:
° how organizational leaders communicate;
° how knowledge is shared;
° how decisions are made;
° how processes and structures are created;
° and expand communication to include many boundary publics that are also often considered as highly trusted sources of information about the organization and essential players contributing to the organization’s success.”

My reply

Yes, many of an organisation’s relationships are now both important and fleeting or arm’s length. Actually, that will often require an unattractive wariness. The need for secrecy, privacy and caution is greater than ever and has to be communicated as well as possible.

Stockholm Accords on the new boundaries of external communication:

“The network society mandates that a communicative organization expand its scope and skills to focus on customers*, investors*, communities*, governments*, active citizenship groups*,  industry groups*, mainstream, digital and social media*, and other situational stakeholders*.

“Public relations professionals:
° promote, support and contribute to modify products, services or processes;
° bring the voice of the organization into regulatory and community decisions;
° adopt social networking and research skills and tools to listen to stakeholder demands and report to management so that they may be appropriately interpreted and, where relevant and effective, integrated into the decision making process;
° strengthen brand loyalty* and equity*, thus reinforcing the organization’s license to operate;
° work with all organizational functions, through every step of production and delivery, to craft and implement effective communication programs*.
° actively participate in dialogue*, evaluate and measure results*, and accordingly adjust their practices.”

My reply

This looks like PR’s pitch to stick its nose in everywhere. Nice try, and to some extent justified.

Stockholm Accords on co-ordination of internal and external communication:

“In value networks, each communicative issue* is multi faceted*, multi stakeholder* and inter relational within and between different networks* and positioned in diverse legal frameworks.

“The communicative organization must balance global transparency, finite resources and time sensitive demands dealing with dynamic changes in inside/outside territorial borders and new conflicts of interests emerging from multiple stakeholder participation*.
Dialogue with internal, boundary and external stakeholders must be coordinated with the organization’s mission*, vision*, values*, implementation*, promises*, as well as actions* and behaviors*.

“Public Relations professionals:
° research, develop, monitor and adjust organizational behavior and communication behaviors providing leadership for issues based on stakeholder and societal relationships;
° develop a knowledge base that includes social and psychological sciences, best practices and formative research to create, evaluate, measure and implement programs for continuous improvement.”

My reply

This looks like a pitch for PRs to be rulers of the universe: all-seeing, all-knowing, etc. I don’t mind this accord but it is not so much edifying and energising as yawn-making. How about: “Almost every aspect of your work will convey a message about your organisation, so expect a good PR to take an interest in everything you do.”

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