Politics & Language: Political Abuse and the Web – Bernard Keane

On Tuesday 15 March 2011, The Sydney Institute held a discussion on the use of language in political debate developing with a multi-media world, the free use of the web and 24-hour news outlets. Bernard Keane, the Canberra correspondent for Crikey.com., joined Shelley Gare, author and journalist, and Tom Switzer, editor of the Spectator Australia to consider what might be happening to public discourse and the use of language.

POLITICS & LANGUAGE: POLITICAL ABUSE AND THE WEB

 

BERNARD KEANE

 

 

I’d like to begin at the obvious starting point for a discussion about political abuse and the internet: the weavers of early modern England.

Weavers played an important role in the spread of Protestantism in sixteenth century England, for several reasons. The industry operated in towns along key trading routes, meaning weavers were regularly exposed to news, new books and new ideas. And it was a highly literate profession, conducive to debate and argument.

The seventeenth century puritan divine Richard Baxter wrote:

I have known many in the long loome that can set their sermon notes or a good book before them and read and discourse together for mutual edification while they worked.

 

“Read and discourse together”. The connectedness of weaving made it a perfect vector for the bibliocentrism and message of personal salvation of Protestantism and, in the seventeenth century, political radicalism.

Scroll forward 200 years, and we see another wave of connectedness that had enormous political implications, as industrialisation drove the development of trade unions, connecting together otherwise powerless individuals not just to establish basic protections for wages and conditions and undertake collective bargaining but, eventually, to try to drive wider social and economic change at a national and even if only by way of ambition, at an international level.

These waves of connectedness were driven by, but also limited by, the communications platforms available at the time: the printing press and horseback communication, until well into the 19th century, then telegraphy, railways and the beginnings of mass media.

The internet is another wave of interconnectedness, the biggest one of all. It is different in degree, not in kind, but the degree is very big: the internet connects completely, globally. Until the late twentieth century, communities were limited by geography. People could communicate across the world, but not in networks.

They were connected but not interconnected in the way they were with their families, neighbours or work colleagues.

This interconnectedness is what is important, not the technology or the platforms. It was what weavers did with their bibles and their tracts that was important, not the printing press or the trade routes that delivered them. It was what radicalised, class-conscious workers did as unionists that was important, not printing presses or railways. And it’s not Facebook or Twitter that’s important; it’s what people use them for.

What’s all this have to do with political abuse and the web? Before the internet, political debate relied on what I call – just to continue the religious theme – the sacerdotal concept of journalism. Editors and journalists mediated like priests between politicians and mass audiences, deciding what to tell them, and framing how issues were debated.

The mainstream media acted, to use another metaphor, as gatekeepers of political debate.

And the medium, in this case, very closely mirrored the message. The media had this role because, courtesy of the high cost of printing and distribution systems, and of broadcast infrastructure – not to mention the politically controlled licencing of broadcasters – media access was limited to a very few people. Political debate was thus a broadcast model. Audiences could participate only by tuning in and watching the debate, the parameters of which were framed by editors, producers and journalists. The only debates in which audiences could genuinely participate were via talkback radio and Letters to the Editor, both controlled by the mainstream media.

Interconnectedness has changed the debate, fundamentally. The broadcast model is breaking down. Now, the mainstream media are only part of the debate, much of which now occurs between people, unmediated by anyone else, online. The audience is much more in control of the debate because they’re now talking amongst themselves, rather than passively watching the debate.

The debate is therefore very different from that controlled by the mainstream media. It’s coarser. Snarkier. Often angrier. There’s far less quality control. But it’s often far more informed on specialist issues, less likely to be caught up in the sort of groupthink that frequently pervades Press Gallery political coverage. Above all it’s infinitely more democratic.

It’s also far more fragmented – and I’ll speak more on this in a moment. For generations there were three media for political debate – print, radio and television. Now there are a huge number of platforms in addition to the traditional 3. There are media web sites, and comments sections under articles. There are mainstream media blogs. There are independent media sites like Crikey. There’s Twitter and Facebook – vast amounts of political debate goes on on Facebook on people’s walls. There are blogs, some with thousands of readers. There are discussion boards. Political debate often breaks out on discussion boards that have nothing to do with politics. There are activist networks like the egregious and apparently omnipotent GetUp. And that’s just for domestic politics. Political debate is now a spectrum of conversations on different platforms, with different rules, different tones, different audiences and different expectations.

Much of this was a debate that was always occurring outside the reach of the mainstream media. It occurred in homes, in pubs, over back fences, in workplaces. But now it occupies the same space that the media occupies. And it is no longer limited by geography. It occurs on a regional, national international scale, between strangers, among groups who would not otherwise have any connection. And anyone can participate.

Has interconnectedness ushered in a cyberutopia of high-quality political debate? Of course not.

When you allow people to connect up, you get people whom we’d all prefer not be connected up. Not just pedophiles, terrorists and organised crime, but conspiracy theorists, for which the internet is the ideal breeding ground. 9/11 truthers, Holocaust deniers, anti-semites, religious zealots, right-wing crazies, left-wing lunatics – the internet is a cyber group hug for them. Still, if you value free speech, then that’s a price you’re willing to pay. But there are two aspects of this new debate in an interconnected world that I think bear discussion.

One is that we’re all now much better at ad hominem attacks than we used to be. I don’t mean this as an issue of style. It’s now very easy to know who your interlocutor is in any debate. If you don’t know who they are, you can google them. And much of what they’ve written – often everything they’ve written – is just a click away, enabling you to profile your opponent and explain their position in terms of their ideology, who they work for, who they support politically, what they’ve said on unrelated issues. It seems to me that all of us are guilty of using this to play the person, and not the ball, much more often than we used to, when we had to grapple with someone’s ideas, rather than explaining them away with reference to who they are and what they’ve said on other occasions.

The other is what I’ve called “ghettoes of agreement”, or “echo chambers”, a term that conservative critics of social media have picked up. This is the product of the greater control people have over political debate. Political debate can now be personalised, just like you personalise your iPod playlist, compared to the old days when what you listened to what dictated by radio producers.

Twitter is the ideal symbol of this. In selecting whom you follow, you can entirely control what news and commentary you see, particularly if, like many of us, you’ve given up on actually using newspaper websites altogether. What we’ve lost from the broadcast model of political debate is that single, mass participation space that the media used to provide when it aggregated all eyeballs across a small number of channels and a handful of newspapers. Empowering individuals is always good, but we’re the poorer for having fragmented what was once a unitary space in which big public policy was debated. You can now ensure that you are in no danger of being exposed to challenging or uncomfortable ideas, unless that’s exactly what you want.

That’s not to say all the negatives are on the side of the internet. It’s plain that there is a deep resentment in the mainstream media about how it no longer controls political debate. This isn’t surprising. The last ten years have seen a succession of gatekeepers unhappy that the internet is ruining their business model. Studio executives unhappy about downloading. Media moguls unhappy about content aggregation. Retailers unhappy about e-commerce. Politicians unhappy about Wikileaks. Lawyers unhappy about jurors using Google.

Go further back – not too far back – and you’ll find captains of industry wanting to ban about trade unions. And Anglican clerics, like their Catholic predecessors, unhappy about congregations discussing religion amongst themselves, without the guidance of priests and bishops. But it’s clear that not all of the “abuse” comes from the internet side of the equation.

For many journalists and editors, the fact that they no longer control the debate is hard to stomach. This was best summed up by a tweet from a Press Gallery journalist during the 2010 election campaign, who reacted angrily to criticism from bloggers of coverage of the Orgill Report by demanding “just let the professionals do their job.”

This cri de coeur, and the criticism from other Gallery journalists of what they call “parasites” and “armchair critics” over online criticism of their campaign coverage, perfectly sums this up. It’s taken other forms as well. The Australian, amongst its many wars, is engaged in a war on new media. It outed and attacked a blogger who had been critical of News Ltd. Its editor threatened to sue an academic over tweets; its media editor threatened to report another academic to police over a humorous tweet and, extraordinarily, an editorial on the tragedy of the Queensland floods was used to lash out at social media.

The Fairfax press may be even worse. Fairfax specialises in what I’ve started calling “gatekeeper porn”, running stories on the evils of the internet so frequently and regularly that there seems to be an editorial directive to gather any possible connection between the internet and something bad happening somewhere in the world and run it prominently. And in a fascinating example of “not getting the internet”, last year Fairfax, unlike every other newspaper outlet in the world, refused to put online the Wikileaks cables it ran stories on, and actually admitted that its basis for preventing us from making up our own minds about the cables was fear of other outlets covering the cables better than it had.

To me this resentment confuses the changing nature of political debate with the changing business model of news media.

Mainstream media journalists, editors and executives are plainly right to be concerned about the threat of new media to traditional media business models. So should the rest of us, given no one has yet worked out where quality, mass audience journalism is going to come from in a world of online revenues. But that’s a different issue to the changed nature of political debate, in which the mainstream media now only plays a part, albeit an important one, rather than wholly controlling it.

In this space, the media can continue to play the role for which we value it most highly, its contribution to a civil society and to an informed electorate. It will simply do so as part of a wider conversation. We may no longer be discussing Scripture over looms, but interconnectedness is again driving major socio-economic change, and it has a long way to go yet despite the best efforts of Middle Eastern dictators.

It has given us a new form of political debate, one to which we all need to adjust. Along the way, we have lost some of the good parts of the old, media-controlled debate, but in exchange for a fundamentally more democratic one.