Writing about internal communications

For free. 

I sort of don’t mind LinkedIn even if it is full of people madly patting each other on the back. So much PATTING it’s incredible. You see one person retweet an achievement. You see another person commenting “Congratulations” it’s one thing and the next. 

A virtual schmoozefest.

But it has been around for a while and is based on the idea that people have to declare their identity. So props for being sensible. Recently I’d seen things appearing in my feed asking me to contribute to stories. Today I saw an inmail regarding the same thing. I’ll include it below.

Inmail is a tool LinkedIn gives people letting them message each other. With a subscription you can send messages to people you’re not connected to.

As you can see from the above the company disabled replies. I wanted to ask them if they’d be paying me for my expertise. It was disappointing that the only thing I wanted from LinkedIn that they hadn’t already provided wasn’t mentioned. It’s like AI, the big companies want to get the content but they don’t want to have to pay any money for it. Big tech likes to get rich but sharing some of that bounty with struggling writers isn’t part of the getting-rich plan.

Now, I’ve been in business since 1985 and have written countless emails, messages, letters, postcards, you name it even end-of-year cards that they use in Japan. So it’s only right that to get the benefit of that expertise LinkedIn should pay me something that I can actually use: some cash. 

Hoo!

On the other hand maybe I should get involved just to get my name out there. Presumably LinkedIn has a mechanism with these stories to publicise the names of the people who are involved in their capacity as writers. With this insight ringing in my head I visited the post again and added comments to two parts of one article about writing. To minimise the effort involved in this task I reused some text I’d written some years before for my daughter who, at that time, had writing plans of her own. In the end she ditched them but I kept the MS-Word file on my computer which I found. I did some more of these posts later on, I mean on subsequent days because I felt like I knew something about internal communications. After all I’d worked in PR – both internal and external – for a decade. No, more than a decade, because my work with the change manager at Sydney University was also internal communications. So that’s 9 years in Japan plus sic years in Sydney: a total of 15 years in IC. Then there was my work with Eastern Suburbs Art Group from 2022 to the present. Total: 17 years.

I felt I had something to contribute. The money could wait. I needed to get a few things off my chest. I wrote for free and it felt GOOD.

New and old media struggles

If you bother to read to the end I won’t promise you’ll be amused but this story about new and old media is at least interesting. The new represented by X and the old in this case represented by the Sydney Morning Herald. X has been here I think since 2007 the SMH since I think 1831.

I saw a tweet by someone I follow and I won’t include his name here because I don’t want to cause any consternation or upset. I don’t have a problem with this poster usually but this event was so extraordinary that I just had to comment. He wrote:

Now I'm not one to speculate as you know but if you were Justice Lee picking up the paper today and seeing a headline saying a lying recidivist and alleged rapist should receive compensation, I dunno, I'd probably be taking a dim view.

I immediately thought that there had been an announcement in the Bruce Lehrmann defamation case. It had been in the media a lot the previous year. I personally had heard nothing so when my acquaintance tweeted this my ears pricked up. Had the judge said something? Surely I would’ve seen an announcement if the case had been brought to a conclusion.

So I responded with a question and my acquaintance replied with a link to the story that had appeared on the SMH website a day or two before. I had seen this story and it was just word of what the lawyers for one party had suggested should be done. I asked if the SMH had done wrong by publishing the story.

But the judge hasn't announced anything, this story is just reporting on the progress of the case. There doesn't seem to b anything abt this story that's exceptional from a legal standpoint. Were you suggesting otherwise?

He said “No” and I asked again if the SMH had done something wrong.

But [name removed] your tweet suggests something different. It seemed to me that reporters who had been invited into the court and had done their job as the judge wanted them to do were the object of your opprobrium. Correct me if I'm wrong. Did the SMH do something inappropriate here?

He told me to let it go, I told him to be wary of defaming the plaintiff.

This highlights a certain problem that new media has with regard to the instruments of government. People who use new media have trust issues for whatever reason, I can’t fathom what they are in every case, in fact in most cases there’s no way to know why a person might distrust authority, but the fact is that my acquaintance worked for a media company for all of his adult life.

What to make of this event?

It’s funny how posters like my acquaintance crow with delight when an election result that is favourable to them transpires, how they celebrate when someone they hate is successful convicted of some offence. Yet they still don’t like authority, in this case simply the authority the SMH has to be trusted based on 190-odd years of operation. 

If this situation doesn’t illustrate the conflict between the new and old medias I don’t know what does. You see here a electronic platform that is being used to publish defamatory material with the assistance of a company that is legally going about its business as the judge wants. My acquaintance is exploiting the company for his own purposes.

Calling someone an “alleged” rapist is bad enough, the word at least shields the poster from possible action. The other accusation? Bruce Lehrmann has shown no inclination to let things go, and his case in court at the moment hinges on what the judge thinks about his testimony and the testimony of the woman he is accused of assaulting. 

This is the thing with social media, the release is instantaneous, you can get things off your chest but they can come back to bite you. I contacted Seven West Media, which had paid for Bruce Lehrmann’s accommodation. I had tried to find out who was representing Lehrmann and in the news stories had only been able to discover the names of his barristers. Now I needed that of his solicitor.

UPDATE

• The initial poster blocked me then about five days later unblocked me saying “I’m sorry”. Another person’d gotten involved who also blocked me, but so far no apology from that quarter. I did find out where she works though (in an art gallery).
• I sent an email to Lehrmann’s solicitor but they never got back to me. As at the time of posting this the judge in the case still hadn’t made an announcement.

Chronicle of an abomination

I promise this post won’t be an inane whinge about the evils of social media. That would be terrible and a waste of everyone’s time. The reason for the headline however is that social media keeps giving more and more. More what, you ask? It’s giving more reasons to take the medium with a sceptical cast of the eye because it just jumped the shark.

How could something that’s already completely broken – and I’m talking about the poster boy for degeneracy, the platform formerly known as Twitter – get even worse and, in fact, practically cease to wield any power at all because it’s reached beyond the unforgivable into the heretofore unchartered realms of parody.

It’s truly jumped the shark.

“This must be bad,” I hear you say. And I say to you: “It’s so enormously terrible that there’s no mountain high enough to allow you to get up the slope and see just how enormous the terribleness is.” It’s that bad.

Many moons ago when I was still noodling about in Blogville, dreaming of writing the most awesome film script to accompany my failing to be an influencer, I came up with the idea of a paramedic who, during the day, strains every muscle and mental ligament in an effort so save lives. But at night he’s an online troll, someone who seems to have so little concern for the wellbeing of his fellow man or woman that he drives someone to suicide. The screenplay would elaborate all the details, cross all the “i”s and dot all the “t”s, so that you would get a visceral impression – in the same way that Samuel Richardson three hundred years ago did for the unfortunate Pamela – of the man in question.

Something like evil.

Worse because cloaked during work hours (night shifts included for those who were thinking to trip me up with an interruption) with the mantle of the bringer of succour and the bearer of beneficence.

A veritable demon.

Well, I sat on this idea for years without ever working up the wherewithal in the talent department to make a start on a script. But it was unnecessary because in the meantime life had caught up with my dreams and had delivered a guilty party in the form of a medical doctor and user of X who in his regular downtime writes the most appalling troll-like tweets. A man who works in a hospital. Who no doubt saves lives. But who despite all his virtues is a degenerate troll. A bringer of suffering and mental anguish. A stoker of hatred. An abomination.

And what’s more a man who, when he was brought up on related charges in the court of X wrote two tweets in his own defence and then unceremoniously DELETED THEM!

Who will write the summons to appear before this esteemed court. Who will sit in judgement on this corrupt doctor, a man who uses the most extreme language to achieve his no doubt estimable because progressive goals. Who else but ME!

Even before the poll the Voice felt like a lost cause

Author's note: I wrote this on 9 October, in the week leading up to the Voice poll on 14 October.

Australians are being asked to alter their birth certificate with very little information. I know, I know the trolls have been making this point for a long time and it’s time to move past it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. If you watch Netflix you’ll see how deeply people feel about family ties. I watched a TV show about a doctor who inseminated hundreds of women without their consent with his own sperm, the children of those procedures – carried out in a fertility clinic in Indiana – are rightly outraged by the liberties the physician took with their paternity, making himself a kind of divine vessel in the process of ruining other people’s idea of who they are. In the case of the Voice it strikes me that part of the problem arises from a similar place linked to the very identity of voters. A legislated Voice is like a passport, you can even let yours expire and then reapply for another one. But in order to do so you need a birth certificate at least. The Voice vote is like asking someone to change details on their birth certificate.

What?

If you had to alter your birth certificate to change the name of your father, how would that make you feel. Would you feel as though you’d been lied to, cheated, deceived? Or would you simply say “So what?” and move on blithely? I don’t know about you but this seems like a big deal.

The problem for Albanese and his ministers is that if you start describing how the Voice will work you’re going to get bogged down in distracting detail. I understand completely their need to keep the debate limited to “Yes” and “No”. When the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) was forced by the media to get involved in the short-lived “Tick” and “Cross” debate they simply refused to be drawn out on the matter, saying again and again (and again in ads) that voters are being asked to simply write “Yes” or “No’ on the ballot paper. The AEC understands that even to talk publicly about the confusion created was to continue sowing confusion, so they aborted the juggernaut as quickly as possible and the media obediently moved on. 

That’s not to say that everyone moved on, by no means. Many people out there in La La Land believe that they’re being conned and that they’re having the wool pulled down over their eyes. But we don’t need to worry about the fringes. It’s the middle we’re concerned about, the majority 80 percent who count.

Even given this section of the population there are many diverse viewpoints in play, and it’s within this cohort that the arguments about detail will continue to be important right up to polling day. I’m writing this on 9 Oct so polling day is still in the future, but according to opinion polls the Voice is looking unlikely as a going concern. Not to say that opinion polls are all that important, we know that people routinely lie to pollsters for various reasons, but still the impetus seems at the moment to be behind the “No” position. Given that the most likely reason people will have for voting “No” is the lack of detail – it’s an issue unaligned with any particular political position, after all – I think that the lead-up to 14 Oct has been mishandled by the government. It seems to me that having Nathan Cleary come out in favour of the Voice is the Voice’s “jump-the-shark” moment, the moment when you hear the wind whistling through the eaves just before the tornado hits. I fear for the Voice. It sounds like a lost cause to me.

Don't come between an Aussie and his gas-guzzling ute

Labor’s “announcement” of an EV standard is interesting in what it says about the party’s relationship with the public. In fact there was no announcement, just an announcement that an announcement would be made in the future. Instead of jumping into the water you stick your toe in and test the temperature. You get a cold toe instead of a shock to the system.

In 2019 it was different under Bill Shorten. The change reflects the differences in the leaders, with Albo more likely to take a cautious approach while Shorten believed everything he read on Twitter, equating the opinions of the most vocal Left supporters with the average Aussie.

They learned their lesson because we got Morrison for three years.

In 2023 instead of saying “we’re going to set the fleet emissions per kilometre travelled to 105g of carbon” like they did in 2019 (which would require all new cars purchased to be pure-electric EVs) they’re saying, “hey look we’re in the future going to set an emissions target for new vehicles”.

Chalk and cheese.

This new announcement is Albo doing a bit of market research. I imagine that he’s got the boffins doing surveys of ordinary Australians roped into contributing to the climate cause in a market where the specifics are totally different from, say, in tiny Norway or tiny Finland. Australia is a vast continent without charging infrastructure and the debate must be completely different here from how it’s conducted in Scandinavia. 

I don’t envy Albo the task but probably it has to be done before policy frameworks can be committed to. The optics don’t look good where the recent surge in pure-electric EV (PEEV) sales only brings the PEEV share of new car sales to 3 percent. It’s very hard to talk with your European counterparts about climate change when the realities on the ground in Coonabarabran or Cooma are so different from the way they look in minuscule European markets but the job has to be tackled if Australia doesn’t want to find itself penalised by trade commissioners.

I wrote this post mainly in April this year and since then nothing has been said to cement a carbon-emissions target for passenger vehicles in place. We see moves by state governments to bring in hydrogen-powered buses, and we see sales of EVs increase. Toyota has even announced in an ad that it’s selling a PEEV Lexus in Australia. But still no move from the government to do something concrete about car emissions. We know that the most popular cars in the country are both large utes, so we see the population sticking to its gas-guzzling guns. The government knows better than to come between an Aussie and his ute.

Twitter renaming won't change it but hopefully more is to come

In about 2016 Twitter had become fatally wounded in its current form. Other social media sites are now springing up because of Elon Musk’s changes but the fundamental ingredient of the monster is still the same. As long as people are involved the outcome will be disappointing.

I am not sure if it’s up to the proprietor to put in place “better” rules that can cope with the different ways people use to abuse their privileges. I’ve yet to see a social media platform that actually encourages worthwhile debate, though not being a Chinese speaker it’s possible that there is one out there. Perhaps a person who uses WeChat can advise. If anyone has a better idea let me know.

Musk just might be crazy enough to be able to tame the beast. He’s changed the parameters in every industry he’s entered and is nothing if not unconventional, and doing things the same way they’ve always been done is not going to give us the results we seem to agree we seek. I wonder though. If all the bad-faith actors using anonymous accounts were put together in a room and asked to put their hands up to say they wanted more civil conversations, how many would do so? Someone once said to me that the reason people are so aggressive on Twitter is because to speak politely would do violence to the extremes of feeling they experience when confronted by one or more issues. 

I can understand that but I also understand that in a pluralists democracy you are naturally going to get a range of opinions. If we all thought about every issue in the same way it’s be weird, so being able to challenge people whose natural bias is different from yours requires a degree of diplomatic skill. Perhaps people think it’s a “cop out” to speak in a civil manner? Perhaps they must speak strongly in order to honestly convey the strength of their feelings.

I don’t know about you but I don’t like it when people shout at me and we haven’t been introduced, haven’t established any ground rules for conduct. If I meet someone in a highway rest stop I’m going to be civil and courteous and guarded because I don’t want to be smashed in the face, but people on Twitter talking about a topic that interests them smash without talking and be damned because they’re in no danger of being hit down to the pavement.

It’s this lack of accountability that gives people license to behave like animals, or else like school kids scrapping and cussing in the playground after science class has ended. But then do we blame the teachers for the low tone of the entire school or do we blame the parents?

I think that politicians must accept some blame for the way things are turning out online. The incessant carping, the insulting dismissals of differing opinions, the inability or unwillingness to compromise are corroding public debate. It’s been going on for years but now it’s time to stop. Our system of government has a thing called Question Time when Opposition pollies can get a chance to launch difficult questions to the government, but the way the latter responds to the former is mostly unedifying. I want politicians universally to THINK for a moment about how their insults veiled and overt affect the wider community so that we can start to build a more sustainable public sphere.

Rhetorical standards being what they are, and politicians not being the most imaginative people alive, I won’t hold my breath. I just think this is a good place to start.

Albo tests the waters on EV sales

Labor’s “announcement” of an EV standard is interesting in what it says about the party’s relationship with the public. In fact there was no announcement, just an announcement that an announcement would be made in the future. Instead of jumping into the water you stick your toe in and test the temperature. So you get a cold toe instead of a shock to the system.

In 2019 it was different under Bill Shorten. The change reflects the differences in the leaders, with Albo more likely to take a cautious approach while Shorten believed everything he read on Twitter, equating the opinions of the most vocal Left supporters with the average Aussie.

They learned their lesson because we got Morrison for three years.

In 2023 instead of saying “we’re going to set the fleet emissions per kilometre travelled to 105g of carbon” like they did in 2019 (which would require all new cars purchased to be pure-electric EVs) they’re saying, “hey look we’re in the future going to set an emissions target for new vehicles”.

Chalk and cheese.

This new announcement is Albo doing a bit of market research. I imagine that he’s got the boffins organised doing surveys of ordinary Australians roped into contribute to the climate cause in a market where the operating specifics are totally different from, say, Norway or Finland. I don’t envy him the task but it probably has to be done. The optics don’t look good where the recent surge in PEEV sales only brings the PEEV share of new car sales to 3 percent. It’s hard to talk with your European counterparts about climate change when the realities on the ground in Coonabarabran or Cooma are so different from in Scandinavia.