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.

Epidemic of social media abuse being fuelled by bleeding hearts

Whenever I hear someone attack the attackers they point the finger to the right wing trolls, but let’s be frank the right wing is typified by trolling. You don’t expect a Nazi to be nice, but the woke left who want social justice and human rights are playing with the same language.

This is clear, the left are just as bad as the right when it comes to online abuse, and in the left’s case it’s not excusable. If you promote peace and forgiveness you’d better be prepared to practice what you preach or else you just end up fuelling the sort of vicious spiral that saw Lisa Millar from the BAC ‘Breakfast Couch’ program quite Twitter in disgust.

The ABC is in an unenviable position because their charter stipulates they must be balanced. If this means giving air time to those on the right of the political spectrum then so be it, but there are thousands on the left WHO WILL NOT TOLERATE THIS. They criticise the ABC for even allowing people whose views are different from theirs to be on-camera, they attack journalists (most particularly in the context of Int’l Women’s Day, which was yesterday, female journalists), and they lower the tone for everyone allowing more bad language to proliferate.

You are responsible.

It’s not some nameless goon in a suit who profits from the hate, it’s people you celebrate because their views consone with yours. It’s not a big corporation that makes money out of the poor conduct, it’s you. Just stop it.

The thing with social media is that there’s no consequences for poor conduct. People use anonymous accounts and raise the bar to the highest pitch BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MATTER if someone disagrees with them. If they’re in a pub and start carrying on like a pork chop they might get floored by a punch in the nose, but not online. Online they can say precisely anything they want.

Putin can say anything he wants because there’re no consequences. Trump taught him how to bend the rules so far they threaten to break. Trump was nothing without Twitter, and when Twitter closed his account he stopped being a threat. Now that he’s back in the loop we’d better be careful.

But everyone has a way to stop the abuse, stop the lies, stop the spoken hate. We can all work to raise the tone of social media, but where’s the incentive. People “like” tweets that take the most extreme position, the platform celebrates hyperbole and ridicule, so how do we stop the rot? It’s up to all of us to take a private stand. Not because it’ll make us popular, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Mastodon booms as Twitter enters turbulent time

It’s been strange watching some people go a bit manic as Twitter enters a turbulent time. Many are going across to a new platform and then telegraphing the fact probably hoping that others will go there too and follow them so that they can keep up-to-date with the scintillating content that made Twitter such a hellsite in the first place.

Trump is not the problem and Musk certainly isn’t, but it’s doubly odd to think of a company where the individual stakes of all the participants are considered to be so important that people will go to this much effort – working out how the new technology functions, setting up an account, making a note of the password, tweeting the address – just so that they can abuse others with impunity as they’ve done for the past five years.

Or however long Twitter has been a bonfire of epic proportions.

It’s both sad and amusing to be witness to the mass exodus as people realise that what they’re spent so much time investing in is threatened with disablement or worse: complete annihilation. All those hours sitting in front of the computer screen or staring at the mobile phone, all those “likes”, all those retweets, all that patience exhausted, those yearnings finally rewarded – and then it’s going to be taken away in a flash.

It must be horrible to have put so much of yourself into something that SOMEONE ELSE OWNS in its entirety, your activity discounted because you don’t possess the master sign-on details (or whatever the technical terms is for the main access key).

Your life taken and played with by a hyper-capitalist with a taste for supersonic vehicles. Your life. All those people who follow you and retweet and “like” every tweet you send out filled with your infinite wisdom. All your wit and aggression made subservient to a man you’ll never meet. Parts of you made into an object, a resource (human resources), a statistic, a “handle”.

Though you never got a blue tick.

I can’t really imagine the feelings of such a person because for years I’ve been complaining on a different blog about how Twitter operates to privilege the most extreme expression, the most outrageous words, the most terrible ideas. Surely Musk is only wanting to celebrate this characteristic of the website? Surely he’s making it into the reason for its existence. 

Surely you’d want to be part of that because all of your followers love you for that reason. What is there to complain about if your wishes have finally turned into reality? What more could you possibly want? Do you want to be given the main access key (techno-specialists help me out here)? 

Why not indeed? What else is there to try?

Perhaps Musk can assign control of the platform to a different influencer for a year in turn to see how the site performs with different management. Wouldn’t this be a more democratic solution to the problem of how to manage Twitter? King for a day.

King for a year.

King for the rest of your life, like President Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin. Master of the twitterverse. Sovereign. In control of your own destiny. Wordlord. Moster. God.

While politics becomes more polarised the bush comes to town

When ‘Q and A’ got shuffled off to 8.30 on a Thursday night I felt vindicated. Years before I’d stopped watching this unpleasant show, with its combative political operatives and quasi-debate, its copying of the flame wars found all too often on Twitter and its loud voices intent on just niggling the opposition into further cornfluffle. 

I needed to coin a word for the almost meaningless vociferations that get read by thousands at all times of the day on social media. The carriers of sarcasm, the producers of temporary victory – moments that lead to nothing but a hunger for something to offset the savage pull of the ravenous vacuum – and the bringers of shame to the angels who might, if they moderated their speech, be able to take part in a process they watch enviously from the sidelines.

Meanwhile, farmers are using social media in creative ways to engage with their customers in the cities, both through TikTok videos produced on mobile phones and through the unnumbered cooking shows that grace our screens. Wherever you turn you see a cooking show where there’s a camera capturing a key ingredient – salt, say, or extra virgin olive oil – being added to a frying pan or bowl as show hosts, busy at 4pm helping viewers get through to dinnertime by making a cake or a stir-fry, talk about the produce they rely on. There’s one show where most of the cooking is done on barbeques, in the field, with scenic backdrops adding colour to what is mostly, in fact, simple fare. 

I watch many of them. We seem to harbour an insatiable appetite for content that features food being made, and so farmers should know that consumers take food personally. We’re getting pork belly hamburgers just as we’re getting Master Chef in the umpteenth season to satisfy our hunger for new flavours. Multiculturalism ties in with this dynamic because one of the first ways anyone will experience a foreign culture is through its signature meals. 

PETA demonstration, Pitt St Mall, 1 September

We can express our political affiliation by avoiding dairy and we can even express things about our politics by saying that we like pad see ew or butter chicken. The other day I discovered by talking with an Indian friend that “masala” just means “spice”, and this conversation raised an understanding of a place that I will probably never visit but that is becoming more and more important as the forces of globalisation continue to operate on our fractured world. 

Food gives us access to the Other, to alternative ways of living, and hence it can enrich our lives even if all we do is buy a takeaway that a member of the precariat brings to our front door on his motor scooter. Food is a highway and a forest, both, and farmers who venture to make content aimed at metropolitan audiences might be surprised by what they can achieve. 

It’s not just the immediate financial spin-offs that matter, it’s the way that such engagement can lift the brand and lead to industry-wide profitability. Reputation matters, and it’s not enough to rely on elected representatives to do the PR heavy lifting. People have to do it for themselves.

Peter Greste talk on a media freedom law sponsored by Macquarie Uni

Last week I went along to a talk and discussion in the centre of town on one high floor of 123 Pitt Street above Martin Place, where I waited the view over the skyline and the harbour was very scenic, the sound of glasses clinking in the background accompaniment to the spectacle I took in from a comfortable seat. I felt privileged to be so high up I was able to see the water. A helicopter flew from left to right and the grey water rippled.

Greste has ideas about a media freedom law and it would take the form of a system in order to address the problem of complacency in a community where the reputation of journalists is low. How to get support from government and people when journos are sort of like pornographers in the reputation stakes? Greste’s response to this issue is a certification process where instead of accrediting specified individuals on the basis of their place of work, or on the basis of the number of hours a week they practice the craft, you get a panel of experts to certify the process they use. This would allow bloggers and random tweeters to have the same access to protection under a potential media freedom law.

Greste also talked about the “grey zone” where meaningful conversations occur, and he says it is diminishing. He pointed out that ISIS had quoted George Bush admiringly where he says, “You’re either with us or against us,” in the aftermath of 9/11, and noted for the record (two cameras were operating at the back of the room, aimed above attendees’ heads) that most laws in Australia that restrict media freedom had been introduced since 2001.

It's in the interest of everybody to have a free press, and Greste described how public costs invariably go up where there is no media oversight. The relationship between the media and politicians is inextricable, he said, the two sets of people being intimately bound together so that the role of either one is unimaginable without the other.

Fran Kelly was on the panel after Greste’s talk and she highlighted the difficulty of getting support for such a certification board. I sort of agree with her, the way the public sphere operates today the nuance and subtlety of Greste’s ideas would be erased by flame wars and people would merely object to another faceless institution having power over their destinies. Politicians would have a key role to play in furthering the public interest in the face of such debates.

The man who invited me to the event arrived almost at start time and the university’s VC was there to give moral support to Greste, whom he praised. A range of people were in attendance, men and women, and there were a number of questions from the audience to lend variety to the evening. I left to get the train home without staying for refreshments, saying goodbye to my friend in the foyer, but thought about how journalists might improve their standing in the community by being more intelligent as to how they go about their business. Instead of following the herd they might be more selective and ignore party platforms. Instead they might look to the future taking the long view, and be more transparent.

Ceremony has meaning and should be recognised

Watching the opening of Parliament I was quite shocked when Andrew Probyn in his rundown of the events dismissed much of what had happened over the course of the day as mere ceremony, as though the only thing that counted was numbers of representatives and their votes on individual Bills. 

This kind of short-sighted attitude allows “expert” like Probyn to ignore the content of the Indigenous contribution to the day’s proceedings, where Paul House exhorted representatives to respect all living things, a clarion call of momentous proportions especially given the appalling rate of mammal extinctions experienced by the continent of Australia.

In fact, the nightly news followed the ABC’s coverage (which included the entirety of the governor-general’s address) by focusing on a few words spoken by the prime minister in respect of outcomes. Albanese said that when you’re old you have only two options looking back over your life: to be proud or to regret. I personally don’t think this is strictly true (I’ll be happy if I feel a mild sense of contentment about what’s happened over the course of my eventful life) but I am not going to quibble with the PM’s advance gloss for his period of leadership at this point in time.

What I want to concentrate on is the double standard in play when it comes to ceremony. For some nationalities (eg the Japanese) form is just as important as substance, and rightly so. We are immensely proud of some aspects of our legacy of peaceful democratic transitions, and we endlessly go on about the past when it comes to sport, but for some reason we won’t admit this to even exist or else we think that relying on the comfort of formalism is a weakness or something to be ashamed about.

Form is tremendously powerful, and not obeying it can have radical ramifications, just think of the process of ordering and paying for food. If something “seems” wrong at one point then you worry that the meal will be spoiled. Not responding in the correct way might also see you accused of trying to get out of the restaurant without paying, which could ruin more than your evening. Driving a car is also a highly formalised routine, with a specified sequence of actions involved in, say, turning a corner safely so that nobody gets hurt and so that you arrive in time at your destination.

But when it comes to politics “form” is a nasty word. We even want to get rid of the Queen for some reason, as if the horrors of US politics had never happened (since 2016 at least) because why you’d want to mix your ceremonial head of state with your executive – in the same person – is beyond me, and we have seen how people become irrationally destructive and even criminal when this is allowed to take place.

In fact we need form just as much as the Japanese. We desperately want to feel like things are going on in the correct fashion even though the world changes so fast that it’s hard to keep up. We want to feel close to people around us even though sometimes we feel the need to get away to some remote location and commune with naked nature. We crave peace yet we get bored if we’re not amused and flattered by some stupid Netflix drama we can switch off at a whim. We relish the companionship of dogs, whose routines come to dominate our lives because they keep us sane.

Yet Andrew Probyn can talk about “mere” form and the next day watch State of Origin: a series (established only in the 1980s) that it’s been talked about expanding because Melbourne feels left out. If NRL isn’t all form, I don’t know how to whip tea.

Richard Marles gets to the root of our problem with China

I was heartened and surprised to hear the deputy prime minister telling China to be more open. The story appeared on the Sydney Morning Herald website today. Surprised because I have no great faith in the ability of Labor politicians to act independent of ideology, though hearing the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, advance broadly the same foreign policy as the previous government was a relief. Labor is not known for its depth of talent and it’s unarguable that most of its operatives come from a very narrow gene pool in the union movement.

This link to the historical left is particularly problematic when it comes to dealing with China because China’s government, also, comes from the historical left. While Labor is vocally proud of the legacy of freedom represented by Westminster democracy, China is still sceptical because of its experience in the 19th century, a time of humiliation and disappointment. While the British monarchy was wrong to allow Parliament to attack China with steam-powered ships, on the other hand the Chinese emperor was certainly wrong to refuse to open up to the West.

So there were mistakes on both sides, but this embedded memoir of suffering and the use of force for illegitimate reasons colours Australia’s relations with the Middle Kingdom today. Marles is certainly right to focus on a root cause of distrust, which is China’s complete avoidance of a free media ecosystem in favour of approved government mouthpieces. Having said that China must be sceptical of the ability of free media outlets to steer public opinion – and thereby the direction of government – in the right way. I have no doubt that the Chinese president feels scorn for Western media given his country’s experience. Even in more recent times, in Australia, media outlets in New South Wales and other states attacked Chinese people in a way that, today, we would find reprehensible if we were exposed to it. 

Of course we are not. Perhaps the Australian government could launch a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like a royal commission that could hold hearings hearing both sides in a public forum. You could have historians and politicians, representatives from local ethnic communities, journalists and writers – all participating in a vibrant gabfest of claim and counterclaim to rival Master Chef in colour and appeal. What would such a forum do for our relations with China? It might show her that being open has its advantages.

Alternative voices in the public sphere silenced by fire

I regret the need to use incendiary terms to express myself but the topic warrants the deployment of the word “fire” especially since there is a precedent in the term “flame war”. The voices I’m talking about are supported by many but heard by few in the channels that matter most to them, which is the traditional media. It’s surprising how powerless people evidently feel when they think that their extreme expressions – surrounding ideas spawned by political debate – don’t matter and that, in fact, the more extreme the expressions that are used the more important must be the views of the speaker.

But when they cave into such impulses they limit the reach of their views because the mainstream media shuts them out. The term “sewer rat” which some journalists use to characterise the angels of Twitter, all those anonymous tragics who gravitate to the heat given off by #auspol like moths to a flame, gets adopted with pride in people’s Twitter handles. It becomes a badge of honour, like a tattoo. 

Graffiti tagging gets cleaned off walls by councils and homeowners in the same way that the aggressive comments of our guardian angels are wiped off the front pages by members of the press gallery. With the noise a lot of legitimate questions become invisible and the polis suffers as a result. The system is rendered less representative and people move further to the margins, so the machine of state itself gets attacked instead of the ideas belonging to other side of the political divide. 

Popularism and popularity become muddled in this grey zone that exists in the moment, but that can be mined for ammunition by the more committed among us. Trawling through old posts put out in the heat of the moment becomes like a raw academic debate: you said this, I said that. Tit for tat and beggar take the hindmost. 

Ring a-ring a-rosey, we all fall down. If only we could use this “work” to practical purpose, but it seems futile to wish for such a thing as people on all sides denigrate those who dare contradict them. In the old days, when I was at secondary school, we had debating societies. Personally, being more interested in art, I never saw the virtue of such things, but now I do. It’s a reminder of the benefit of the old in the face of the new, because perhaps by regularising all the effort, bringing it into some manageable form where different people who fulfill different roles can discuss the issues we all agree are important, we might find that there are solutions to pressing problems that remain to be solved. It should be easier to find common ground. 

Google market listings frustratingly circumscribe data

This is an anecdotal account of a Google failure, but bear with me as it links in with a previous post. That was about Facebook, but the problem is the same. 

So what’s the problem? It’s about how forms pigeon hole people, places and things. It’s about the exceptions that get typecast. It’s about flexibility. With Facebook Marketplace it was the issue of pricing, where I’d want to sell a number of similar items for a unified cost (3 for $5, for example). This time with Google it’s about opening hours.

When you look up a business on Google you usually want a few crucial bits of information in order to accomplish your goals. It might be a street address, it might be opening hours, it might be the phone number. You need to get somewhere to buy something but you’re not sure if you’re going to be on-time. Do you have time to drive with your friends across town and arrive before the places closes? You want to know before setting out so you don’t waste fuel and time.

Not long ago I was in a big rush because Google said that the flower markets that Saturday closed at 8.30am. The website the organisation published said 11am when I’d consulted it the day before when I was at home but my friend’s fiancé (we were intent on getting flowers for the wedding) looked at his mobile phone when we were in the car and said that the markets were about to shut. It was still before eight o’clock but we still had to drive all the way across town. An argument ensued. Everyone was blamed. A cup of soy milk was thrown, wetting the interior of the car.

Later, when we’d got the flowers, I cleaned up the car using a Chux wipe and some water but some of the residue would still be hanging in weeks later. In the event we bought $146 worth of flowers but only two of us ended up getting to the markets as my friend’s fiancé got out of the car, soaking wet, and caught the train back home.

None of this drama would’ve been necessary if Google had a way to say “Stallholders start closing at 8.30am but the facility only shuts at 11am.” The problem is that the interface Google has constructed eliminates all complexity. 

So much anguish because of the tyranny of forms.

I’ve worked in software and so I know that getting the interface between the people and the machine right can take time. You need to anticipate exceptions before you make the rules otherwise you get conflict. You get sharp words. You get recriminations. Heartache. You need to accommodate the richness of life if you want to avoid typecasting people and places. Like Facebook, Google has to change.

Mainstream media to play a growing role as Trump media comes online

In the old days, in other countries, when the military decided to take over they first went to the TV station so that they could control messaging. In China today – even in the heart of our own century – the government decided to play by different rules and to set up alternative public spaces to harbour discussion, and so new social media companies came into existence. Now, Donald Trump has just appointed a new CEO for his new socmed company, a former Republican Congressman named Devin Nunes.

Since many people were disgusted by Trump’s encouragement of the January Congress riots, and since many on the other side will follow Trump anywhere he leads, what you’re going to have in the United States is an increasingly polarised public sphere where the mainstream media – which will include people with stronger stomachs than most, who’ll be paid to take out accounts on Trump’s platform so they can monitor developments and trends there – will play a growing role in the community.

Because of this there’ll be times when Trump might disenfranchise journalists who don’t follow his line, disabling their accounts, removing posts, or even provoking pile-ons. As a result many journalists will use anonymous accounts in order to monitor debate, and so that they can get information without being blocked or censured. Anonymity is a pressing matter in Australia, where the government is developing laws that’ll make it mandatory for social media companies to divulge the identities and contact details of people whose remarks are deemed by a court to be offensive and defamatory. If they don’t do so, the government says, they themselves will be liable in any court case brought as a result of actionable comments made on their platforms.

It’s important for the Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government to carefully word such laws as it’s clear that anonymity is going to remain, in many countries, an important resource for the legitimate participation of various actors in several spheres of endeavour. You need to balance the requirements of many different parties if you’re not going to cause harm in one way by achieving justice in another way. I look forward to what eventuates, and no doubt the mainstream media will, as usual, report in a balanced way on such developments. At least, in Australia, we don’t have rogue politicians seeking to establish a personal public domain where their messages can go unchallenged. We’re lucky to have the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which supplies reliable information for all citizens (and even for some people living overseas).

Melbourne protest rally might be turning point for civility in social media

In the middle of this month a protest rally on account of new laws the Labor government wanted to enact regarding Covid and the health response caused hundreds of people to flock to the streets. Visible among them was a cart with a gallows and three nooses. Missiles were hurled, resulting in injuries. The language on some of the placards was intemperate.

On social media prominent left-wing commentators themselves protested the rally but ignored how they, themselves, often use intemperate language in order to achieve their rhetorical goals. Flaming and ridicule are part of the arsenal of such individuals – who often hide behind anonymity online – and this had caused the prime minister to vociferate publicly against the tenor of debate. Earlier in the month he’d even voiced ideas about making the big tech companies more accountable for what was published on their platforms.

Australia had already moved in this direction, the High Court finding that media companies are responsible for the comments people leave on their Facebook pages. Morrison (the PM) was saying what many – people like me, who sit in the centre – think: that online conversations need to be more responsive to the real world and that the freewheeling tone of social media is becoming more and more toxic.

On TV, the leader of the Opposition criticised the PM for criticising state governments that had chosen to restrict people’s freedom. Morrison utterly condemned calls for violence, he said, but understood that many people are frustrated. Australians have done their bit and governments, he averred, needed to do the same.

This was seen by many as condoning extremism. The first journalist I heard voicing an opinion about Morrison’s words (it happened to be the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Andrew Probyn) expressed a degree of puzzlement. I think this is understandable. We’re puzzled, all of us, but we encourage the type of extreme expressions embodied in the gallows and the nooses. We’re part of the problem, and perhaps this current debate will serve as a turning point. Along with whatever measures the federal government attempts to introduce – though it’s arguable whether they’ll have time to do so before the next federal election – this conversation can be our saving grace.

Marketplace needs more flexibility in pricing tools

You see it all the time, people putting “$0” (which the application turns into “FREE”) for an item for which, the description shows by words, a price must be paid. I find this all the time, so it’s commonplace. The other day I put up a selection of literary fiction priced at $0 but that I wanted to sell for $5 each. I did the same thing for a group of history books as well.

I’d been getting rid of a lot of books. Initially I’d put up pictures of individual books, but found that the response for this method is very limited. Hardly anyone was asking a question. When I put up a number of history books (I think there were 13 in the set) for $50 I got a sudden influx of queries, so evidently I’d hit a nerve. A man came over to my place on two occasions and bought 50 books. Another man got me to mail seven books to his house out near Liverpool. A third man I met at Parramatta to which suburb I’d travelled on the ferry. 

The group photo was magical, so I tried to reproduce the effect by putting up a photo showing novels by Martin Amis, Thomas Pynchon, and Tom Wolfe, among others. The price was $0 and the description had more details, including the fact that they were on sale (and not being given away) but the response this time was surprising in another way. “Is it free,” messaged Enes. “No $5 per book, as per description.” “Why don’t u put as $5 then.” Another person wrote to me, “Hi, is this free?” I mistakenly tapped the prompted button to say “Yes, it’s available” and Monica asked again: “But is it free..?” 

I changed the price attached to the photo to “$5” but I’d felt the pain these people experienced to learn that something they coveted, due to an inspiration rooted deep inside their being, had been denied them. Doubly painful because there might be a reason for their not being able to afford the minuscule $5 necessary to purchase one of my cheap books. 

When Josh came over to buy some of the novels the other day, dressed in hi-vis and wearing boots, he didn’t look like a reader of literary fiction. But I felt his passion when we were browsing. Or, at least, when he was browsing and I was standing by ready to let him know if a book was available or not. He hopefully picked a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez off a shelf and I hesitated before allowing him to take it. I suggested he should read Haruki Murakami and he took two of the Japanese author’s novels. He asked me what I was reading and I told him it was a Nancy Mitford novel and that this author’d been my father’s favourite.

This personal link to books means that the process for buying them should be better crafted by Facebook. It shouldn’t be enough to let people put “$0” as the price when this is not, in fact, the case. It’s not the seller’s fault that people are disappointed. It’s the intermediary’s fault that the online tools are not flexible enough to account for all situations. If the only way for me to get people interested in my books is to put up photos of groups of books, then the pricing tools should allow me to say “3 for $10 or $5 each” or something similar. Buyers would benefit from being able to do their shopping without the shock of disappointment, and sellers would be able to be honest at the same time as they achieve their sales goals.

Macron dummy spit has Australian media bewildered

I finally saw a news story – it took weeks of flailing about with the same old line – about the submarine bust-up (the federal Australian government cancelled a $90-billion deal for French-designed subs) with some wider relevance. It was by Chris Uhlmann. 

Uhlmann located the French president’s unhappiness in the context of geopolitical ambitions “to leverage his nation’s colonial footprint in New Caledonia and French Polynesia to deal France into the great game of the 21st century; the strategic struggle for the Indo-Pacific”. What some on social media have poo-poohed – Australia’s legacy commitment to French security embodied in WWI and WWII Antipodean military success – is closer to home but few have alluded to it, possibly on account of French sensibilities. 

We’re being very kind to Macron and his people, but if China ever got into a war with the United States it’s highly likely that Russia would join in on her side, so it’s in Macron’s interest to see a strong Australia. Napoleon’s much-repeated quip about English “shopkeepers” seems suddenly ironic.

Facebook should offer Marketplace booster vouchers to loyal users

I had a nice conversation with a guy named Ash I met yesterday who bought four black chairs I’d wanted to sell. We were talking as we carried the chairs out of the garage to his grey sedan. He said he wished Fb Mktplace’d been around when he was a student and I agreed that you can find amazing bargains. 

The chairs had come to me when I bought a table for the front room. The table and four chairs cost $50 and I sold the chairs for $30. The guy who sold them to me was moving to Melbourne and wanted to empty out his apartment so he also gave me four outdoor chairs for free, which I listed for $20. Ash said he’d think about buying these as well. The table is made of steel and glass and suits the entryway to my house – it’s on the tiles just inside the front door – offering a modern, contemporary aspect to visitors. It also gives me a place to put things.

Like books I’ve been selling that I want to show to buyers who come into the house. I listed books the other day in a way I’d not contemplated before. In the past I’d just put up one book at a time with a price and title. This time I shot a photo of just over a dozen history books on a shelf and offered them all for $50 (or $5 each). As a result I got over ten responses and in the same day sold 23 books to two different buyers (one left some behind and promised to come back later to pick them up). In the past this kind of reaction would have been even more remarkable. But community interest stopped after a couple of days.

With the chairs I’d had them up for about a week or ten days. But the slackening off in engagement for the books makes me think of another feature of the site, where they give you the opportunity to boost your listing by paying a fee. They also contact you for some listings after they’ve been up for a week or so, asking if you want to renew the listing. Normally I decline this offer but I think in future I’ll take them up on it. With this feature you only get a limited number of renewals (though I haven’t seen what happens when you reach the limit) and that’s why I normally don’t accept these messages that come through driven by an AI.

Facebook relies on artificial intelligence. I like Fb Mktplace because, unlike eBay, they don’t charge you for listing. But they probably might offer to boost listed items at no charge. If I put up a book to sell for $5 I don’t want to pay $2.50 to boost it. Facebook anyway has enough money and doesn’t really need my $2.50 to be profitable. 

So far I’ve sold hundreds of dollars’ worth of goods online using this interface and will continue to use it in future. I particularly want to get rid of books as I already have 13 bookcases and they’re mostly all full. If I want to buy more physical books – and this is more than likely, as I’m an inveterate reader – I’ll need free space to store them. In the past I’ve bought many books that’ve just sat unread for years waiting for inclination to strike so I take them off the shelf to spend time with, and recently I’ve been scooping up old books that catch my attention. Fb Mktplace helps me to rationalise my library but my loyalty – I’d used the platform since 2007 and spend a good deal of time on it each day – should be better rewarded. Maybe the company could use its algorithms to convert time spent on the site into booster vouchers that can be reclaimed when a seller wants to promote a listing.