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!

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.

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.

Social media authentication regime would be a face too steep to climb

The Sydney Morning Herald reported three days ago that a report had been tabled in federal Parliament regarding safety and domestic violence, in which there was a suggestion it 

called for users to be required to present 100 points of identification – which could include a driver’s licence, birth certificate, Medicare card, or passport – in order to open or maintain an existing social media account with companies such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

At about the same time, a federal minister announced that she used an anonymous account to conduct some discussions with the community. What might’ve surprised the government – which did not, it must be remembered, make any policy announcement in response to the committee’s report – was the reaction of that respected (but never respectful) community. 

It was, of course, utterly offended. Not that the community is ever short on expressions of hatred aimed at the government. It seems that the outrage mill that runs 24 hours a day is always switching its allegiances, taking up for a few hours one issue or another in its endless cycle of bonding and othering, a relentless attempt to satisfy our collective vanity. 

But let’s think about this briefly in the cold light of day. It’s Easter Monday, after all, and we’re probably all sick and tired of talking with family and might need a break to draw us back to the real world of work and politics, the world away from photos of pets and appeals for sympathy on account of a chocolate overload.

If the government is having a hard time getting vaccinations into people’s arms, and has (we’re told) fallen short of its goal by a wide margin, how much more complex to make each and every person who uses each and every social media platform – submit genuine IDs at a government-run office. And how much more unlikely that Service NSW (for example) or Centrelink would be able to gauge the authenticity of the documents thus tendered for scrutiny by one bleary-eyed functionary or another.

Even if you did get all the correct documents put before the censor and a message sent via an official channel to Twitter’s head office in California, as soon as you’d gotten the routine up and running there would be a news story about a fraud. A woman assaulted by a former partner who’d used subterfuge to get hold of her residential address, a late-night murder perhaps (in the worst case) carried out by an old lover with an axe to grind and with an anonymous account that the government had (incorrectly) said was really a school lteacher.

And what of anonymous accounts? What of the federal minister? Wouldn’t she be able to operate anonymously if she wanted to, given that opening and operating that account would require the use of ID? Why shouldn’t a prominent person who finds the rough-and-tumble of Twitter a bit hard to take – even on the best days – opt for a less bruising method to engage with the demos? If ID were required, surely you’d still be able to have an anonymous account?

The scale of the operation is what’s missing from accounts like that published by the SMH. When the government opened up its purse at the beginning of Covid’s remake of the public sphere, all you had to do was go to Centrelink and report the fact that you were out of work. The money came directly thereafter into your bank account – registered with the authorities for just such emergencies. There was no scrutinising. There were not delays. You weren’t asked to sign a statutory declaration stating that you’d lost your driver’s licence. You didn’t have to go to the post office and apply for a passport.

A passport? Takes two weeks to get a new one if you have all the necessary documents on hand. But say that you have to go to Births, Deaths and Marriages and ask for a new birth certificate? What then? More delay? Meanwhile, in your absence, Twitter continues to spew out a tone of rebarbative bile each and every second, a flow making a mountain of unwatched – except to a few – messaging. A rugged butte made of aggression and spite. A headland of reheated verbiage that quotes TS Eliot and Camus and Orwell at a more than alarming rate. A cornucopia of derivative cliché. A cascade of bumptious kitsch.

Commentators up the wattage to cut through noise

What Tony Abbot in a state of deep chagrin called a “febrile” media culture has had another casualty, with commentators on the right seemingly dismayed by Anthony Albanese’s solid performance in the opinion polls, causing them to up the wattage on their pronouncements.

The above tweet appeared on or near 8 February and – unsurprisingly – garnered a lot of responses. The amount of online activity accompanying this little sally by Bolt was striking. It was almost as though this – the response – had been the aim all along. To counter that effect, the next day (or thereabouts) Alan Jones came out with his own attempt to provoke outrage among adherents of the Left.

You’ve got to applaud the quantity or quality of imaginative effort that such tweets entail in the formulation. Because putting them out there is – as everyone knows – a matter of moments. Coming up with an idea precisely aimed at sparking hatred however takes practice and a good deal of bravery. No-one can legitimately accuse Bolt and Jones of being a shrinking violet.

In fact being out there and building this kind of negative capacity is the whole plan. In order to remain current in that new media culture – a phenomenon engendered by the rise of social media, since about 2007 – commentators must up the wattage constantly just to remain visible. 

If they’re not visible they lose the only thing that they’ve got to sell: their popularity. And around this time it became urgent to cement their gains due to the appearance – in addition to Albanese’s good polling numbers – or Joe Biden as US president. There was also the festering scandal of New South Wales’ pork barrelling money for fire rejuvenation. The events that this show targeted had played out a year earlier, during the aftermath of the summer bushfires, but the long tail of shame had come to grips with the deputy leader of the Coalition in Sydney, John Barilaro, who sat up in front of a Parliamentary enquiry stumbling over his words in an effort to cope with the effects of cognitive dissonance. 

It was actually a superb performance, and if it had been an actor instead of a politician, he could’ve won an Oscar but it’s easy to make this sort of snide comment – I’m almost ashamed of myself – because that’s how so much of public discourse is carried out. As I noted a couple of years ago, the commentariat’s increased breadth has been accompanied by a narrowing of viewpoints available to sample. The negative comments people make when an unpopular politician pokes up his or her head school pundits in how to gain traction. 

We’re creating the new mode used by Bolt and Jones. 

The information viaduct and species behaviour

You don’t often find justifications for journalism with this kind of title, but as the length of this post indicates (approx. 2300 words) I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for quite some time. The first traces of this line of enquiry I can find appeared on Happy Antipodean on 14 September 2015 in a post titled “Studying journalism is not just a vocational course” which was about training. A light piece in response to a Sydney Morning Herald story that’d just appeared, it contained this:

Storytelling is an essential human activity that shows no likelihood of disappearing. And all industry sectors can use storytellers to build their businesses. In fact they need them, in the same way a viable electorate needs journalists in order to make the critical decisions that national stability relies on. They don't call it the media – the layer in the middle, the information viaduct – for nothing.

On 2 July 2018 I expanded on this point in a post titled “The articulation of stories and the dynamics of progress”, which I include in its entirety below.

On 29 June at 6.49am an account on Twitter named ‘Stand For Something Even If You're Sitting Down’ tweeted the following:

[President Donald] Trump: The press is the enemy of the American people.

Milo [Yiannopoulos, a right-wing commentator]: The press should be killed.

Shooter [Jarrod Ramos, who killed journalists in Maryland in 2018]: Kills members of the press.

The Left: Trump and Milo are dangerous and culpable in this.

The Right: The Left needs to be civil.

We tell ourselves stories all the time as we strive to function as members of a community that sustains us. Such stories are essential to its proper functioning and to maintaining our ties to it. They cement us within its fabric as essential parts of it. They are the glue that binds each community together, and part of that process involves us articulating aspects of the stories that animate our social lives, to form coherent narratives. The above tweet is a symptom of this articulation, where each step in the process of meaning-creation stems from the one that comes before. We locate ourselves within this process of meaning-creation by helping to tell either the whole story from beginning to end, or just one part of it that can then be taken up by the next person in the chain.

That chain ties us to the earth, from which all wealth derives. The earth sustains us as the stories we tell each other sustain us in our various tribes. They work in two ways: to keep us together and to keep others out. While the first aim is important for our survival, the second can prevent us from learning new things. So while stories can teach people entering the tribe what it is important for them to know, so that they can help the whole function more effectively, they can also exclude ideas that might function to help the tribe survive and prosper.

In our communities, the tribes operate much like sporting teams that are competing for the scarce resource of victory. In this flawed scenario, which is a zero-sum game, only one team can win, and so each member of it works to the utmost extent of his or her capacities to destroy the effectiveness of the opposition. In this earnest game we strengthen the bonds that keep us together by helping to articulate the stories that sustain the tribe, but we might also lose sight of the ultimate goal, which is for both teams to prosper and to increase the amount of wealth the earth surrenders, for the same amount of energy expended. Sometimes we need to borrow from the playbook of the opposition, and use ideas that have been articulated and developed by that tribe, in order to strengthen the chain that binds us to the earth. This is called “progress”.

At the end of the month I was at it again as the bug had bitten and I was on a roll. This time the post was titled “Intolerance and incivility on social media”. The bit I want to include is this:

They say that there are "echo chambers" online where people just see views that conform to their own, because people only follow people with views that are similar to theirs. But especially with Twitter hashtags, you now get to see what people of all walks of life are thinking and saying. And often tweets from people you follow might be in the form of a retweet from an ideological enemy accompanied by additional commentary refuting what the original tweet had said, but you still get to see what had been written. I think there is actually more awareness now than ever before of what people on the other side of the fence think and do.

But what is true is that the conversations that happen across the divide are very low-quality. Flame wars erupt, sarcasm is used, and people just dig in, refusing to budge an inch from cherished positions. It’s not at all like a collegiate forum where robust academic debates take place in an ambience where the right of everyone to express themselves unobstructed is respected, but more like the schoolyard, where hurtful things are said casually to exclude, to wound, and to objectify without considering the consequences.

On 2 December 2018 I published a post titled “Ego, like tribal loyalty, cements people’s identity” which contained the following elucidation of my theory of narrative.

If you don’t have a healthy ego you’re probably suffering from a mental illness. It is what keeps us confident and “happy” (that indefinable feeling of rightness that characterises our waking life, even if we are not aware of it most of the time). You don’t want to be without an ego. In its absence your life would be hell.

But ego has a drawback even while it keeps everything ticking along smoothly: it keeps new ideas out of our consciousness. We privilege what we already know and cleave to ideas that are central to our identity. This aspect of ego makes it a liability in some circumstances. We won’t listen. We reject things outright unless they’re wrapped correctly. We say “No” when we perhaps should think twice.

For groups of people, the function of ego is carried out by tribal loyalty. We might all be individuals, with own tastes and preferences, but we cannot survive alone, without a community to support us. The group has its own language, its common referents, its beliefs even. It has its icons and its leaders and its spokespeople. It has traditions and lore and ways for members to use to conduct themselves so that everyone gets along well. Pledging loyalty to the tribe, however, has, like ego for the individual, the downside risk that it serves to quarantine the group from valuable input from outside. People who are identified as outsiders are distrusted or even mocked and scorned. Their ideas are diminished by sarcasm and other rhetorical methods used to create community, or ignored.

So, good ideas can have trouble getting in. Bad ideas can be perpetuated regardless of their merit simply through common usage. If someone you trust says something that is factually incorrect, you are likely to believe that it is true. This happens all the time in the public sphere, where most people outsource their critical faculties to political parties. Individual tastes only go so far; mostly our preferences are predictable, and our likes and dislikes can be accurately mapped just by learning which group we belong to.

In August I examined a flame war that Australian journalist Peter van Onselen had been caught up in. For a while he quit Twitter, but made an exception for a colleague. As I reported in a post titled “Extreme views get all the attention”:

At 9.06am on 17 August, van Onselen tweeted to Fairfax journalist Jacqueline Maley: “Yours is the only tweet I’m responding to, I said I’m no longer using twitter [sic] for more than posts [because] the vile abuse I’ve received has stunned me. The left right spectrum is more of a curved U leaving extreme left & right with much in common. That’s all I was saying. Signing off.”

I went on, later:

The sensible centre is being hollowed out as people take sides and reward the outlets that buttress their personal biases with their cash. But partisanship is not good for democracy. What we need are outlets that look at individual policies and judge them based on their merits, not on the basis of whether we support the political party that espouses them.

“Social media is bad for journalism” ran the headline on a post I put up on Happy Antipodean on 5 April 2019:

Social media is great for sharing links but the quality of material being produced in recent years is not encouraging. BuzzFeed for a start, with its quizzes and text-poor stories and endless sequences of quoted tweets, is a bad sign.

Then you have the newspapers that pimp their stories to get subscribers. The quality doesn't matter to people as long as the bias conforms with their own. Some, like the Guardian, ask for donations and run campaigns to fund stories on specific topics. But with the groupthink evident on social media begging for ideologically-bent material in preference to objective stories written by ethical journalists, it's hard to see how we can be well served by such organisations.

You also have "indie" media which is run on a shoestring and which runs complete nonsense that people applaud and retweet endlessly, as though the vomit they are promoting were some rare souffle offered up by the kitchen of a Michelin-starred chef.

The kinds of extremism that thrives in social media, on sites like Twitter and Facebook, is precisely the wrong kind of influence you want to have operating on journalism. In the old days, university graduates used to complain about the hysterical headlines produced by the major urban tabloids. Words with the same kind of rhetorical audacity as statements that are made by politicians intent on demolishing the arguments of their opponents. But with social media this same kind of rhetoric is ubiquitous.

On 27 February 2019 I wrote a post titled “Group behaviour and popular narratives” that contained the following further elucidation of my ideas, particularly as they related to groups.

People actually don't want to be made to think, they want to be made to feel comfortable with their existing biases. This is what makes them adhere to groups in the first place. It’s quite natural. You see this clearly with both politics and with the arts. In the latter case, people gravitate to the familiar and the routine, the thing that most closely resembles what they have already consumed at one time or another. This is because they remember the feeling it gave them last time and they want to feel the same way again. It’s about pleasure, and we are nothing if not pleasure-seeking animals. But it’s also about safety (we feel good when we feel safe).

With politics, what you find is that people will unthinkingly endorse views that conform to their political party's policy platform. People don't want anything "challenging" (although that is a normal way for critics to compliment a work of art, such as a movie or a novel that they like). People want what they had before, except better and cheaper.

With public policy, problems usually arise where you find regressive thinking that derives from people’s tendency to operate in mobs. Demagogues are a problem sometimes but once you have rule by the demos the problem actually derives in most cases from the ways that groups behave.

We actually shouldn't be following party platforms. What we should be doing is choosing the policies that are going to achieve the best results, regardless of which party endorses them. Unfortunately, people are unthinking creatures who like to stick close to the group. So we will continue to swing wildly from one side to the other even while the big problems such as climate change and wealth inequality, both of which are complex and worsening in their impacts, and which require concerted action, resist the solutions we throw up from time to time in a haphazard fashion.

In a post put up on 23 September of the same year titled “Social media and the cultural elites” I wrote:

[T]he cultural elites are enthusiastic proponents of social media and use it as aggressively as your average (left-wing or right-wing) troll in order to promote their favourite views regardless how narrow these might be. They are not babes in the wood, nor are they merely subject to unwarranted censure by an ignorant rabble. They are participating with eyes wide open in a system of communication that encourages verbal abuse at worst and at least an ugly contempt for opponents.

Now that we’re all paddling in the water, how does it feel? Do you feel comfortable? How should you react if your feelings are not respected? What about your own conduct? Are you entirely blameless if some people flame you or denigrate your words? If they disrespect you? Do you respect others? Is being “nice” important or is good policy the only worthy goal? What kind of policy is created according to reprehensible behaviour? Does it matter? Does good policy even matter? 

Who says it’s good?!

You do. Or s/he does. Or else you all say it’s bad. Either way, you’re complicit. It’s actually your policy. The polls tell us so. This brings me back to another 2015 post, this one titled “A ‘febrile’ media culture or radical transparency?” It was in response to just-deposed PM Tony Abbott’s parting slash at the commentariat. I talked about how the public sphere had changed since a large proportion of the community was using Twitter.

[T]he thing is that the whole relationship between the public and politicians has changed due to the ever-on nature of the public sphere, enabled through social media. There is nowhere to hide any more once the soundbite has been launched into the ether. If there is any dissimulation, or plain treachery, or just day-to-day spin, you will be found out. That then will cause a wave of opinion to start in cyberspace and this will lead journalists to find ways to satisfy the appetite thus kindled.

Scott Morrison is more used to working in this new type of space, as his recent policy shift in favour of greentech indicates. So even though a lot of what happens on social media is reprehensible at least, and damaging at worst, at least we see the message getting through.