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.

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.

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.

'China Tonight' hits the spot

I hadn’t watched this program before, feeling some measure of resentment on account of Stan Grant’s constant shifting within the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It seemed as though every time I looked at the primary digital channel he was hosting a different show. ‘Matter of Fact’, another late-night show, was cancelled after 10 months and then Grant moved to Doha to work with Al Jazeera (which I have problems with). 

Now he’s back though it remains to be seen how long the China program will last for. I wonder why Grant is such a butterfly? Is the problem with him or with the ABC? To make ‘China Tonight’ he teams up with Yvonne Yong, who started working at the national broadcaster in 2016 and has also worked with Sky News in London.

Grant worked in China for many years and Yong speaks Mandarin so the two hosts have a good pedigree and what I saw is promising. This type of program is especially important due to the lack of news coming out of China on account of the Communist Party’s iron-like grip on the flow of information. This has gone so far as to spawn new social media platforms for Chinese people, which are rigorous in their obedience to the Party. There is no such thing as a free media in China so Grant and Yong provide an unusual window onto its public sphere. As I’ve written in the past, much of what passes for public debate happens on social media, which can become quite boisterous despite the Party’s hunger for total control.

In the show of 18 October I saw some evidence of a peculiarly Chinese form of cancel culture. Whereas in the West when someone is cancelled it’s at the instigation of random actors who build momentum for action, in China it’s the Party that orders and carries out the cancellation, even leading to actors in movies having their names removed from credits. It’s Orwellian, and I’ve got Grant and Yong to thank for supplying light in a space characterised by darkness.

The Age selectively turns off replies to tweets

Having posted yesterday on a tweet involving Gina Reinhart that had replies turned off I’ve scouted out some tweets from the same source with the reply function still on. This seems to be the default position.

The following tweets had replies enabled. First, one about supermarkets and the competition offered by retailer Aldi.

Next is a tweet about a local Australian Netflix employee.

Next is a women’s health story. Another noncontentious one.

Finally there’s one about vaccines for Covid – potentially contentious but still getting the liberal treatment.

It seems that consumer affairs, health, and industrial relations are less contentious than climate change. The newspaper's editors are obviously concerned about the High Court decision that makes media companies liable for comments on posts they put up. That case resulted from comments left on a Facebook post.

The Age has turned off comments for Twitter posts

I discovered this on the morning of 7 October when I wanted to reply to a post editors had put up about Gina Reinhart saying that humans weren’t affecting the climate. See image below.

This is fairly alarming though I saw the same morning (it was about 8.30am) that the Guardian and the New York Times hadn’t followed suit. It’s alarming for the same reason that it’s alarming when politicians block people on Twitter. This is because dialogue is the raison d’etre of social media and, for a journalist or politician, obstructing it must be viewed with a feeling of disquiet.

Though you can understand why some might take this step. When a journalist or a politician criticises social media on account of the tone of debate social media responds by doubling down, so you see two sides ranked like opposing football teams, each one eager to prove itself in the contest. Some people keep away. Others keep silent and watch from the sidelines.

Nikki Savva to write a column for Nine Newspapers

In 2016 Savva published a book about Tony Abbott and the small coterie of insiders who helped him to govern. In it, she talks about Abbott’s problems. I wrote at the time:

One of the main ones was that all decisions seemed to emanate from a small group of select people in the leader's office, including his chief-of-staff. The type of collegial consultation that members of Parliament are apparently used to in a Westminster democracy were thrown out the door. A tiny clique was doing everything to control the message, but when the leader's popularity failed to turn around people outside that group turned on the leader and replaced him just like that.

That chief-of-staff, Peta Credlin, now writes a column for The Australian, where Savva used to run her words. Savva also used to work for Nine Chairman Peter Costello, so the current move is as cosy as Abbott’s counsellors were.

Savva is best known to the general population for her appearances on the ABC’s Sunday chat show, ‘Insiders’, which gets talked about at length on social media. One thing Savva didn’t talk about in her book was the one-term government we’ve seen so much of in recent years in Australia. As I wrote at the time of her book’s appearance:

But this phenomenon of one-term governments is something that the commentariat will have to one day really take a close, hard look at. So far noone has really made the attempt. I think it has something to do with the new public sphere in the age of social media. But a lot of people would despise me for even suggesting something like this.

It'd be very interesting if Savva could turn her attention to such things as these because so far the quantity of discussion about the shiftiness of politics in this country hasn’t percolated through the community to any significant degree. People are aware that something’s changed, but they are not all saying the same thing. Awareness is limited to responses to journalists and politicians who castigate the broader community when debate turns ugly. The common people revel in the icy sobriquets thrown out by the wounded.

Working around Facebook’s ban

To begin with, here’s what people yesterday saw when they tried to post links taken from Australian news websites:

I saw this humorous take early this morning in my Twitter timeline:

Taking a lead from Chris’ approach – while the BBC home page early this morning (Sydney time) featured a story about the ban, the New York Times’ site did not – my post today contains an often light-hearted take on a first-world problem as the social media giant goes head-to-head with the Australian government. I take a term out of the playbook of one of my favourite TV shows – ‘Hard Quiz’ (Wednesday nights at 8pm on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s main channel) – keeping in mind Tom Gleeson’s Monty Python-esque suppressed grin – a self-conscious smirk – as he hams it up, poking fun at all those drama-filled moments we enjoy so much when we watch TV. “Will Diane win a weekend away at Noosa or will she go home with nothing?” 

The standard, gimcrack game-show spiel. 

We adore the dramatic moment – as long as nothing important’s at stake – but while the Facebook v. Morrison govt contest appears for most to rank low on the criticality stakes, it has affected others hard. 

But there could be an upside: we might start learning how to write. https://magnetformedia.blogspot.com/2021/02/facebook-news-ban-puts-australians-back.html So, to put theory into practice, today I cheekily put the following on Facebook:

Two articles abt Facebook’s ban today on the Sydney Morning Herald website. In one, the PM says he’ll take the issue to the G7 in June. Morrison has spoken abt the ban w Narendra Modi, the Indian president. In another article, Stephen Scheeler, a former chief executive of Facebook in Australia and New Zealand, says, “Lying at the heart of Facebook’s abrupt ban on all Australian news is a global strategic gamble that will have a huge bearing not just on Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth, but on the dynamic between Big Tech and democracy.” He adds: “I suspect its bet is this: that by taking an aggressive hard line with a middle power, such as Australia, a tough message will be sent to the rest of the world to back off on regulation.”

To demonstrate just how irritated they were with the IT company, people were also doing other things. You can, for example, just copy and paste the news article’s entire text, as did this man:

Another person had the same idea, but only copying part of the target article:

Another way around the ban is to put up screen shots made from offending articles:

The same guy also used the “double-blind” method: screen shots of blog posts about news stories:

One more way around the ban is to use TinyURL:

This solution has the drawback that it crops out images and headlines and teasers, making it necessary to add some own text. Another approach – this time by a freelancer – is to direct people to an email subscription service that is run independent of Facebook. Stephanie Wood has done this, posting:

As I've discovered since taking a redundancy from Fairfax Media in 2017, life on the outside as a freelancer is incredibly tough. I'm not sure right now how I'm going to make a go of it. Facebook's action is a blow to freelancers like me who have tried to build communities and followings using the platform. (Never mind the blow it is to multiple other organisations and people who have used it to get important messages out into the world.)

You can go to her website at http://stephaniewood.com and subscribe:

Facebook’s decision to ban Oz news stories could turn out to be costly for the American company as – compelled by sovereign pride – any number of countries around the world may take a hard line, and move to rein in the behemoth. People who use the service might think, “This is just another case of the company meddling with my life.” Most don’t like to be thwarted. Having cornered part of the market for vanity and spite – the two sides of ego being shitposting and bragging – Facebook might find that it quickly loses all credibility as a trusted partner in the business of staying in touch with friends, acquaintances, and family. 

Complete strangers might well become friends – this has of course happened to me, as it has with pretty much everyone – but I like to feel as though I am in control of the process. Another thing that seems to be ubiquitous is that feeling that Facebook is listening to one’s conversations. This also detracts from the pleasure of the process. For example when you send an email to someone in which you mention a category of consumer product or service and then – all of a sudden – you see an ad for that same product or service on the social graph. As though Facebook had been listening to your chatter (as, indeed, it is).

Facebook knows what to do to counter such worries: it simply ignores them. But it doesn’t know what to do about the Australian government’s new media code – which is due to shortly pass through the Senate – so it is crushing opposition by blocking the posting of news articles. Such a heavy-handed response merely highlights the company’s frustration and dismay. Latika Bourke, the Sydney Morning Herald’s London correspondent, published a story this morning about how the UK government is viewing the Oz news ban: 

The chair of the British parliament’s committee for the media and tech says Facebook’s “irresponsible” decision to cut off news and official government feeds for Australian users constitutes “bullying” and will unite legislators from around the world into wanting to curb Big Tech’s abuse of its monopoly.

Facebook news ban puts Australians back in control of their messaging

Facebook has decided to do the unthinkable and stop Australians – and people overseas posting news from Down Under – sharing their favourite media stories. This move comes just a day after it was announced that Google and a few Australian news organisations had reached agreements on profit sharing.

This move by the tech giant pushes people over to Twitter, but it might have an unintended effect as people, driven by who they are – sharing embodies intrinsic parts of our personalities – start to write their own posts with perhaps the occasional quote from a news outlet. Or even with no quotes – Facebook might block such use of its interface – and, rather, paraphrased extracts of news stories.

We’ll have to see what happens. Twitter, meanwhile will take more territory from its competitor. The government hasn’t asked Twitter to share any profits from its use of news, so as far as things stand currently – the day this article you’re reading was posted – there’s no reason to fear that it’ll become completely impossible for people to engage with other around the news campfire.

Whatever happens, the Facebook shift will increase the importance of literacy. People now – eager to connect with friends and family, and denied a basic freedom by Facebook’s greed – will learn to craft sentences that have the same pith and rigour as your average news story. Short, sharp, to-the-point. 

News is where we live. We’re swimming in stories like fish in the sea. Without stories we die. Solitary confinement can be fatal as it changes the way our brains work, so being connected with others in a news environment is critical to the health of the polis. Without this outlet we feel frustration and will resort to other measures in order to release the pent-up emotions we harbour as a result of dealing with the fear and loathing of daily life. News liberates as it consoles. 

It can also terrify and anger. But whatever happens, with Facebook’s decision comes a moment when Australians – and, indeed, the world – must find other ways to message, to shine a light on the hill, to let fly the billows of signal smoke across the valleys of the oceans.

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.