Our lives have been transformed by technology (again). Public debate is now dominated by social media, right? So everybody who owns a mobile phone has as much of a chance to influence the national discourse as any professional opinion former. A communications innovation has made the edited media redundant, yeah? Or maybe not.
I am old enough to recall a whole series of irreversible changes in the human condition brought about by technical innovations — which weren’t.
In my childhood, it was ‘inevitable’ that the public cinema — actually going out to see a film in a theatre — would die as a consequence of television. The entertainment available to everybody in the comfort of his own home would put an end to trips to the pictures. Then came the multiplex with its luxury seating, and Hollywood blockbusters with special effects that needed a purpose-built auditorium to do them justice — and that was the end of that.
More recently, it was televisions themselves that were doomed to obsolescence because everybody would watch programmes on their computers. No more gathering in the living room to view a scheduled broadcast: You’ll just access whatever you want, when you want, on a hand-held device. Then came the fetishistic mega-television as object of desire: The 50-inch flat-screen monster with wireless connectivity, high definition, and infinite on-demand facilities selling at a far higher price than anybody would have dreamt of paying for a TV a decade earlier, when its death was being confidently predicted.
Well, you get the picture. Technical progress, as often as not, does not even bring about the minor revisions in our way of doing things that would have been expected. Whatever happened to the ‘paperless office’? My desk, like that of my colleagues, is littered with printouts of internet material because, if I am to make serious use of research I find on the web, I need a hard copy that I can look at as I write.
The disappearance of the printed word, especially in book form, has been bandied about as inevitable since the early Sixties. Yet the arrival of the e-reader appears scarcely to have touched the sales of real, physical books, except at the popular, holiday-read end of the market. So, what about the social media revolution, then?
How inexorable is this movement towards infinite opinion-mongering and the unmonitored, unfiltered dissemination of every judgement, observation or threat that anyone chooses to broadcast to the world? We have now reached a point where the value — and the danger — of this phenomenon has become a hot enough topic for all the glib presumptions about it to be properly examined. I would argue that it is not, in any true sense of the word, democratic.
Not unless you think that political freedom means impunity from any sort of moral responsibility. Nor is it ‘social’ if you take that word to have its positive meaning: Conducive to communal good. Democracy is freedom under the rule of law: Its essence lies in the power of the citizenry, who are relied upon to accept the responsibility that comes with that power in their behaviour toward one another as individuals, as well as to the polity as a whole.
A public platform that licenses the lawless, anarchic promulgation of hatred, or incitement to violence without accountability, is the enemy of democracy — not an advanced outpost of it. But how have we got here? Why has this neutral public space been effectively (but not exclusively) dominated by an escalating nastiness so hideous and gratuitous as to raise doubts about the mental health of the population at large? Where has all this absurd, unfathomable rage and hatred come from? Has it always been there, lying beneath the surface of an apparently benign national life, just waiting for its chance to leap from the dark?
I doubt it: I am more inclined to believe that there is something about the isolation of computer-based activity (and this includes online pornography addiction) that breeds deviant, narcissistic, almost autistic, attitudes to the outside world. Which may be another reason why obsessive participation in ‘social media’ is not really social at all: Why it can so easily become detached, insular and, in the end, deeply anti-social.
The people who send the rape and death threats are not communicating with the world as we, or they, experience it. Nor are they expressing genuine rage against women (for which Tony Wang, the boss of Twitter, has “personally apologised”, for what that’s worth). The infantile men who do this are just showing off to each other like little boys shouting insults at girls in the school playground. For the duration of this fantasy, they are in a parallel universe in which their puerile outbursts have no repercussions.
And there is one striking, singular cause of this delusion: the anonymity that — for some inexplicable reason — has become the norm in internet discourse. What possible justification could there be — what historical precedent is there — for this sinister cloak of invisibility being offered to everyone who participates in what is touted as a forum for public debate? You are not permitted to vote, or to contribute seriously to any public disputation (including the letters page of any newspaper) in a free society, without being prepared to identify yourself.
Yet ‘social media’ addicts can pour obscene abuse, personal threats and bile of every variety into the public domain under any number of aliases — and this supposedly adds to the sum total of human liberty. The idea that this might protect political dissidents seems rather risible now that we know that there is no real anonymity at all on the internet. Everything you do and write in any part of the world, as you sit hunched over your laptop in apparent invisibility, can be monitored and traced. You may as well hand all your transactions, including your web browser history, direct to the US security services, for all the good your ‘anonymous’ hash tag or commenter’s pseudonym will do you. The little boys with their dirty talk have brought on a fully fledged crisis of confidence in the web — or, at least, in the unrestricted participation of everybody in it. Which is a real shame.
Evidence of the better side of human nature is there, for the asking. Try posting a request for help on a medical problem (or even better, a technical one) on a dedicated web forum and you will be astonished by the generosity and helpfulness of the replies. But then we get respectable authors hiding behind false identities to trash their rivals’ books. And restaurant owners posing as satisfied customers to give phoney reviews of their own establishments. What if the irresponsibility, the untrustworthiness, or just the sheer unpleasantness takes an ineradicable hold and this whole experiment becomes just another technical revolution that faded away?
— The Telegraph Group Ltd, London 2013
