Losing my twitterginity

A long way behind the trend, I started using twitter a couple of weeks ago. The reason for this was to try to publicise my other blog (the Brexit blog) to gain a wider audience for it. Several people had advised me to do this, as indeed they had for this blog. But this blog has managed to develop a fairly large readership whereas the Brexit blog was languishing largely unread. So I took the plunge, set up an account (@chrisgreybrexit) and started tweeting.

My previous resistance to twitter was much more than a disinclination. I remembered having written a post on this blog back in October 2014 about my antipathy to twitter but it was not until I went back and checked that I found just how hostile I had been. To give a flavour:

“It is not just another medium of communication, neutral in itself, it entails an emotional, political and intellectual infantilisation of communication. That, I think, is the image we should have of tweeting: an endlessly, insatiably egocentric infant spewing out its thoughts and feelings at the instant they occur. The trolls are not so much a side-effect as an exemplification of this: far from being an anomaly they define the ideal-type of the tweeter. But unlike infants they claim a right, albeit one detached from any kind of defensible ethics or politics.”

Gosh. Well, I recant. Converts are almost as depressing as ex-smokers in their evangelism so I want to be careful that I do not bounce from one extreme to the other. Even so, I have (largely) changed my mind.

Starting out is a rather curious experience. You can tweet, yes, but who will read it if you have no followers? But, then, who will follow you if you have not tweeted anything? It is reminiscent of being picked (or not) for sports teams at school. Until picked you can't show your prowess; until you have shown your prowess you won't be picked. So I alerted a few people who I thought might be interested and who I knew were on twitter, and I followed a few people who I thought were interesting and might be interested in following me; and some of them did indeed follow me. So a day or two in I had a heady following of 15 or so and after a few provisional tweets put out a message alerting them to my latest post on the Brexit blog.

Nothing much happened until a couple of days later when, suddenly, I started receiving hundreds of email alerts from twitter about new followers, mentions, retweets, likes (all completely new language to me) and the readership of the Brexit blog started shooting up into the hundreds and, then, the thousands. My followers rose to an admittedly still puny few hundred, but within them were several well-known journalists and politicians. What had happened took me a little while to reconstruct but in essence one of my early little pool of followers had tweeted a message to his large group of followers, one of whom tweeted a very positive message to his even larger group of followers one of whom, a leading journalist, had added a positive endorsement and sent it to his half a million plus followers. I was picking up the crumbs, so to speak, of the twitterati cake.

So the first thing to say is that my aim of getting a bigger readership for the blog had, unquestionably, worked. It was undoubtedly dumb luck and it has died down considerably since, but it did work. Beyond that, I began to be quite fascinated by the way that I now had a kind of tailored news site in which those I followed fed me interesting things and I could feed to those following me things I considered interesting. It has an addictive quality.

So I saw her face, but am I now a believer? Yes and no. There are some clear downsides. Given the Brexit focus there have inevitably been some nasty messages, not so much on twitter or the blog but (since people can google me and find my email address) on my work email. But I must admit that I’m quite amused by this insight into the Brexiter mindset (and for anyone reading this who sends me such messages please note that I laugh, delete and don’t reply). As for comments made on twitter itself, my view remains that 140 character messages is not a good way of having a discussion.

What I can now see is that twitter is a good way of sharing news stories and other resources that one might otherwise miss. But even here there is a downside. There has been a lot of talk (that until now I had not really understood) about how social media tends to create silos, or echo chambers, in which one’s own views are simply re-confirmed by contact with like-minded people. I can see this from my two weeks on twitter. Obviously that’s mainly to do with my choices of who to follow, and these have indeed given me the impression that, like me, others are fuming with anger and fear about what Brexit means. There may be a danger in that if it leads to misreading the balance of opinion – but perhaps not in this case, since it is a counterweight to the bulk of media reporting. But isn’t that exactly the reasoning of the post-truth loonies who insist that the ‘mainstream media’ ignores their nonsense?

There’s an ongoing debate about whether the use of twitter is declining but it seems to be the preferred medium of Donald Trump so who’s to deny its political importance? I started following him on twitter this week but, alas, so far he has not returned the compliment.

The fourth estate

There are many things I would like to write about today, from the latest Islamist atrocities in Brussels to the latest twists in the EU Referendum debate. But one dimension of these and, by definition, any news story is the reporting of news in general and the importance of journalistic freedom in particular.

I’m prompted to say this by the trial which began today, in secret, in Turkey of journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül. The case, which involves charges of espionage since the journalists reported on alleged Turkish state support for weapons shipments to Syria, has attracted widespread condemnation. It comes at a time of wider concerns about press freedom in Turkey, in part following the State takeover of Zaman, the country’s biggest newspaper, earlier this month.

Journalistic freedom is always a target for attack by authoritarian regimes, and there are numerous cases throughout history – Egypt’s action against three al-Jazeera journalists being a recent notorious example. That this is so reflects, precisely, why journalism is so important to a free society and why it is so important to defend it. The universally acclaimed recent film Spotlight, about the journalistic investigation of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, dramatizes this, as did now classic films like All the President’s Men or The Killing Fields.

The need for robust reporting and investigative journalism seems to me to be all the more important given the massive increase in information available because of the internet and social media – what Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks calls ‘the networked fourth estate’. In one way this seems to offer a powerful counter in its own right to political authoritarianism. In another way, it obscures because it enables anyone and everyone to put their message out – in blogs like this one, indeed – with no necessary regard for truth, verification or accuracy. Twitter storms both shape the news agenda and become news in their own right.

In this world, according to the Pew Research Center:

"Instead of gatekeepers, journalists now become referees. Acknowledging that our potential audience is flooded with unlimited information and no way of discerning what is of value, what is true, what is propaganda, we must construct our work to offer them the referee’s advice: this information has been checked and verified; this information has been found to be untrue; this is self-interested propaganda; this is being reported but we have yet to be able to verify the information."

Academics are also important in this process. I think it was C. Wright Mills who described sociology as ‘slow journalism’ but whoever it was I agree – as regards sociology and social science in general, including organization studies. Indeed this is why (returning to the general point) authoritarian regimes also persecute academics as they do journalists, but my point is more particularly that in the internet-enabled cacophony academics can also be ‘referees’. Indeed they are often used by the media in just that way, and it seems to me a more important social utility than the rather mechanical notion of ‘research impact’ currently in vogue. What I find striking and impressive is the way that every time a new news story breaks, there is an academic on hand with expertise in what just hours before might have been dismissed as esoteric self-indulgence or 'academic' in the pejorative sense.

Of course there are plenty of academics and journalists who use their positions in ways that neither live up to the heroic traditions of investigative crusade nor to the mundane traditions of careful facticity. And the notions of disinterested truth that underpin both are clearly somewhat threadbare; one hardly needs to read the laboured prose of postmodern philosophers to realise this. Even so many journalists and academics do, I think, seek to uphold their best traditions whilst being sensitive to their limitations.

On the other hand, just at the moment that good journalism is most needed it is being undermined by the economics of new technology and the voracious demands of 24-hour rolling news. It is very cheap to use what is at best citizen journalism and at worst twitter-fuelled populism to fill cavernous news space, and much journalism is now no more than a recycling of the PR material of firms and governments. By contrast, it is expensive to maintain a journalistic staff unless there is lot of cultural capital and state subsidy (e.g. the BBC) or a lot of cultural capital and a brand that can be ‘monetized’ (e.g. the Financial Times). Academics, too, face pressures, especially where universities are heavily dependent on private funding or just when they become so overwhelmed by other demands that their public information role gets marginalized.

Even so, our main concern should surely be the very direct, coercive ways in which authoritarian states seek to silence comment, and here I return to Turkey – a country, let’s not forget, that is a member of NATO and an aspirant member of the EU. Here, it is not just journalists who are being arrested and, in fact, killed. Just ten days ago, three mathematics academics were arrested for calling for an end to security operations against the Kurds (and a fourth, British computer scientist Chris Stephenson was arrested and then deported for protesting in their support) and stand accused of terrorism.

Required reading

Over Christmas I have been reading Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, Number 11. Like John Lanchester’s Capital, which I ‘reviewed’ on this blog, it can be read as a ‘state of the nation’ novel (Coe even makes a joke about this) and, via five interlocking sub-stories, it reprises some of the themes of his earlier books, especially What a Carve Up! and The Closed Circle. Overall, I would characterise these themes as being about the unwinding of the post-war welfare state and its accompanying collectivism, and the ongoing consequences of individualization, privatization and – a key one in Number 11 – monetization (in the sense of putting monetary value on things like education which might otherwise be regarded as valuable in themselves).

The title Number 11 carries several resonances: the address of Britain’s finance minister; the number of the circular bus route that a character rides so as to be warm without heating her home; the number of subterranean floors being dug below an uber-rich family’s London home to extend their already commodious residence. For it’s a satire – sometimes almost judderingly heavy-handed, other times almost painfully delicate – that often addresses some of the themes of this blog, especially those of inequality, tax avoidance, the pitfalls of choice, the politics of ‘austerity’ and, even, the perils of twitter.

The section that spoke most profoundly and personally to me is entitled ‘The Crystal Garden’ which tells of the doomed attempt of Roger, an Oxford academic of about my age, to track down a short film he had seen as a child:

“Roger was convinced … that life was better, simpler, easier, in the past … it wasn’t just a hankering for childhood. It was bigger than that. It was to do with what the country was like … in the sixties and seventies …. For Roger it was about welfarism, and having a safety net, and above all … not being weighed down by choice all the time … he loved the idea of trusting people to make decisions on his behalf. Not all of them. Just some. Just enough so that you were free to live other parts of your life the way that you wanted.” (Coe, 2015: 176)

It’s important to understand that this isn’t about nostalgia, or at least not just about nostalgia. It’s about a rupture that animates – in very different ways – the politics of both nationalists and socialists across, at least, Europe. In France, Les Trentes Glorieuses, Jean Fourastié’s term for the 1945-1975 period of economic growth and social security, captures the same sentiment that Coe expresses. This rupture is described in my book in terms of the shift in the 1970s to the new capitalism (pp. 104-120) and so, of course, present in the book I most heavily draw on in that section, Richard Sennett’s (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism. And it’s no coincidence that at the heart of Roger’s memory was “waiting for his father to come home from work – from the same place he worked for forty years” (Coe, 2015: 176) because stable employment was at the heart of the economic and social security of those years. As I’ve argued elsewhere on this blog, the erosion of that security constitutes the most pressing political issue of the present time in Western societies, in ways well-captured (for all that it is startlingly inattentive to the ‘critical management’ literature that says much the same thing) by Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism.

We can understand this in conventional political terms: the social democratic consensus of North and West Europe and, to an extent, the USA in the post-war decades was about the best economic and social arrangement that has so far existed (even if it did not always seem so at the time). But perhaps it is better understood without thinking in terms of economic or political theory. Bill Bryson’s humorous memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid expresses it well as regards the United States; David Lodge’s novel Nice Work captures the beginning of it in the UK, especially as regards academic life. And Coe’s book is the latest example of the powerful way that art and humour can illuminate social science.

In a somewhat related vein, another Christmas read was Douglas Board’s novel MBA. This is not nearly so well-written (but, to be fair, whereas Coe is a well-established professional novelist Board is a coaching and leadership consultant who has turned his hand to fiction) and it’s a fairly clumsy satire, if not farce, of business schools. Still, it does hit what are for me some familiar targets in terms of the corporatization and even corruption of the contemporary business school, including the hubris of high-flying deans (see Parker, 2014 for a real world example). And there are some acute insights along the way about, for example, the enmeshment of business schools and politicians in the marketization of the public sector that also get a look-in in Coe’s book. MBA certainly isn’t a great or even a good novel, but it’s the first that I know of that tackles the business school. I feel sure that this setting is ripe for the attention of a latter-day Malcolm Bradbury or David Lodge campus novel.

Antisocial media

I’m taking a break from blogging about the election (about which there is not much of interest to say at the moment anyway) to reflect on something which, whilst not new, seems to be a growing phenomenon. It’s prompted by an experience whilst waiting at a large train station in London the other day. Nearby, there was an information stand at which sat a young woman in a smart uniform. Every few minutes, a passenger would approach her with some query or other and each time she would, after a moment, look up from her mobile phone, answer the question, and then immediately go back to the phone. I watched for a while and it seemed to me that she could hardly bear to look away from her phone for even a few seconds.

I’ve also noticed – again, it’s not an original observation, but recently it seems to be one I make more frequently – how the students I teach seem to find it all but impossible to go through a class, or for that matter a few minutes, without looking at their phones. One thing that seems particularly strange about this is that students invariably complain about the lack of class contact time, especially since the introduction of tuition fees in English universities, and yet in that time that they do have they absent themselves. There’s been quite a bit of research which suggests that phone-addiction is becoming increasingly common, including studies of students.

By phone addiction, of course, we really mean addiction to the internet and social media. It’s quite an alien world to me, and I’ve posted elsewhere about my views of twitter. I’ve never had a Facebook account – let alone Pinterest or Instagram - and although I do use my phone for email and texting I regard it primarily as just a phone. I don’t much like using it as the connection and comfort never seem as good as a landline and, horror of horrors, I leave it turned off for days at a time.

That’s not, or not just, middle-aged Luddism. I do wonder what the effects of this apparent addiction are. Some are all too obvious as when people walk through busy streets, oblivious to everyone around them, glued to the phone. Indeed there are increasing numbers of accidents as a result, as in this report about Tokyo, but I guess the same would be true in any large city. It’s also obvious when you watch commuters using phones and tablets to play games. Recently, a British politician was criticised for playing the game Candy Crush during a parliamentary committee. Less obvious effects include the report this week that levels of myopia amongst children are rocketing because of the amount of time spent indoors at computers and mobile devices, and in China steps are being taken to prevent this. Or, to take another example, phone use whilst driving is an increasing cause of traffic accidents.

There seems something infantile about all this; the inability to pay more than momentary attention, the compulsive need to play. More than that, it seems as if the social media addiction in particular comes at a great cost to social interaction. In connecting us it also disconnects us from ‘real’ relationships, as many commentators have noted. It is also – connecting with the example I began with – being reported that workplace productivity is being damaged by the obsessive need to connect, with one recent survey identifying it as the main cause of timewasting at work.

I realise that this sounds puritanical, and perhaps it is – perhaps, though, there are some virtues in puritanism? And of course there are downsides to all forms of human interaction, whether virtual or real. But it does seem to me problematic that increasingly we are unable to live in the present and the here-and-now. I’ll close with another recent observation, of a couple sitting at a restaurant table each engaging not with each other but with their phones. Or perhaps not, for it came into my head that for all I knew they were actually connecting with each other via their phones in preference to talking. It seemed not just possible but ineffably sad.

What's in a picture?

Further to my recent post on the perils of Twitter, another British politician has come a cropper because of a tweet. This time the victim (or villain, depending on your take) is Emily Thornberry, who tweeted a photo of a house displaying large St George’s flags (i.e. the English flag) and with a white van parked outside. The context of this is a little complicated to understand outside of England so I will try to summarise it.

The house that was pictured is in the constituency of Rochester and Strood, where there was a by-election yesterday which was won by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) who are opposed to British membership of the EU and to what they believe are too high levels of immigration. If you want some background, I have written about UKIP elsewhere, and also about British debates about immigration. UKIP have recently attracted high levels of electoral support, first in European elections and now in two by-elections where they have won seats in the British parliament.

Whilst being a party of the Thatcherite Right, they have a populist appeal that is increasingly attracting traditional working-class Labour voters in a way not dissimilar to the way that Thatcher herself was able to do in fact. This is where the tweeted image becomes important. The English flags can be taken to reference a particular strand of working-class English nationalism. ‘White van man’ is an expression connoting a stereotypical working class tradesman – not, actually, the traditional industrial working class, then, but perhaps a skilled, self-employed worker. Again, very much the segment of the working class that Thatcherism appealed to, and now UKIP. Thus Thornberry’s tweet was widely interpreted as derogatory towards working class voters, and she resigned her position as a member of Labour’s front bench.

This interpretation has great purchase because it plays into a narrative whereby Labour politicians (and politicians in general) are depicted as an out of touch ‘metropolitan elite’ who are alien to working class sentiment and interests. That Thornberry is an MP for Islington, stereotypically a part of London associated with multi-culturalism and 'trendy lefties', compounded this. It is an aspect of the cosmopolitans and locals split I discussed in another post, and has it counterpart in many countries apart from Britain

This situation is fraught with strange ironies – the UKIP leader and its two MPs are all men educated at elite, fee-paying public schools who used to work in the City of London, and so hardly horny handed sons of the toil, and UKIP are notably cool on trade union and employment rights whilst being four-square behind global free markets and deregulation. Elitist Emily Thornberry, by contrast, grew up on a council estate and went to a State school.  As for the Labour Party, its leader is simultaneously denounced as a left wing firebrand and as having abandoned its left wing roots. That is all part of the long-term consequences of the Blairite New Labour project, and is another topic.

What I want to focus on here is something different. It is that the tweeted picture was instantly read in a particular way. It had no accompanying text other than to say that it was taken in Rochester, so it was almost entirely a matter of the picture being interpreted in the way that it was. Other interpretations were surely possible. It could have been taken to mean that this was a working-class seat that Labour should be aiming to win (they have held it in the past), for example. Or it could just be seen as the habitual Twitter post saying ‘this is where I am today’. But John Mann, a Labour MP, criticised Thornberry’s tweet because he said that the symbols of the English flag and the white van were emblematic of traditional Labour values, so she had insulted traditional Labour voters. This seems truly peculiar: if it is the case (which I doubt) that these were symbols of Labour values then how could it be ‘insulting’ for a Labour politician to depict them?

That it was read the way that it was I think points to another irony of the present political situation. It is a pervasive trope of UKIP supporters that they are hamstrung by ‘political correctness’ and are not ‘allowed to say what they really think’ as a result; in particular that they are ‘not allowed to talk about immigration’ (bizarre, since it is constantly talked about). Yet what this episode shows is something quite different. Let’s assume that the picture did indeed mean something like: ‘look, this is the kind of people who vote UKIP: English nationalists from the self-employed skilled working class’. Would this really be so awful? Isn’t it the case that, as UKIP themselves say, they attract such support? Is it so terribly derogatory and sneering to say this, and yet fine to ‘sneer’ at the ‘middle-class metropolitan elite’? Isn’t the real ‘political correctness’ in play that any implicit criticism of UKIP support is immediately positioned as unacceptable?

We seem to be a long way from organization theory, I know, but that is not really so. What lies beneath all of this is the nature and consequences of global capitalism and in particular the international mobility of what management textbooks would call the human resource. Politics in Britain, as in many other countries, is struggling to come to terms with what this means – in terms of employment, wages, employment protection, welfare, healthcare and communities. These are serious issues for all of us and yet no politician seems able to discuss them seriously. Into that gap has stepped, in Britain, the beery, blokeish populism of UKIP but that offers no realistic answers. That would not matter, except that by positioning elitism in terms of things like the supposedly sneering nature of a tweeted photo this populism makes it all but impossible to discuss the actions of the real elite, who do not tweet but buy and sell our companies, jobs, lives and livelihoods and for whom welfare, healthcare and community are entirely irrelevant. UKIP have nothing to say about this, of course, but nor do any of the main political parties in Britain.

On Twitter

New technologies always throw up new vocabularies. Recently, we have learned the term ‘twitter storm’ to denote a surge of typically acrimonious comment on the twitter social media site. We also now have ‘trolls’, and this is an interesting example of how the new language has become old enough to mutate. A few years back a troll was someone who posted deliberately provocative comments on internet forums in order to garner a reaction – the implication being that the poster did not really think these things. Increasingly, though, a troll is understood to be someone posting offensive, abusive or threatening remarks, with no suggestion that this is done purely for effect.

Of course trolls tweet and tweeters troll, and we have seen the effects this can have this week with the apparent suicide of Brenda Leyland. She had been tweeting abusive messages to the family of Madeleine McCann, the child who disappeared on a family holiday in Portugal seven years ago. The dead woman had been confronted by a journalist a few days before her death. This in turn led to the journalist becoming the subject of a vitriolic twitter campaign. And recently twitter trolls who made rape and death threats against feminist campaigners were jailed.

Meanwhile, in the fallout from the sacking of cricketer Kevin Pietersen – which I posted about a while back - continued when he published his autobiography this week. Much of the controversy concerns tweets that he sent, and a bogus twitter account set up by his then team mates in his name which reduced him to tears. His former team mates immediately took to twitter to give their reactions.

Twitter is not, of course, just the domain of trolls and celebrities. In September 2013 some 200 million users worldwide sent 400 million tweets per day. It has become a near-compulsory conduit for political and corporate leaders. Really quite important statements are released on twitter by, for example, British Prime Minister David Cameron, as they are by Barack Obama. No self-respecting Chief Executive fails to tweet, nor any corporate PR department. And twitter can also provide a vehicle for whistle blowers, trade unions and activists.

We should not however conclude that this is just a neutral technology that may be used for any and every purpose. It is a very particular medium with very particular rules, most notably the 140 character rule. In this way it has a very particular effect: it is a vehicle for simplification. Much has been made of the issue of anonymity and the way this encourages ‘trolls’ to behave in ways that they might not otherwise do. But it makes all who use it behave in ways they would not otherwise do, by stripping out all nuance. The two are linked: for the trolls, ethical sensitivity is flattened out; for the ‘responsible tweeters’ complexity is flattened out.

This is not an elitist lament for ‘dumbing down’. Twitter and other social media are not egalitarian, despite the claims of starry-eyed internet libertarians. They give the illusion of a voice for everyone, but their very ubiquity means that no voice is heard. Sure, anyone can open a twitter account or a facebook page or set up a blog, but that does not mean that the old structures of power have disappeared. Would you be reading this blog if it were not for my book and its publisher? Would that book have been published if I did not hold a university position? There is no democratization in social media, but there is a very powerful illusion of it. Everyone has a voice, so no one can be heard.

So when several friends and colleagues have suggested that I should start to tweet, not least to publicize this blog, I haven’t been keen. When I ask to see how they use twitter I am always amazed that they see a value in it. To me it just seems meaningless. I can’t imagine gaining anything from ‘following’ them, even though they are people who I like or whose work interests me. So by the same token I can’t imagine that anything could be gained by me tweeting.

Perhaps you will think that I am just a Luddite. But that is a convenient term to imply a blanket rejection of new technology normally used by those uncritically accepting new technology. I prefer to think that the Emperor has no clothes and that twitter stands as testimony to a shallow populism dressed up as democratic participation and an egotism dressed up as open communication. It seems to me to have several very unpleasant effects and no redeeming qualities at all. It is not just another medium of communication, neutral in itself, it entails an emotional, political and intellectual infantilisation of communication.

That, I think, is the image we should have of tweeting: an endlessly, insatiably egocentric infant spewing out its thoughts and feelings at the instant they occur. The trolls are not so much a side-effect as an exemplification of this: far from being an anomaly they define the ideal-type of the tweeter. But unlike infants they claim a right, albeit one detached from any kind of defensible ethics or politics. As Brenda Leyland said when confronted about her tweets: “I’m entitled to do that”. That is not to revile her. A few days later she was dead, caught in desperation between the infantilised, simplified world of 140 character tweets and the adult world where words, politics and ethics are more complex.