Old man to internet: 'Get off my lawn!' (or, why it's pointless to control the internet, and the generation gap that stops people understanding this)

Back in the unspecifically-dated olden days, censoring the media was easy. There wasn't much media, for starters. The only books published were either the King James Bible, or books about the King James Bible. Any radical newspapers being distributed could be burned, and their editors hung, or just priced out the market by raising the tax people had to pay to print them. Easy.

Today, though - not so easy. You haven't got some uppity peasant running off copies of his Leveller pamphlets in his hut - now it's the internet. Trying to subdue the internet is like playing one of those whack-a-mole games, but when you knock one down it just stays there, while ten more spring up purely out of spite. You've no chance.

And yet people still try. Just this week, the lawyers of the British Royal family moved to stop the publication of nude photos of Kate Middleton, which were already seen in France after magazine Closer published them there. Already an Italian newspaper has stated it's intention to do so, as did the Irish Daily Star. Several American magazines have followed suit.

The Queen herself could burn the printing presses of these magazines to the ground, it doesn't matter - they're on the internet. They've been scanned on to blogs and Twitter accounts. If you want to see blurry pictures of what might be Kate Middleton's possible boobs, just Google it. Moving to stop the publication just generates a bit of publicity for the magazine that has the injunction against it.*

And today Pakistan's prime minister Raja Pervez ordered access to YouTube in his country to be blocked, to stop people seeing 'Innocence of Muslims', the film connected to the rioting and attacking of embassies across the Middle East and North Africa. Sure, it's possible to block YouTube, but the information would get out anyway. For one thing, YouTube isn't the only video-hosting site. Secondly, if someone has downloaded a copy, they can disperse it at will. Plus, it is out there - that the video exists is inflammatory enough.**

People believe, erroneously, that the internet can be tamed - for better or worse, it cannot. British right-wing paper The Daily Express, I believe, is running a campaign to purge the internet of porn. It's like purging a sandwich of bread. They might just be trying to protect children from hardcore porn, but this is equally a task without an end. Presumably the campaign has the support of its readers - a newspaper only ever runs campaigns it knows it will get the support the readership - who are 99% ageing Christian Tory/Ukip-voters, who are likely to have never used the internet, and don't understand quite how the it works.

Similarly, when the super-injunction of footballer Ryan Giggs was made pointless by the details being revealed on Twitter, he tried to sue everyone on Twitter who had tweeted it. Everyone. Presumably his lawyers said 'Yeah, we can do that. Just make sure you keep paying us, and we'll look into it' and high-fived each other when he left the room.

What I find most interesting about this is that there exists a generation gap between those who 'get' the internet and those who don't. My generation (I'm twenty) grew up with the internet - we, and those younger than us, are the ones that get it. I'm generalising, but it is the older age groups that don't understand. 'They' don't use it as much as 'we' do. This excellent article by now-defunct communist-propaganda-machine Deterritorial Support Group notes the use of Goatse as a modern-day industrial sabotage. The argument is thus: Goatse, and shock-memes like it, have been reappropriated as in-jokes by those who understand them (like a group of friends watching the same obscure TV show and using it's jokes as their own makeshift language). They then skip this into designs and popular culture, effectively subverting logos from the inside. DSG argue this is a form of post-Fordism industrial sabotage simply because it is now the only way to rebel within the workplace while still being able to remain employed there. When a production factory was the de-facto destination of the working classes, sabotage could take on a different, physical form. What if you 'accidently' left a screw out of every tenth car you worked on? There are numerous stories of workers in Eastern European bomb factories who, while being made to work by the occupying Nazi army, purposely forgot to put explosives in some of the bombs so that they would do less harm when eventually dropped on Britain.

Now that the working landscape has changed (from a production to a consumption society, as Baudrillard argued), the nature of industrial sabotage has changed with it. People now subvert mainstream logos with anti-mainstream sources.

 Above: the logo for Hungry House. What makes me think of Goatse, and the DSG article - the forks look like hands, and why would you have two forks? A knife and fork would look better.

Whether this subversion is intended or not is debatable - what is most noticeable is the change cultural differences that make the internet a source of confusion to one group and so easy to use to another. People who try to control the internet - the naked celebrity pictures, the extremist material, the child pornography, the free media content - are like that old man shouting at kids to 'get off my lawn!'. The kids will continue to run over his garden - mainly because it annoys him. He doesn't understand the sheer pointless joy that the kids get, the thrill of defying authority in some. And to them, he just looks foolish.



*A side note here: I can't be the first person to point out the hypocrisy of British newspapers in the way they have treated this incident. They claim it to be an invasion of privacy - it is, but they exist in a culture where privacy is something to be swept aside in the pursuit of a story. They hack phones, send paparazzi to hound drunk celebrities, relentlessly press rape victims for information if they think it will get them an extra reader or two. The Daily Mail covered the story by stretching a single word, 'grotesque', over it's front page, but it could equally have been a label for the contents of the paper itself.

 **Another side note: This doesn't even cover the myriad reasons behind the rioting - the idea that people in Middle Eastern countries have only just found something to hate America for is laughable. And the violence is more prominent in countries which do not have a higher Muslim population, but were more heavily involved in the Arab Spring. Certainly, the violence seems to have been provoked by the video, but, like how lat summer's rioting in England was sparked by the shooting of Mark Duggan by police, the anger that drove it, and the reasons that lead it to continue, were various. The view of the media that the 'Innocence of Muslims' is the sole reason behind the violence is a continuation of the highly-flawed and dangerous discourse that all Middle Eastern countries are roughly the same, and that each has problems that can be dealt with in much the same way.

Random thoughts on: The Newsroom

Misogyny

Perhaps one of the most damaging early criticisms of The Newsroom was that it veered, in its portrayal of the female characters, towards sexism. Certainly, the female characters tend to follow female stereotypes. Slone, for example, is an intelligent woman, able to get ahead in her chosen career which she is passionate about – but still caves into requests from producers when a wardrobe of complimentary clothes is dangled in front of her.

The accusations of Sorkin’s misogyny remind me of similar claims which were aimed Jonathon Franzen. Both seem to struggle to portray their female characters in a positive light, but this comes not from a dislike of women, but from having to stray from their comfort zone. Both Franzen and Sorkin are white, male, middle-class intellectuals – the blueprint for all their good characters, and the type of characters which they feel confident, and are able to, write about. They write from experience, in the same way that someone who did not live in the Amazon for six years could not write about that situation in the same way as someone who did.

I don’t think Franzen is sexist (snobbish, yes, but not sexist), and nor do I think Sorkin is sexist.

Technology

Where would news media be without the internet? In a more financially stable place, for one thing. The Newsroom’s two main characters, Will and MacKenzie, both reject the new way in which news is gathered and dispersed, and it can be assumed, given his romantic and idealistic view of the way real-life newsrooms are run, Sorkin does as well. Early on in the series MacKenzie fails to understand how to use e-mail, and inadvertently sends information about her and Will to everyone at ACN. Will, it is remarked, ‘can’t even find Will’s blog’. And so on.

The lack of realism constantly jars – would two people, still in their forties (roughly) really not know how to use online technology? Especially considering their industry is effectively run by it? The only person who really seems to embrace the online world is Neil – he is therefore portrayed as a nerd for much of the series, and is relegated in one episode to the role of a prop for a dreadful running joke about Bigfoot.

Humour

The Newsroom is not a funny programme. What is unfortunate is that it tries to be. Like the Bigfoot joke mentioned above, Sorkin’s attempts to inject a bit of comedy almost all fall flat on their face. Two other examples stick out, both from the second part of the blackout episode.

First, Jim and ... attempt to lure Sarah onto Newnight because she went to college with Casey Anthony, and they are desperate to find a different angle. They head to her work in a high-fashion store, where Jim’s awkwardness is played up to new heights, attempting to both talk a customer into buying a dress and invite Sarah on a date. Jim has regularly been portrayed as awkward (when it suits the script) but at one point he asks ... if he thinks Sarah and the customer are making out in the changing room. ... is shocked, and so are we – Jim is merely an awkward journalist, not a sex-crazed social disaster.

In the same episode, Sorkin attempts to wring some humour, for some reason, from Will putting on trousers. First we see him complaining to his tailor that something is wrong with his trousers – a few scenes later he is bouncing into the newsroom with his trousers around his ankles, because he cannot get his other leg into them. He falls flat on his face, in a scene which juts out as a failed attempt at pointless slapstick.

Politics

It came as something of a surprise when Will was revealed to be a registered Republican, and a Tea Party supporter at that. Going into the show, everyone was expecting Sorkin’s liberal background to influence the politics of the show. It certainly did. Will is not a Republican in the Fox News sense – his Republican party is that of Abraham Lincoln, not Mitt Romney.

What Will ultimately believes in is truth. This is what he hopes to attain through his broadcasts. His search for the truth, and the relentless assault on the lies of the Republican party, mean that, to those outside ACN, he is a liberal. What Sorkin has done here, interestingly, is show that, in his attempts to find the truth, Will is perceived to have liberal values – therefore, liberal values are the truth. Sorkin says here that by simply looking at the facts and figures which you have easy access to, you will find that the Republicans are indeed wrong.

Will’s Republicanism also serves another purpose – he is the sensible Republican. He is not the one who believes that Obama hates white people, is a Muslim, wants to take away your guns etc. His relative saneness in comparison with the rest of the party shows them up to be the ridiculous fantasists they are.

Simulacrum

Earlier I used the words idealistic and romantic – no other pairing could better describe The Newsroom. It’s regular name-checking of legendary American news anchors – Walter Kronkite, for one – shows the view that Sorkin has of news broadcasting. It is a noble, vital format. This he tries to capture with The Newsroom. The team consistently go against the orders from bosses, who are concerned only with advertising revenue. In ACN’s Newsnight, Sorkin has laid out his utopian vision of Habermass’ Public Sphere. He wants to reclaim journalism from profit and partisan politics.

The main problem is whether this type of journalism ever really existed. Mainstream press, radio, broadcasting – unless it is government owned, it has its eyes on profit. Outside the mainstream, the issue of one-sided politics is likely to be evermore present.

I have no doubt that broadcast journalism – journalism as whole, in fact – has seen better days, both financially and ethically. But the dream chased by Sorkin – it seems to be more a view of the past preserved in amber, with the dirt and sleaze wiped away.

 

The 2012 Olympics draws to a close today. It has succeeded in charming the vast amount of cynics in Britain who were waiting for it to be a disaster. It has been hard to look anywhere and not see Union Flags fluttering en masse. The constant cacophony of cynicism has now been replaced with a din proclaiming that Britain is once again united.

This argument, poised after a long summer of ‘national celebration’, has three main strands:

1.       That Scottish athletes like Chris Hoy and Andy Murray chose to pose with a Union Flag after winning gold medals – a blow to the nationalism of Scottish pro-independence activists

2.       That immigrant athletes like Mo Farah winning the gold is a major blow to racist groups like the BNP and the EDL.

3.       That this show of national unity washes away the still-present stain of last summer’s England-wide rioting.

The first argument is merely an aesthetic victory for the Better Together campaign – essentially like them wheeling out other celebrities to back their cause, like the pro-independence campaign did at their launch party.

The second two arguments tackle more entrenched problems faced by Britain in the 21^st century. The divide between Scotland and England, flared up since the announcing of the 2014 referendum, is still largely polite, fought as a democratic political argument between a number of centrist parties on the public stage.

The Olympics would face a much bigger task trying to remove racism from British life. In the aftermath of both of Mo Farah’s gold medal people tweet Nick Griffin to ask how he was feeling now that an immigrant was representing Britain on the world stage. Same for the EDL. It’s a strange belief, the one the racism only exists within the confines of the members of a few fringe political groups. It ignores the entire racial structures of society, and this argument is like saying patriarchy has been finished off because women are now allowed to box. The Daily Mail, which contains more racist influence than the BNO could ever wish for, still campaigns against what they call ‘plastic Brits’ – athletes who do not sing the national anthem cannot, in their view, really be British.

Similarly, the same racist structures, as well as class structures, which led to the 2011 riots still exist. An Olympic village does little to remove this – if anything, the lavish spending so close to deprivation will increase the anger felt by thousands of people in London and beyond. The Olympics does present an opportunity to use sport as a way to help people, but this could only be achieved with a long, sustained effort that is highly unlikely in an age of austerity (no matter what David Cameron has said in the last few days). In Brazil football is seen as a way to lift people out of poverty from the favelas, but when this, on the scale of poverty in these areas, hardly make a difference. People need more than a sports centre to help them.

The ‘real Britain’ that has been talked about so much – the one sans inequality – is an interesting media construct and nothing more. Like the Olympic village itself, Britain managed to close itself off to everything around it. The Olympics made Britain great again, and it ignored everything else. In the week before the Olympics the IRA announced that they would be continuing their armed campaign for a one-state Ireland. Perhaps the biggest threat to the current form of the UK in modern times, this was all but ignored in the media, save for a few Guardian articles on one day only.

Modern Britain has problems – every nation does – and it’s attempt to further ignore these with the Olympics is actually quite dangerous. If you genuinely believed that racism had been dealt a serious blow in the last two weeks you probably wouldn’t take much notice of slow assimilation in society of racist thoughts.