How the internet messes with the game of media and party politics
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The rolling self-diagnosis of what ails our politics and political coverage continued apace last week. Laurie Oakes devoted his Andrew Olle Lecture on Friday evening to it, a couple of days after Annabel Crabb gave a Sydney Institute talk on a similar theme. The debate has flared frequently since the 2010 election, most particularly after Lindsay Tanner gave everyone a bollocking in Sideshow. But last week’s lectures were particularly timely given this week News Ltd starts rolling out its paywall in an effort to discover the alchemy that will reverse the decline of text-based media revenue. Or, if not that, then at least milk cash from people who don’t realise you can already get Liberal press releases for free from the party’s website. Oakes and Crabb offered guarded optimism and some suggestions. Oakes, addressing several hundred senior media industry executives and practitioners, wanted journalists to take the public interest (and politicians) more seriously and devote more time to significant public issues, rather than letting them get churned through the news cycle in a matter of hours. He also thinks we need politicians who are more like Paul Keating and, by implication, less like Gillard and Abbott. Crabb suggests, inter alia, the monetisation of privacy could be the business model of a media future based around quality content for smaller audiences. Both were thoughtful additions to the debate, and both are a remedy to the reflexive criticism of the press gallery as irremediably hopeless that pervades the blogosphere. But neither, for mine, really got to grips with the central problems confronting the media and politicians. Both acknowledged the end of the age of audience passivity, but Oakes really seemed to be saying that the traditional 20th century model of journalists as key intermediaries between voters and politicians needed to be restored and preserved by journalists doing their jobs better. I call the intermediary idea the sacerdotal concept of journalism, and Oakes’s suggestions, while eminently sensible, were a bit like a Reformation Pope declaring everything would be fine if Catholic priests said mass better. Crabb, however, understands that the role of the unchallenged intermediary has broken down, that the authoritative position of the media between politicians and audiences is vanishing by the day (the internet interprets gatekeepers as damage, and routes around them), and that the media and politicians — particularly the latter — will just have to get used to it. But I hoped she’d go further with the underlying issue she correctly identified early on, that major party politicians and the mainstream media are in the same slowly sinking boat, because that’s where I suspect the debate is most interesting. Let’s take a slight detour, first. During the election, when pieces about how bad it all was and whether it was the fault of politicians or the media or both were proliferating online, I suggested that voters themselves were as much the problem as hacks and MPs. It was voters, after all, who had retreated from all forms of civic engagement, and particularly political activism, over the course of the past 30 years or more, outsourcing politics to a caste of professional apparatchiks feeling their way via polling and focus groups. For this insolence, I was roundly castigated — Demos will not be mocked — and an early 2010 article I stumbled on recently might give pause for thought. US academics Thomas Sander and Robert Putnam looked at levels of civic engagement among American youth since 2001. Putnam’s name might be familiar because he wrote the key text on civic disengagement, in 1995, Bowling Alone, about the decline of American social capital in the second half of the 20th century, exploring issues such as the decline in trust of others, participation in civic organisations like political parties or even community-focused forms of leisure. Sander and Putnam found some good news last year: levels of civic engagement by young Americans — although more from middle and high than low-income backgrounds — had been on the rise since about 2001, reversing a constant decline since the mid-’60s. They identify 9/11 as a key motivational event for young Americans, but profess to be “agnostic” about the impact of the internet on this rising level of engagement. I’m less agnostic. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the rise of civic engagement in the past decade has been among people with the highest levels of internet use and lowest levels of television consumption. In his original Bowling Alone study, Putnam put a lot of the blame — 25%, he suggested, with a disconcerting level of specificity — for the fall in levels of civic engagement on television. Since its arrival, television has “privatised” leisure time, sucking several hours a day out of other activities including socialising and community engagement, thereby consuming social capital. From the moment it crept into our lounge rooms in the mid-20th century, TV began rewiring how we interacted, on a population-wide scale. As McLuhan said, “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”. Some have the internet pegged as another atomising medium, TV on steroids, the ultimate solitary experience as you surf on the ocean of content. But, especially since social media usage reached a mass scale, the internet has been the greatest connecting tool in history. It connects and interconnects like nothing before it and users have responded by using it to do what they do offline — establishing communities, networks and relationships. Some critics such as Malcolm Gladwell — whose basic argument is that people did stuff before the internet so, well, what are you on about? — and mainstream media deadenders such as former NYT editor Bill “Hugo Chavez is the President of Brazil” Keller insist that somehow it’s all not real, that bonds forged online can’t be compared to those offline and don’t matter anyway, claims that have been discredited by research showing strong complementarity between online and offline bonds. Take the current Occupy protests across the US and several other countries. This movement has emerged from the internet, a real-world version of online communities. Protesters in the US, London, Frankfurt and Australian cities are likely to feel a far stronger sense of community and a greater sense of identity with their Occupy counterparts in other countries than with many, and probably most, of the inhabitants of their own countries.
And if this strikes you as odd, or even somehow inappropriately unpatriotic, it only shows you’re still thinking in analog terms. Community is no longer anchored to place (where you live, where you work, your country), as it has been throughout human history, but anchored to commonality of interest, connected by the internet. In a double blow to the significance of place, you don’t even have to remain stationary to connect to an online community any more. Mobile internet services keep you permanently connected to whatever community you select into, wherever you are. Geography is still important for many of the communities we participate in, but the internet severed the causal link between geography and community. It’s the start of a post-geography era that will be one of the key historical events of the Gutenberg age. The community-generating power of the internet is in direct contrast to the atomising power of television. The internet connects where television isolates. While newsprint and radio are less isolating, television symbolises the atomisation implicit in mass media, which bases its business model on establishing a hub-and-spoke relationship with consumers, dominating and mediating the way they understand the world and blocking out competing sources of information or, for that matter, anything that might distract them from their roles as passive advertising target and contented consumer. (By the way, the atomisation that’s at the heart of the liberal economic project is a separate matter I’ll deal with in a coming piece on economic reform). The internet won’t restore a prelapsarian world from the time before the idiot box ended our bowling nights. The communities and connections established won’t be like those of a geography-based world. They’ll be communities we choose for ourselves, because empowered audiences now don’t just decide for themselves what news articles to consume, they decide the worlds in which they’ll participate. Which brings us back to politics and the media — two industries, by the way, that not merely share a past as gatekeepers but that are structured on geography. Our political system is based on an arbitrary fixation with the nation-state and geographically determined electorates (an idea inherited from the Brits), and the mainstream media continues to mostly operate, and be regulated, on the basis of location. The internet thus doesn’t just threaten the business models of former gatekeepers industries and empower once-passive audiences. It reverses the long-term process on which the mainstream media and major party politics are based, the one as business model, the other as delivery system that took advantage of the mass media’s hub-and-spoke model to reach voters. The internet ignores the basis on which politics and the media historically have operated. What to do? Well, so far, not a lot. One of the characteristics of gatekeepers is that decades of exploiting a privileged position robs them of the capacity to innovate; indeed, they come to see innovation as something to be feared and attacked as it threatens their incumbent position. This has led to the recurring phenomenon of digital natives successfully innovating in pre-digital industries while incumbents look forlornly at falling revenues and wonder what to do. Crabb suggests the media might need to find a model to monetise personal data for niche services, but digital natives, in the form of Google and Facebook, are already doing that. Google is good at spotting such opportunities — it makes billions from advertising revenues (supposedly in terminal decline) while the mainstream media scratches its head looking for a business model. So is Apple, which Steve Jobs drove into the space left unoccupied by the copyright mafia, which was convinced it could preserve its analog business model for content. So are online retailers, who’ve left bricks’n’mortar rivals in their wake. A similar process is under way for governments and political parties. GetUp has established a progressive political voice (one that takes credit for everything under the sun) while Labor appeared to fall silent. So, too, WikiLeaks and other whistleblower sites, which work on an understanding only recently achieved by governments following the WikiLeaks cables, that the internet and connectedness flatten information hierarchies. The problem isn’t so much whether the major political parties and the media will work out a response to the challenge of the internet, it’s whether they’ll do so before someone else does. The short history of the internet says they won’t, that they’ll be left behind by smarter, more innovative digital natives who grow organically on the internet, rather than trying to make the internet fit the demands of the analog era or bolt it on to analog models. The politicians and the press probably have more time than other industries to understand their plight and react to it. But society is being rewired once more, and not in a way that benefits them. |
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26 Comments
Standing ovation Bernard! One of the finest pieces you’ve ever written for Crikey.
Note to Crikey: In celebration of News Ltd’s erection of it’s long awaited safety fence, perhaps you might consider letting this gem from BK fly free today.
I am not sure I grasp all of this article by BK, but I understand the import of what it is all about. My concern is not that the internet is generating new communities of like-minded people that are (rightly) by-passing most of the media because of the insignificant content it contains, but how do such communities actually bring about action. Take the present Occupy movements. I fully agree with their view that the present system allows a select few get obscenely rich while making all the others on the planet pay for it. They get to gether and occupy a street or two and maybe picket a bank or financial institution but change NOTHING. If the powers wait a few more weeks everyone will go home and things will be back to nnormal until the next, predictable, financial crash during which the villains will move away with the ill-gotten gains and the rest of us will be left to try and piece together a better system.
I can see now that the coming discussions about climate change in Durban will be full of noise signifying nothing. Nothing decisive will happen until some catastrophe occurs that has a savage impact on the rich and the only way out will be the suspending of social democracy and the introduction of some form of autocracy to get us through the global mess our present leaders have got us into.
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A good read Bernard with only a few narky swipes, and refreshing for that. Technological advancements have wrought profound changes in societies before, as now. I am intrigued by, and find myself agreeing with, your suggestion of a new form of tribalism unbound from geography, and with an almost instantaneous global communication reach. But whilst international movements will impact greatly, you should consider that all politics is local (Tip ONeill).
nice sentiments. feels a little hyperbolic though…
Yet to see anything derived from the internet crystalise into anything actually meaningful in the political sphere. It’s threatening sure, and there are real effect insofar as mainstream politicians react to them - but it’s a little like jumping at shadows…
Don’t look at Occupy either. It is how it appears and not likely to make a dent on things in this country any time soon.
Wonderful Mr Keane! Lovely analysis. I’m left wondering about the logical conclusion to this argument. I mean at a societal level. Makes me think about a stateless globe. I can see a need for a judiciary and a bureaucracy - someone has to write the rules and someone has to organise the garbage disposal. But the party political system becomes a dinosaur in this model. ‘Leaders’ are chosen by your communities on a global basis not a geographical basis. This becomes an exciting future where idealism, ideals and ideas can flourish.
Great article.
IMO the Occupy movement is an evolutionary step in the interaction between digital natives and existing power structures. It is a natural conjunction of much of what Bernard lays out above.
It’s a pregnant moment in history that could go in many different ways. I think it could as easily fade into background noise, explode into violence, or prove to be the political “smarter, more innovative digital native” that Bernard predicts.
Perhaps the revolution won’t be televised after all. It might be offered for download via torrent.
With our current lot of POLITICAL MASTERS, I cant see much changing, unless the pressure is kept up.
Unfortunately, where I live and age prevents me from participating, believe me protests work, being on the wrong side during the Vietnam war protests, has a lasting effect, (I was a soldier), its going to take a lot, but its up to the younger generation, to fix the past mistakes, caused by people like me, who believed the SYSTEM.
Great article Bernard.
It would be sad if people see the changes that are occurring as something to fear. The democratic system, as it is now working, is now in a state where some politicians, political parties and some in the media think they have worked out how to manipulate the populace. Lovely to think that there is something on its way that no one in the system can control.
I second Paddy, this is a great piece. BK draws clear parallels between party politics and mass media: their power and relevance has been similarly rooted in geography, and they are both now threatened by the rise of communities and alignments that transcend physical location. For the media that disruption is well underway. But what would post-geographical politics look like, and how does that change come about? Newspapers can fail and new media can take their place overnight, but presumably the nation-state/electorate-based political system will put up a bit more of a fight.
“The thing” about the internet too, is that the mass media (with their control of “hard copy” news) can’t control “feedback” through filtering “letters” that might run contrary to their message.
More people/”punters” (in media vernacular) are now aware of how widespread “dissent” is, to what they’re being drip-fed (to what that tabloid press regards qualifies as “news” worth presenting, as they control it’s presentation. More often embellished and just plain commentary, spun to fit a continuing editorial narrative and agenda).
Bernard,
It is not the end of geographies; rather than a re-shaping of them from strict physical space. It is more the end of physical territoriality.
An excellent article. In response to D. John Hunwick’s speculation I wonder if the transition from awareness to action will evolve in tandem with the transition from ignorance to awareness. It might be possible that as a result of new methods of and new fronts for receiving information, new methods of initiating action may appear?
I suspect that as the process of accessing information becomes increasingly independant (in its choice of source) and simultaneously social as a result of this choice (in its more consciously negotiated implications), the transition from awareness to action will evolve.
Where public demonstration may increasingly have little effect on outcomes, the communities created and enabled by the internet may produce new forms of demonstration enabled by the technology itself and the increased access it provides.
It is foreseeable that the combination of online media, online shopping and online social networking may provide an increasing outlet for solidarity in action not just upon social and cultural capital but upon ec onomic capital also. Rather than demonstrating on the streets, people may begin demonstrating through their consumption a far more direct, coordinated and effective means than has ever before been seen.
To sight your example of Occupy, cwhole companies may begin to spring up whose business models are conscius of the increasing concerns for wealth disparity and harken a return to user owned retail and even manufacturing consortiums… Collective and democraticly controlled member based corporations who through their nature are viable within a capitalist marketplace without sacrificing the economic ethics important to its members (this is just one example that springs to mind). We are already seeing the increase of “group buy” websites whose models are still fundamentally hierarchical in terms of their slary distribution, but the results for consumers are already being felt. There appears little difference between what I am hinting at hear and older “analogue” models such as Campbells Cash and Carry or Costco, except it is a lot easier to imagine a cooperative model being utilised successfully in conjunction with an online access model to greatly increase the potential for the benefits of these.
Again just one example but as always I think the propensity for action is always on the onus of the people involved in any endeavour. If you are concerned then maybe there is something more you could do?
Nice article. Whilst in general agreeance with its sentiments I find it intersting that you almost dismiss geography entirely. It is true that we will engage with the communities we choose and yes much of this will be online however I also believe that for the next 10 - 20 years at least there is still a place for geography, and even post this point there will still be some sort of identification with a place of comfort- even if it is via some sort of virtual world and hologram existence.
I think the question is does the nation state, based on geography, and its associated political mechanisms remain relevant or does it disappear only to be replaced by some sort of hybrid online democracy coupled with some sort of local / tribal democracy - If you will a sort of mixed system that provides both online voice and needs driven locality based governance.
It could it be that Kennett era ‘super councils’ are already staring demise in the face with more grass roots based democracy being supported and aided by online mechanisms.
Occupy Movement is just one example of people feeling disempowered, disillusioned and essentially non existent. The S11 protests in Melbourne a few years ago were another. Demos in one of their article on a new form of liberalism argued that Govt’s had failed to realise that they exist for people - not vice versa and it was this arrogant authoritarian attitude (inherent in current democracy) that poses the greatest threat to stability and current forms of Govt. The occupy Movement is a fore-runner to this and I think we will find that online world will assist this response. When the time comes democratic systems will be reshaped by the online world and new forms of community - the question that remains is…….will it be a gradual shift or will there be a seismic upheaval in a western democratic nation that heralds the change.
Wasn’t it Henry Lawson in the late 1890s that spoke about a revolution should the apathy of wealthy men endure? Maybe it wont be economic wealth but it will be about power and participation.
I think you misrepresent Oakes. He is not calling for some return to the past order, but to devote time to substantive issues as deserved, & he sees the insider/journo as the best positioned to do this- an interpreter not a gatekeeper.
The empowerment of the wider community by the internet et.al. is fine as far as it goes, but as the programming adage goes “garbage in. garbage out”. the journo. has to do truth finding. There is much of the empowerment akin to giving guns to kids loaded up with rumor and lies oten provided by journos via PR (read professional Rogue) working for pollies.
You cannot have a quality system without good verifiable information. Lies & distotions are halfway around the World before Truth gets it’s boots on.
Nice work Bernard.
I don’t believe we have no more gatekeepers, or see them as damaged nodes though, the internet allows us to “outsource” gatekeepers…we can decide from a vast range which ones we want to use (information aggregation is pretty important “on the net” or you’ll never find what your after, you need information specificity, not just “more” or “more varied” information…this is where google “gets it”). The trick with the internet is to find gatekeepers (aggregators) that are “in tune” with you. We can now choose who our gatekeepers will be on what subject we want, something as specific as a model train blog or something as varied as Reuters. Because we can (and do) now range far and wide, no single information monopoly (gatekeeper), or duopoly like in Australia, holds sway.
I also think it’s very early days for “Occupy”. It wont be “the” organisation that will be a change of the status quo, but it is the seed of a change, it’s the start of something that is still feeling it’s way (and may well be for a while yet). It needs focus to achieve something, and orgs like GetUp and OurSay may well be the forerunners of mechanisms to get that focus…but it’s still early days for them even in “net time”…
An interesting counterpoint to this argument is the view that societies and economies will need to “relocalise” in the coming decades, due to the declining availability of energy (peak oil, limits on fossil fuel use) for transporting people and resources around the globe. Ideas are much more lightweight travellers, but even so, the internet relies on a complex and resource-hungry infrastructure. Transcending geography is an energy-intensive business however you do it. If we reshape our institutions to fit the post-local reality of the early 21st century, will we be in even worse shape to deal with the hyper-local reality that follows it?
TINMAN_AU - re gatekeepers, it’s a separate issue but a new generation of digital-native gatekeepers of course is emerging in the form of Google, Facebook, Apple. Crucially they’re gatekeepers by virtue of offering an appealing product, not controlling communications networks - gatekeepers “elected” by the market, not imposed by the state or as a result of vested interests. That’s not to say they won’t be, ultimately, as damaging as analog-era gatekeepers if they get the chance and can shut down competitors (Apple I’m looking at you).
Excellent article, Bernard. Thankyou. Gatekeepers always exercise some degree of censorship, if only in choosing specific information, but the traditional ones still have an illusion of control. I wonder how long the illusion will last.
My father always said, “Don’t complain about politics unless you’re willing to do something about it.” A whole new Coalition of the Willing is arising.
Follow up to previous comment as ‘Simone’ (changed public name to be more honest and in line with Twitter identity - if it ever gets ‘moderated’ and published!), anyway it’s possible it will also mean more nutters. Hard to predict that one. They did burn witches!
Great article
the MSM seem to view the occupy protests with a degree of contempt but I recall they did so at first with the anti war and anti nuclear demos of the past; not to mention women’s rights; referring to them as the lunatic fringe. Legitimate protests eventually gain a critical mass before they have to be taken seriously by the powers that be. It may well happen more quickly this time around thanks to the new media but I wouldn’t expect to hear many supportive statements in the popular press.
I agree about Apple Bernard, it’s scary to think of what their Newstand product might be like if they introduce similar rules/”guidelines” as their App Store, it’d be like living in a Fisher-Price Universe I think, but then that’s Apple for you and some folks seem to like it that way…as long as we are left with a choice of sandbox verses “theme park” then it’s all good I guess…
The occupy people are just starting to find their political feet. Soon these people who have for decades felt they could do nothing will begin to think and act in a way which our politicians already fear. These occupiers may build the value of their vote by exercising it for change and change again, in a legitimate pursuit of honest open representative government. Something which many of us have never experienced. Things like the dumping of Hunters Hill radioactive waste at Kemps Creek wont go unoticed till it is too late! Because all our politicians are under a digital microscope! Edward James
Outstanding article. Have you read Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age? It’s about 15 years old, and at the time seemed rather improbable, but in a lot of ways the world in which it is set is very much what you’re talking about. A world in which people identify as part of particular global communities, rather than with where they happen to be located geographically. For almost all purposes these communities supply what is now offered by the nation-state. Some communities are based on chosen ethnic identities (listen for the sound of Andrew Bolt’s head exploding) while others are based on politics or values, but the point is that people select in. Only rarely does one have to interact with others from a different community just because you live in the same city.
Our electoral system, based on geographic boundaries, was no longer state of the art in the 20th Century, but will be completely unsuited to such a world. On the other hand, sufficient power is going to remain in the nation-state for the foreseeable future that these globalised communities are going to have to interact with the nation-state, and will find that particularly difficult in nations where democracy means single-member electorates.
This discussion inspired me to ask Noam Chomsky a question about post-geographical geopolitics on OurSay. You can vote for it here: http://oursay.org/s/ta or ask your own (probably more elegantly phrased) version. If you have any respect for the man, please go and vote for *something* to outrank the appalling troll that’s currently in second place. Thanks.
Time to bring out the Guillotine and start again with our Politicians and Industry heads ( To roll )and media owners. The TRUTH or the Guillotine .