One of the things that some interviewees told me about their work in moderating websites and working for politicians was the difficulty presented by the sheer volume of digital communication – especially email –  that comes their way. The pace and amount of communication was, for many, more of a worry than tone, even when the really abusive stuff is taken into account. Successive waves of information technologies have enormously expanded the burden on frontline workers in political and media institutions. 

This is representative of a relatively unexplored and often unacknowledged dimension of political communication that has expanded rapidly in the digital era, starting long before more heralded developments in political campaigning. A lot of research in political communication has concentrated either on the relationship between media and politicians, or on one version of another of effects research – for example the persuasive effectiveness of campaign messaging or media coverage on voters. (There are many notable and noble exceptions to this, of course).

I’ve started using the term retail political communication to distinguish the area of work my interviewees have led me to think more about . Funnily enough, it’s a form of work that politicians and higher profile journalists are extensively shielded from by their staff. The workers I spoke to are the ones who have to cope with the massive amounts of material which now come back at politicians and media outlets from digitally-equipped citizens and audiences. Retail political communication is where the biggest changes (and to my mind crises) in liberal-democratic political communication systems are playing out. It’s a term which I’ll explicate further elsewhere but that gives some of the picture. 

(It might start sounding that I am not as sanguine as others about the “democratising” effect of digital media technologies – that I think will wind up being something of an understatement.) 

I took what my interviewees said seriously and decided to try to find out some metrics which might be indicative of changes in the volume of political communication. I would stress that the metrics are being used as just one measure – I certainly believe what people tell me about changes in their jobs, and I am in no sense checking up on them. I have a longer, theoretical and methodological reason for rejecting the economistic distinction between revealed and stated behaviours, and for trusting people’s accounts of their own work. The book overall is not quantitatively focused. And I’ll be arguing back and forth between between metrics like this, interviews and lots of political theory. But I won’t bother you with that now. 

How to gauge changes in retail political communication? It’s difficult and dubiously ethical/legal to access the email archives of individual politicians – and they don’t hang around very long on average anyway. It wasn’t obvious to me that the government had ever published the volume of communication coming its way. So I decided to make a Freedom of Information request using Open Australia‘s handy tool on their Right To Know site.  

You can see the path my request took on the site. It took a month or so but apart from that the process was pretty painless, and although I didn’t get everything I wanted, that was entirely due to technical issues – they just can’t resolve traffic figures to individual members or even differentiate easily between senators and MPs. 

FoI’s-as-scholarly-method might turn out to be an interesting conversation to have in its own right. For journalists, they’re often used in an essentially adversarial, muckraking fashion, where the operating assumption is that the government is trying to conceal something. Other less serious people use them in the course of self-aggrandisement. But in my case, I was simply trying to encourage government to bring some information to light which is not necessarily sensitive or damaging, or even deliberately concealed, but that hand’t been sought out or published. Alongside FoI’s applications in journalism, could requests by scholars come to be seen as part of productive collaborations? Food for methodological thought (If you know of any discussions of this that already exist, I’d love to hear about them). 

I’ve now put in further FoIs to find out email traffic to ministers, and (I hope) comments posted to the websites of national broadcasters.

—

ANYWAY, I thought there might be some general interest in some details of the figures, which are public now anyway on the Right to Know site, and which do indeed suggest big increases in traffic over time, and just as interestingly, large declines in the more immediate past. The unpredictability of the workload arising from digital communication technology might end up being as important as raw increases. 

What we are looking at here is the details of email to Federal MPs and Senators’ electorate offices. I have submitted a separate FoI request to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to ask about the email coming into ministerial offices. I will follow up with state parliaments as well. Parliamentary Services were good enough to break the figures down into emails sent between addresses within the parliamentary computing network, and emails arriving from the Internet. 

You can see that the early figures have been rounded to the nearest 10000 – that’s the way they came I’m afraid! Just looking at the table that there’s a series of big increases in Internet email (which makes sense as a metric for retail political communication) between the turn of the millennium and 09-10, followed by a decline to Rudd era levels over 10/11 and 12/13. 

Aren’t you lucky: I made a chart with these and totals. 

Big increases in a decade – Internet email increased 1194% between 99-00 and 09-10, while the electorate staff entitlement for MPs went from 3 to 4. You can see that in the second half of the decade,  internal communication within the parliamentary network levelled off, while communication from the outside world increased with enormous rapidity (64% increase in 09-10) and then fell away just as quickly (27% and 33% decreases in 10-11 and 11-12). 

I graphed year on year changes in traffic here. I’ve made some other charts but I’m not Ezra Klein so I will leave it here for now. 

Commercial organisations can respond to big increases in email traffic related to their core business by hiring more people. Even public service departments have more flexibility in staffing than MPs have with regard to electorate staff. In circumstances where a significant source of workload is changing so quickly, and there is a legitimate expectation that contact from constituents will be attended to in a timely way, it becomes difficult to rationally plan and apportion staff workloads, and attend to the other functions of an MP’s office. 

Trends like this may contribute to a heightened frustration with government, a progressive loss of faith in its capacities, and a spiral of incivility. But this will be a major theme of the project as a whole. 

Anyway, all of this is by way of a taster. Obvious questions include the source of the recent decline (is it related to the broader uptake of web 2.0 technologies?) the source of big spikes, and the relationship between these upticks and incivility. So much more to explore, but that’s it for now. 

Any questions or comments, stick ‘em below or get in touch. 

I’m not asking for a medal – mainly I’m posting about this because I don’t often hear academic colleagues in Australia talking about self-funded research. People talk a lot about the difficulties of getting ARC funding, and even more about the pressure that universities put on academics over funding applications, but there’s less about projects that don’t use or need additional government assistance.

Before detailing my own experiences further it’s probably best that I acknowledge some of my privileges. Since 2007 (more or less) I have had full-time employment in the Australian university system, and my partner has also had a full-time academic job for that entire time. I am able-bodied, childless, located in southern/metropolitan Australia and easily able to travel. I have friends in a number of Australian cities who have been willing and able to put me up when I come to town to do interviews. So I suppose I have a lot of advantages when it comes to contemplating funding my own research. But there are many people in academia with some or all of these advantages.

Even though I em well-placed to fund my own research, the self-funding of this project happened almost by accident. At the beginning, I thought that I had secured, with a colleague, some money from an outside source, which we would use to pay for a seed project that we would work up into an ARC Linkage application. But the partner pulled out due to an inability to commit the resources they had thought they could. I decided to go ahead anyway, realising that the scale of the project meant that it really wouldn’t take much to get it finished.

In the end, I think this lack of external funding wound up being a benefit for several reasons. First, the project became tighter and reflected my own personal research interests more closely. Whereas the partner had wanted more of a focus on the challenges incivility poses to realising a policy vision – i.e. to power – my increasingly ratbaggy cast of mind meant that I was much more interested in using incivility to explore and define the work of those who are “below the line” in political communication – not politicians and celebrity journalists but ordinary political communication workers. I wanted to keep hold of the possibility of viewing the limitation of state power and the critique of expert systems that incivility contains as welcome developments. I wanted to at least consider that the problem wasn’t rude people, but poorly-adapted institutions, and flaws in our political system. The lack of a partners input meant I could more easily pursue this more critical instinct.

Second, I had no forms to fill out apart from human ethics paperwork. No acquittals, no tedious grant applications, no endless repetitions of a project prospectus, no worries about whether or not the project looked “fundable”. A wise man once told me that a grant application involves about as much work as a peer-reviewed paper. Having avoided spending that time, I can now use it to write one more paper, or finish my book faster. As it happens, I think that in the future there will be a version of this research that will benefit from funding – indeed I think it is “fundable” in a sense right now. But for now I haven’t needed to bend it into anyone else’s shape. I wasn’t led into feeling like it had failed before it started because it failed to receive ARC funding. Thus the project lives, and now it gets to develop at its own pace.

Third, the whole thing is portable. I just quit my job. Next week I am moving to America. The whole project is basically on my laptop, the cloud and a secure hard drive. I don’t need to move the whole administrative infrastucture of a grant, or leave that work in someone else’s hands. If they have desks and libraries in Los Angeles there will be no down time. There are even more advantages than this, but that will do for now.

I write the above this not to suggest that humanities and social sciences research can go on without any funding. Nor because I think funding and the people who get it are bad. And nor am I saying that I myself will never do funded research in the future.

But I know that the process of trying to get funding can get in the way of doing research. I think that institutional pressures sometimes lead people to collapse the distinctions between funding and research, and to think that if it’s not funded it’s not worth doing, or it should be put off until it is funded. I think that researchers and universities sometimes misallocate resources that could be going into research by investing them in failed and unnecessary bids. We all know why universities carry on like this, but that doesn’t mean we have to. We shouldn’t forget about what we already have at our disposal – our training, our wonderful cheap technologies, our salaries, cheap air travel, friends’ couches.

Anyway, for now I’ll just say that I think that resisting the identification of funding and research is in general a good thing, because it means that we are refusing the adoption of institutional imperatives as our own, and not letting them get in the way of our first duty: expanding human knowledge. We’re also refusing “fundability” as a criterion of quality and worth in research – we’re asserting instead some things are simply worth knowing, and others will see why when we explain it later. And that’s a way of challenging the forms both of careerism and coercion that have developed around funding structures and priorities. (The enduring need to publish research, however it is gathered, is a story for another day).

Self-funded research isn’t possible for everyone, and it’s not the only way to do things. But my experience in the last few months tells me there’s a politics there worth exploring further, which involves ways of reclaiming research from the ARC (and therefore the state) from research bureaucracies in universities, and maybe from commercial partners as well. This is important not least because in my view, it makes research more fun.

Ungrounded reflection tends to lead most quickly in these normative directions. I knew I had to talk to people, and what’s more I wanted to. At first I was drawn to celebrity – Press Gallery journalists and federal politicians. But then I worked out that people in those positions are actually partly sheltered from the most dramatic effects of the changes that have occurred in political communication concurrently with the mass uptake of Internet technologies and, more recently, social media.

So I wound up doing some “deep hanging out” with a selection of the hardest-working people in political communication – the people who moderate news websites and the people who answer phones, emails and run social media accounts on behalf of politicians. I have recorded many, many hours of conversations with these folks in the last few months that I’m still working through. The more complete version of my reflections will be in a book, the manuscript for which I’ve begun working on.

Yesterday, though, I had to produce an abstract for a conference I hope to attend next year. (I won’t name it here, because I am still under consideration). Consider this a snapshot of my thinking to this point on the whole topic. Something that gives some kind of flavour of what I’m now thinking about following those conversations. Any feedback would, as always, be welcome.

The Dark Side of Digital Political Communication? Agonism and Affect Sinks.

Twenty years after the first publication of Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Communities founded a certain strain of optimism in Internet studies, it is still common for scholars to hail each new generation of Internet technology, or even individual platforms, as the redeemers of a fallen democracy. More recently, a range of scholars have begun to listen more closely to the incivility which is the darker counterpoint of Internet history.

My research on online incivility reveals that while the Internet has revealed our politics as agonistic, our institutions are still geared to a predigital liberal constitutionalism that functionally depends on extensive, persistent areas of consensus, not least in procedural matters. Indeed, the consolidation of neoliberal governance has meant that the opposite to an accommodation of agonistic politics has occurred: many areas of politics and government have been depoliticised, and removed from the sphere of democratic scrutiny and dissension (e.g central banks’ conduct of monetary policy) (Hay, 2007). But the attempt to evacuate political conflict from areas of government does not make political passions go away (Chantal Mouffe has long argued that policy convergence and attempts at depoliticisation can instead give rise to populisms which react to the absence of debate on key issues by attacking the political system as a whole).

In these circumstances, front-line workers in our political institutions act as “affect sinks” for the political feelings which have been loosened by “communicative capitalism” (Dean 2009) but which struggle to find their destination. (The metaphor here refers to the heat sinks that allow electronic systems like computers to function) For now, these workers struggle to remove energy from the political communication system, and thus disproportionately bear the costs of agonistic politics. A more sustainable polity will have its institutions redesigned to accommodate the political conflict that we must learn to see not only as unavoidable, but as constitutive of democracy.

This paper is based on a study of those working at the friction points of digital political communication. Drawing on interviews with comment moderators on mainstream news websites, and others working as electorate officers or staffers for Members of Parliament, I show how political communications systems are approaching something of a structural crisis. Those working in public-facing roles struggle to deal with the large volumes of communication that digital technologies allow citizens and campaigning groups to send in contentious times. They also perform difficult emotional labour in dealing with the tone of some of the communication they receive, at a time when a weakening mass media has lost its capacity to moderate the tenor of political discourse. Keeping faith with the commitment these workers share to facilitating public communication means not advocating restrictions on people’s ability to comment. But I do suggest that restructuring the way in which we ask people to deal with public communication in these roles, as well as reframing public expectations, should be our most urgent priority in rebuilding sustainable democratic polities.

Disorder as a problem in the management of populations is the only way we can understand rape or murder and unwed pregnancy as being relevantly similar qua foci of a study, or a discipline. Nevin conceptually gathers them as “undesirable behaviours”. Unwed conception is present because of established conventions in criminology (i.e. it has been produced as a social pathology – a sign of poor impulse control – in the literature Nevin refers to.) But we shouldn’t forget to ask the basic question: “undesirable for whom?” Whose interests are most apparent in defining departures from normative-but-contingent family structures by adult women (Nevin includes women 20-24) as deviant? Who are we controlling our impulses for? In defining the heterosexual marriage as the default state for children to be concieved in? In defining conceptions outside this state as equivalent in certain respects to a crime?

The case of unwed conception should remind us that criminal law, police forces, the justice system are not naturally-occurring phenomena. Nor are they constants, or part of what Colin Hay calls the “realm of necessity”. They are outcomes of operations of power. They involve the past and present administration of violence in their enforcement and maintenance. They involve granting and denying access to the benefits of citizenship, including free movement. Their nature shifts over time, sometimes quite quickly. They are resisted in a range of ways, by a range of people. They have histories. Here they are treated as part of nature which can be correlated with lead levels in the blood or the air – as unchanging and unarguable. Think about changes in policing between the 1960s and now, and the focus of policing over that time. Think about not only changes in incarceration (which some of the researchers account for), but, say, the growth in urban surveillance. Think about the complexity of changes in sexual mores, and of reproductive technologies and rights. Then look at the proxies that studies use in order to control for these factors.

The neatest trick here is that a social definition of undesirable behaviour is made to seem natural by reference to lead poisoning. By abstracting a couple of elements of a complex and extensive history, it’s possible to reduce much of that history to the effect of a molecule. Again in Hay’s terms, it depoliticises crime and families by removing them from the “realm of contingency and deliberation” to the “realm of necessity”. An organic pathology is linked to what some would like to see defined as a social pathology. Departures from a particular morality are associated with cognitive impairment and a certain toxicity.

——

The study of violent crime and unwed conception have a history in the social sciences, and that history is inflected by race. So does IQ as a measure of intelligence and the scene of this historical drama of lead poisoning – the inner city. You don’t have to be a crazy poststructuralist to think IQ is basically a category of racial profiling, or to resist biological determinism – you could be Stephen Jay Gould. Some social scientists struggle to acknowledge this squarely. The solution is to carry out forms of research that are essentially ahistorical.

To believe that lead and crime is anything more than a correlation, you have to believe in the causal chain posited by Nevin. And that chain passes through lowered IQs.

In the body of literature Drum surveys, race is often raised only shyly, in the margins. Here’s Reyes:

lead may be a factor in explaining crime rates by race or income. If disadvantaged groups live in denser and more polluted neighborhoods, they will experience higher lead exposure as children and therefore exhibit more criminal behavior as adults.

Which rather bells the cat. Lead exposure overlaps strongly enough with a history of living in areas of concentrated, complex disadvantage, and thus with the geography of race in the US, for Reyes to offer it as an alternative to explanations of crime in terms of race or poverty. The people with the highest lead exposure also have the highest exposure to complex, localised social disadvantage, which is admittedly not accounted for in Reyes’s state level controls. The story of lead and crime is offered as a substitute for the story of poverty and crime, or race (therefore racism) and crime. But the substitution won’t change much except to depoliticise those discussions. (Think about how the most important policy measures around happened in the 1970s – the hardest work for managers to do in addressing all this is in the past. This is a story of a victory won.)

——

This body of work as assembled by Drum offers to replace history with a detective story. It’s been said that the literature is more modest in its claims than Drum – I can’t see how. Mielke and Zahran are claiming that lead in the air can explain 90% of the variation in aggravated assault and therefore, to the same degree, variations in “social violence”. Nevin himself claims to explain almost all the variation in violence in the period he considers. Put simply, the research defines the scene of the crime. Whodunnit? Lead. We lose something in the process.

What we lose is history. We lose a form of social recording capable of reserving a place for the voices of human participants. We lose the opportunity to put violence and sex in the context of a complex sociability, and not to simply make them a question of disorder. We are incapable here of recognising violence, and living outside sanctioned family structures, as necessary, or differently inflected at different times, or now and again desirable. We cannot see from the perspective of the participants. We cannot recognise making the choice which leads to political agency in dangerous times. The detective story of lead poisoning is a story that threatens to depoliticise all the disorder carried out by that generation, who at one point rocked the foundation of a racist state in what mainstream historians have called a “second civil war” in America. The detective story encourages us to forget this.

Casting the social as natural defines this kind of research. What this means is that it’s a form of thinking that leaves every fundamental social structure in place, and whose real preoccupation is technocratic efficiency. It’s useful in certain, limited ways. But it can’t escape the highly politicised nature of its own basic orientation. Talk of “science” won’t change that, because its framework is not scientifically determined. Rather, in many cases, it avoids considering its political nature in order to line itself up with the needs of managerially-defined government, and denies the need to hear the voices of the managed. This kind of work offers to refine the art of government. It offers to interpose itself between the state and the part of population under discussion. It’s unimaginable in its current form outside the imperatives of the managerial state. It occupies the perspective of those who manage. It surveils the managed. That’s not as a result of a scientific outcome – it’s a result of a political choice.

And you can say all of this without saying that the statistical relationships nominated in the research are incorrect, or denying that lead is poisonous. It’s not to argue that within the bounds of this research, people are acting ethically or honorably. This is about the basic self-incorporation of a tradition of research in the arts of government, and putting itself at the disposal of a managerial state, with its basic orientation to order.

In response to the new Facebook guidelines, I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, comics, paintings, professional photos and videos, etc. (as a result of the Berner Convention). For commercial use of the above my written consent is needed at all times!

The people doing the mocking positioned themselves as knowing, savvy Internet users who realised, unlike the copypasta sheeple, that this was ineffectual as protection for their uploaded materials. (This despite legal opinions which offered that it may in fact have some force).

The scorn is a neat way of ignoring what the widespread sharing of this text reveals – a systematic confusion among Facebook users about their rights. This is a collective failure to appreciate what’s at stake in uploading materials to social media services. Individualising the blame for this actually works to absolve companies like Facebook, whose terms and conditions shift so often, and so rapidly, that even relatively sophisticated users can find it difficult to keep up. People are relying on their friends for information on changes to Facebook’s terms of service because they find reliable, authentic information difficult to come by.

This is connected to a perpetual, free floating anxiety about what it means to be on social media, and to reposit so information in the hands of companies whose business model admittedly rests on harvesting our data. People understand the upside, and millions of people have signed up to services that let them keep in touch with their friends and family (recently this includes a large cohort who are online for the first time). But the downside is poorly understood, not least because making this clear would run counter to the interests of a range of people, including big Internet firms.

In dealing with this anxiety, and rapid, often opaque changes, users have to make do. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen such a practice spread quickly across Facebook, and there have been times in the past when a similar strategy has been used to spread accurate information, and alert fellow users to a problem. (The recent campaign by bands against the changes to the visibility of fan page updates springs to mind) But when anxious users spread incorrect information, savvy users point the finger at them, rather than at a company which has frequently actively misled its users.

The 1337/n00bs divide plays out unhelpfully in other ways. The reflex (and 1337) cyberlibertarian response to concerns about the behaviour of social media companies is formed by an historic fear of Internet regulation. When critics argue that big internet firms are cavalier or exploitative in relation to users’ privacy, intellectual property or other rights, the response is often to point out that users can always exit a particular platform, and/or use one of the other options. However much information Facebook harvests, however loose with users information, it is not a coercive entity like the state. No one is forcing you to be there, and there are alternatives.

There are at least two clear objections to be made to this. One concerns the cost to users. If I were to abandon Facebook for, say Google Plus (and it’s not at all clear to me that G+ is better now, or will be into the future, when it comes to how it uses my information) I would just not be able to keep in touch with a range of people in my life in the same way. My entire family are on there. Schoolfriends are there. Colleagues are there. It’s taken some years for them all to arrive, and it’s unlikely that even a small proportion of them will shift to an alternative platform anytime soon. If I decide that some change to Facebook’s terms of service is the last straw, I have to bear the cost of broken connections indefinitely. Social networking platforms are very sticky because of the big switching costs for users, and I would suggest that for now, Facebook has no meaningful substitute. I won’t even start talking about Google search.

But the second is that the cyberlibertarian assumes that the users actually have enough information at their disposal to know what rights are being sacrificed in order to use any particular platform, and also enough information to know about alternatives and how to use them. I would argue that it’s simply not practically possible to know, in depth, the terms of service on each and every one of the many websites we use, and further that it’s unreasonable to expect that users in a simple bilateral relationship with a tech giant will be able to make sense of terms and conditions that are shifting constantly along with the form and function of the platform.

Walter Lippman mounted a criticism of democracy which said that classical democratic theory required the impossible ideal of an “omnicompetent citizen”, who was abreast and informed about all issues and could make rational decisions about voting on that basis. I actually think this is a fairly vapid critique of democracy, though that’s another story. But I think that a lot of the discussion around big platforms and users’ rights really does assume an impossible ideal: an omnicompetent user who has the time and necessary literacies to make competent, well-informed and regular cost-benefit analyses of their own use of a range of platforms, and the wherewithal to exit or switch when particular platforms become unfavourable.

I don’t think this user exists, and I think the ideal prevents us actually talking properly about users’ rights.

I would say most users lack these capacities, and that this is particularly true of the newer cohorts of regular Internet users who have been drawn out by the affordances of big social media platforms. (However, I’d love to talk further to anyone who really does think they’re completely across the ToS for every service they use. I suspect these specimens are exceedingly rare). Obviously questions about literacy across different cohorts can be framed empirically. But I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to say that a lot of the talk about how disgruntled users can switch is coming from the most literate and experienced users, with the least need for and least dependence on those platforms that have undegone mass uptake.

Rather than thinking in terms of the omnicompetent user, I would prefer us to be talking about the least competent user. If we can’t manage that, we could at least address ourselves to the average user of the average service. And we’re going to be discussing something that Facebook won’t provide without being pushed: either better protection of users’ rights, or more education about them, or both.

(I wouldn’t want to suggest that this post covers the issues he’s concerned with in anything like the depth he does, but I am aware that Mark Andrejevic is pursuing empirical research in this area, and I first raised the idea of the omnicompetent user in conversation with him)

UPDATE: Some enterprising lawyers have set up a tl;dr ToS reference site – thanks to reader Dan.

People close to me – people whom I love and respect – have assured me that I come across as a massive jerk on Twitter. And when I read back over my feed I realise that they are absolutely correct. I obsessively tweet about mundane topics – for example national politics – in a way that adds little value or insight. I unattractively flaunt my membership in various online cliques and in-groups. My linking behaviour reveals middlebrow reading habits, conventional opinions and a pedestrian sensibility. In discussion, I make superficial and tendentious arguments. Only rarely do I talk about my scholarly work in a way that’s informative, as opposed to self-promotional. And on Twitter, as now, I am constantly talking about myself.

I could protest that my on-Twitter persona is different to the “real me”. But you’re all too sophisticated to believe that there is a “real me” apart from the succession of performances I mount in various contexts. I might say instead that my Twitter feed is a particularly unattractive performance of my self. But maybe it’s just the only one of its kind that’s conveniently archived and open to evaluation. We come to social media in various, transitory frames of mind – various chat applications ask us to foreground our “current mood”, and Facebook and Twitter are hardly less explicit in offering that imperative – but I feel like my Twitter performance is generally improvisatory rather than studied. So it’s possible that I’m a jerk across a range of contexts and it’s just that I don’t currently have the resources to understand that. Either way I’ve managed to create an unpleasant impression of myself in the minds of some people who matter to me. And yet I have attracted 3,684 followers, most of whom I don’t know, whether IRL or in more mediated ways. It’s an above average follower count, although there are Australian academics with more. But I suspect it’s partly that number, and partly that I’ve been on Twitter for five years, and various online forums for years before that, and maybe because I’ve published research on how others use Twitter that I have been asked to talk with postgrads and ECRs about it today.

I’m not proposing to tell those of you who are experienced social media users how to suck eggs. If you’re Twitter and your enjoying yourself, you’re probably using it at least as effectively as I am. I would also congratulate those of you who have made a principled decision not to use social media, or to avoid particular platforms. I am not here to evangelise any of this stuff, and I usually find it embarrassing when people do this. (Though I do think that avoiding social media altogether will get more and more difficult, as I explain further on). To those in the middle, I offer not so much advice as personal impressions developed over time. I am not going to pretend that I know any surefire ways of attracting large numbers of followers, apart from already being a bona fide transmedia celebrity. I can’t show you a guaranteed method for using Twitter effectively in easily replicable ways in a training day format. (And I think that some of the people who do claim to be able to reliably do these things, or to help effectively build your “personal brand”, are either lying or themselves deluded. Risk management, perhaps, is a different, easier matter). Whatever I can contribute to the conversation today is based on having spent over five years using Twitter in more or less professional contexts, which have more or less coincided with the five years of my technical existence as an ARC-defined ECR.

And I’ll start that conversation by claiming that social media is not primarily informational. Many academic accounts of social media treat it as a symptom and a vector of information abundance, which can be reliably used as a gauge for the progress of events in the world, and even for their relative importance. We are told how its speed and efficiency are disrupting traditional media because it spreads information more effectively than centralised print or broadcast media can. We’re told about its utility in organising political activism. We are told that analysis of the patterns of data emitted from social media might, perhaps already do shape election campaigns, product marketing, and disaster responses. This is all no doubt true, but it’s not very meaningful in understanding what many everyday users do, and how they interact, and what you should do as a user. People often study Twitter at a distance from which social media is better exploited rather than enjoyed. For users, even reflexive, informed ones, it’s difficult to form an impression about social media platforms beyond the limits of our particular networks, or to make that meet up with macro perspectives. And – as Ben Abraham reminded me once again last week – users deliberately disrupt and interrupt the informational character of Twitter with play and excess.

Drawing on my own experience, and my research where I actually talked to users about what they do, I would say that although information obviously flows across Twitter, for many users the medium is primarily characterised by relentless, reflexive performativity. New information frequently serves to ground the dramatic enunciation of subjective responses. This is something that is echoed in my research on Twitter. A colleague in conversation recently described Twitter as “theatrical”, and I think that’s right. What you’re in there for are affects, impressions, fights, laughs. The most valuable information – information you need to respond to, information that enriches your work, information that helps your career – will get to you in other ways. And to pretend you can just approach it as an information medium and black out the playful stuff is folly. You can’t.

So how does our non-informational social media use mesh with the early stages of a profession which is allegedly all about knowledge? Tl;dr – for early-career academics, social media is simultaneously (1) valuable, (2) unavoidable, (3) risky and (4) a gigantic waste of time. For the remainder of this piece I’ll develop these thoughts.

If I am honest I have to say that I have derived a lot of value from social media. I have made what I suspect will be lifelong friendships online, including in social media. On the one hand there is a small overlap between those friendships and enduring collegial bonds. Some of those good friends are professional colleagues and together we muse on the spectacle what Jussi Parikka recently summarised perfectly as the “corporate climb-the-ladder assholism” of others (and it’s always others, naturally). We chuckle over the mind-bending, perpetual crises of our higher-educational institutions. On the other hand, most of these friends I’ve made have nothing to do with universities. Every conversation with an intelligent person which is not an institutionally directed collaboration, or whose value is not immediately captured by your institution or your field is a blow for good mental health, if not for civilisation.

More pragmatically, perhaps, social media does offer ways to get to know people, and for people to get to know you as a scholar. Colleagues come to understand you as someone who is “on social media”, which believe it or not can still give you some institutional capital. You can link up with people who inspire you, and help you remember why it’s all worthwhile at the end of a bruising semester. Again here, the important thing here is that social media can help you break through the walls of your own institution and find good people beyond it. This has happened to me recently in my experience of Twitter’s role in the CODE conference, where people who I’d previously only encountered on social media suddenly materialised in an even I found genuinely inspiring, even life-changing. Also, to the extent that you have followers, there is also a slightly increased chance of people reading your stuff, which is always nice. And I think that the potential wider readership starts you thinking about how you might communicate more widely as well.

I also really do think social media is valuable in improving your writing. Clarity and concision are improved by time spent communicating on Twitter. These are good qualities for any writer to develop. Academic training in the humanities can encourage the development of a style that is not well-adapted to communicating with a more general audience. I am not the kind of journalistic oaf who insists that everything be intelligible at the level of a Saturday supplement. We should reserve the right to communicate with one another, and with students, in specialist vocabularies that help us to explore difficult ideas. That’s what at least some of us are here for. But the capacity to explain ourselves more broadly has already become, in my view, a matter of industrial survival. Twitter allows you to practice this.

Even were social media not valuable, in many ways it is now largely unavoidable. I am old enough to remember the point, some time in the late 1990s, after mobile phone ownership had stopped being the mark of a wanker and became the norm, when suddenly it was the absence of a phone that became problematic. We’ve reached the point where all our relatives have Facebook accounts, our colleagues have Twitter accounts, and where every research project, department and theorist has a social media presence. It’s not just a baseline industrial reality, it’s daily life in the developed world. I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from choosing to resist the imperatives underlining all this. But it is now a matter of resisting – in Lovink, Rossiter et al’s terms – the givenness of social media. I am not sure whether the worst thing about resisting it under those circumstances is acknowledging its givenness, or having to take it seriously.

Twitter is also risky not least for the reasons I started this talk with. It’s possible, over time, that because of characteristics of your Twitter performance, you slowly confirm a negative impression of yourself in people who, had they met you under different circumstances, may have been better-disposed towards you. I bring this up not because I am particularly exercised about what strangers think about me per se, but because I find myself to be inestimably sad in thinking that there may be people with whom my offline self may have had good, revelatory and mutually illuminating contact with, but for whom my online self was unbearable. It is in banalising the disjunction between mediated and unmediated selves that Twitter has brought us closer to the experience of people who are celebrities. It brings us closer to the experience of politicians by making the “gaffe” a common, everyday experience. Many of us drink or indulge in other intoxicants; many of us simply have tempers. The availability of mobile clients for social media increase the dangers. In a moment we can attach an ill-advised comment to our names forever These more dramatic forms of reputational death are an ongoing risk in an industry where reputational assets become more important all the time. The immediacy of social media makes the dangers different even from the era of blogs in terms of downside risk.

Lastly, I do need to reinforce my strong belief that in many ways social media, and Twitter in particular, is an enormous, extravagant, unprecedented waste of time for anyone, let alone emerging intellectuals. It is almost the perfect weapon for the destruction of writerly productivity. It takes its capacity to distract to the brink of evil by binding it intimately with the the things- writing, reading, discovery – that give our lives and work meaning. It is like an intellectual auto-immune disorder, which causes the mind to attack and consume itself. Many arguments there are conducted as if in a goldfish bowl – there is little advance as conversations circle endlessly around a familiar landscape, and participants forget information revealed in antecedent conversations. Many serious and extended arguments seem to involve little more than the clumsy, intemperate exegesis of some cliche, but this makes sense when we realise that it is an environment in which cliches take on argumentative force. It rewards blowhards, sloganeers and organised mobs. The most lasting outcome of most Twitter-based activist campaigns is a the data exhaust that enables marketers to find a new niche. The platform’s tendency to support recreational outrage has caused some people to go pro in this area, and the performance of, in particular, grief for celebrities, can become almost competitive.

But disappointment with Twitter is constitutive of the experience of using it. (It certainly informs many daily performances on the platform.) And anyway, who wants the impoverished life of an atomised utility-maximiser. If you did you probably wouldn’t be bashing your head up against the wall of this profession. Wasting time, being irritated, and exposing oneself to the foibles of others is the price of membership in a community. I am not saying you’ll find community on Twitter, but if you don’t, there’s probably not many other solid reasons to be there. You can tick the social media box for career purposes by simply opening an account and using it in a desultory fashion. My experience tells me that hiring committees will be much more concerned with things like how many refereed publications you have, and whether or not you appear to be someone they’d enjoy working with. Being on Twitter may actually damage your standing in these areas. Technology is changing the sector in a range of ways, and the mass uptake of social media is certainly playing a part here. Until there is a sane response to this, it pays to be cautious, and save the real talk for secret Facebook groups or locked-down ADN chats or beers with friends. But being on Twitter might help to keep you sane, and help you meet interesting people. That’s the best reason for using it, and in this way my remarks echo Mel Gregg’s some years ago on academic blogging.

Despite having once risibly quit the platform, and written up this flounce at length for an ABC website, you’ll still find me there (Remember – you haven’t been on Twitter until you’ve quit in a huff). As a specimen of the social media jerk, I think I’m worth a follow.

There is one thing that I feel the need to jump in on, though, and that’s the odd “debate” about the sincerity or otherwise of the Prime Minister’s parliamentary attack on Tony Abbott.

There’s a notion that these remarks were simply intended to defuse a political attack on the government via the speaker, and that they can therefore be dismissed as insincere, even cynical. This idea has been prevalent in the Press Gallery’s coverage of Tuesday’s events, but we can find it elsewhere.

The people who say this tend to be ostentatiously performing their own political savviness. But that performance is rather undone by the rather naive underlying assumption that a piece of political rhetoric can’t function in a number of different ways.

There’s no doubt that this was intended to rob the Coalition’s parliamentary attack on the Speaker of some momentum. Equally, I don’t think it’s possible to watch the speech and not see that Gillard’s remarks are deeply felt, and that what she sees as Tony Abbott’s sexism really does bother her. As a lifelong political feminist, why wouldn’t it?

So the speech has value as a parliamentary tactic, and possibly also some strategic value: it’s part of an effort to frame Abbott as a misogynist, and you never know, it might get him to modify the tone of the personal attacks he makes on the Prime Minister. But I imagine it made her feel pretty good to get it off her chest at the same time. Again, why wouldn’t it?

Political scientist Susan Herbst’s excellent book Rude Democracy shows how incivility and calls for civility can both be “strategic assets” to be used in political talk. She analyses speeches by Barack Obama and Sarah Palin to show how if we cease viewing civility and incivility in a purely normative manner, we can can see the part they play in the political cut and thrust. But work like Herbst’s is not the kind of easy cynicism we’ve seen in recent days – it enriches our view of the nature of political speech. Rather than insisting that the essence of politics is deception, it shows that, like most human activities, political communication is complicated and multidimensional. Speeches like Gillard’s have tactical and strategic dimensions, but at the same time they seek to establish or reinforce norms. They can also carry a significant affective charge for a broader audience. That Gillard’s did is evidenced by the response to it.

All political communication has multiple audiences, and good communicators will be able to address several at once. Gillard made the coalition look pretty sheepish, probably put some fire in the belly of her colleagues, and for a while it looked like she might have contributed to Peter Slipper keeping his job. But this particular speech had qualities that have found a global audience, and one of those qualities was its obviously sincere anger about the constant drip of gendered insults flowing the Prime Minister’s way. Women everywhere, and not just women, could relate to Gillard’s anger.

Politics has an affective dimension. The really naive view is the one that says that political speech never draws on genuine emotions, and is only ever a move in the game. Unlike some journalists, politicians like Julia Gillard can often walk and chew gum at the same time.

In considering the current state of the press in Australia, the Inquiry has given considerations to not only the submissions received but also to an extensive range of other local and international evidence. From this information the Inquiry has concluded that, despite the intense pressures facing it, the Australian press is in no immediate danger of collapsing. The main media companies appear to be reasonably capable of dealing with the pressures facing them at least over the medium term. Nonetheless, some potential pressure points are becoming evident.

This morning:

Fairfax has announced plans to cut nearly 2,000 jobs and switch its landmark The Age and Sydney Morning Herald broadsheets to ‘compact’ formats as part of cost-cutting measures.

The media company says it will cut 1,900 jobs over the next three years and ditch the broadsheet formats for The Age and the SMH on March 4 next year.

And it will fall in line with its main competitor, News Limited, introducing paywall subscription services for its flagship online services in 2013.

It will also close printing facilities at Chullora in Sydney and Tullamarine in Melbourne by June 2014.

If this is not a “collapse”, what would one look like? What criteria should be use to identify one?

Fairfax is effectively pulling out of printing. It is going to run a combined national newsroom. It is pulling its successful websites behind a paywall. It is retrenching 380 journalists. There is no end in sight, save the self-interested sponsorship of a mining magnate.

Too many of our public conversations about the media in Australia have been looking at the wrong things. Call it punishers and straighteners versus enlargers.

The Independent Media Inquiry bent over backwards to demonstrate the peristence of media power in order to build a case for regulating it further. But the real story is that traditional media are in a death spiral. These have been major social institutions. Despite what many see as their poor performance in recent years, it’s not clear what exists to replace them in that role.

When Fairfax is a plaything of oligarchs (which is likely to mean its mastheads will have even fewer readers) and Rupert Murdoch passes on to whatever his eternal reward may turn out to be, what will happen to public affairs reporting in this country?

What about the topics that might have led to ideas for expanding our choices when it comes to public interest journalism? What will the future look like? How can we support or encourage media diversity? What will journalism be like when the mass audience has fragmented to the extent that mass circulation newspapers are no longer viable for anyone?

These are the topics that almost all official conversations around media policy in the last year have avoided. Now, there may not be a further opportunity to have them.

Update More from Terry Flew, who considers just how precipitously circulations may have fallen in Australia. Glen Fuller disagrees with me at length following a conversation on Twitter today. And my piece has been cross-posted over at PIJF.

Update 2 A couple of readers have suggested that my remarks on newspapers here might be construed as suggesting that public sector broadcasting might also, somehow, be affected by the decline of the business model of independent commercial media. There’s no direct relationship, of course, although the ABC will very likely encounter political difficulties as the business position of newspapers, which they are effectively now competing with as providers of online print content, worsens. Anyhow, consider this a clarification, in case I have been misunderstood.

My problem wasn’t the side-scrolling design as such. It was more the way that this design combined with other features of the site, and the content, to suggest that the Global Mail was only reluctantly an online enterprise.

The site’s design suggested to this progressively less frequent reader that the brief was to make it look like a glossy magazine. When you combined that with the lack of a comments facility, and the lack of links and engagement with other sites in the stories, a distinct impression was formed. This was a website that was only grudgingly online. To me the presentation of the site framed the Internet as a necessary evil – a handy distribution method for a pretty old-fashioned product, not a medium with its own possibilities, which might be usefully engaged with. The lack of capacity for readers to make their own contribution suggested an aversion to the culture of online debate.

The stories reflected this mindset, I think. The photographic essays by Mike Bowers are gorgeous, and always worth a look. But otherwise too many stories were worthy-but-dull, with news and editorial values seemingly informed by a pretty wooly set of ideas about “quality journalism”. (Rumopur has it that there was tension over the rate at which stories were commissioned, so this may not have been the fault of the writers involved).

Too often they were at the weekend supplement level rather than approaching the gold standards of online longform journalism – The Atlantic, The New Yorker, TNR. One never felt sure as one does in checking those sites or their feeds, that one would learn something genuinely new, something which you will always want to shoot to instapaper.

So it seemed like GM combined unfulfilled aspirations to be a quality longform project with an apparent unwillingness to be integrated with the rest of the Internet. These went some way towards robbing the GM of the spark, cheekiness, willingness to experiment, competitive elan, doggedness and fight of more durable and interesting online news ventures. Crikey might have a ramshackle site but it also has shown itself able to compel readers with a different take on the daily agenda, and tweaked the noses of bigger players on the way. Think of Mumbrella or New Matilda, which speak for and to well-defined audiences. Think of On Line Opinion‘s sense of mission. Think of the personality that the more successful Australian blogs manage to project. Think of the best things that have happened at ABC Online in recent years – the Drum and ABC Open, which have harnessed the energy of outsiders. Then pop over to Alexa and do the traffic comparisons.

For all its claims to innovation in design, we never saw GM under Attard do anything really innovative as an online publication. There was no data journalism or visualisation, no experiments with interactive features, no live coverage, no standout social media work, no multimedia offerings.

It’s one thing to be away from the news cycle, it’s another to be so irrelevant that you’re not able to get any traction on the agenda. There seemed to be a desire to put foreign affairs and broad progressive issues on the public radar. But the Global Mail seemed too satisfied with itself from the outset to elbow its way into a place in the national conversation. The audience was taken for granted, not competed for.

When it started, it was claimed that its target market was everyone. This seemed impossibly vague at the time; in retrospect it seems like a disavowal. I think the imagined audience was clear enough – it was the editor and other like minds, who were committed to a similar normative old-media ideal of quality (which might just be redundant, if not obsolete) and a similar suite of soft-left causes. But this audience was just not large enough for the publication to have the desired impact.

Perhaps Attard’s background was not ideal for shepherding a new online outlet. She was a storied foreign correspondent with a long tenure in the ABC’s star system. Perhaps by their nature these things need hungry outsiders, who want to do more than dispense patronage to producing a kind of journalism which is exemplified better elsewhere. Perhaps the eye-popping level of support given to the venture was part of the problem – the whole thing just felt complacent from the outset.

It makes you think, though. When she was in the Media Watch chair, is the Global Mail what Attard wanted the Australian media to look like?

PS Tim Burrowes makes some related points, in the form of a list, on Mumbrella.

It’s not support for the principles around freedom of political expression. Menzies House only extends that support to Bolt. It’s not about demanding that limits be placed on political action or expression. Menzies House only wants that to happen in respect of the Tent Embassy. And it’s clearly not good banner design.

What the campaigns have in common is (1) their crude and lazy opportunism; and (2) that they are both targeted at Aboriginal Australians. The first supports Bolt’s right to make loaded calls about other people’s racial identity. The second seeks to end the right of Aboriginal people to continue a long-standing political protest. They share a basis in a rudimentary understanding that resentments about Aboriginal people are easily awakened and exploited in some parts of the community.

All political groups make choices about how to allocate their scarce resources, how to communicate in a way that activates their supporters, and where they should best try to channel their energies. Faced with all of the issues of interest to conservatives and libertarians in contemporary Australia, Menzies House have initiated two campaigns in succession that target Aboriginal people.

What words should we use to describe such an organisation, and the people who direct it?

Cynically exploiting racial divisions is something that American conservatives are historically quite comfortable with, and rather good at, too.

Tim Andrews, the founder of Menzies House, and one of those responsible for these campaigns, is apparently based in the US, doing political jobs. He describes himself on his own blog as a “classical liberal” – perhaps, while he is in America, he is learning how to throw red meat to the worst of the conservative base, the better to apply such techniques when he returns to Australia.

You may remember Andrews as the political genius who posted a bunch of pictures of “hot young liberal” women online, and then seemed uncommonly surprised when he drew some fire as a result.

Do remember the name, if only to make sure that you and other people you know always associate it with stunts and campaigns like these, wherever his future career might take him. If he’s what passes for a rising star on the right of Australian politics, we probably have lots more divisive, racially coded campaigning to look forward to in the future.

It would be far too much to ask that senior conservative politicians tell people like Andrews to pull their heads in. Indeed, people like Cory Bernardi proudly associate themselves with Menzies House, its campaigns, and its frequently (though inadvertently) amusing content. A sign, perhaps, that Senator Bernardi himself sees the value in divisive campaigning of this nature.

Meanwhile, we should be sure to understand Menzies House for the kind of organisation it really is. And we should see the people who initiate campaigns like this for what they are, too.