Sshhh… screens have ears?

Do you worry about what you post online, Tweet, link to or Like? Perhaps we should - the Paul Chambers case should teach us that authorial intention and reader reception can be poles apart, with horrifying consequences.  


More prosaically, people are talking a lot more about 'managing' your online reputation, as this post over at MMU's PR blog discusses (much of what follows is what I said in a comment there). If you're looking for a job - and perhaps applying for a university course, you should expect to be Googled by your prospective employer. We've had students complain that things they've posted on open websites for academic purposes have been used against them in selection processes. I've also advised students that they should take some simple steps to improve their credibility (an email address along the lines of 'sexybitch' prompted a few words about audiences). 


I used to be quite careful myself: I don't use my real name, or that of The Hegemon, though since I've been named in the national press and many of my colleagues and students read Plashing Vole, the horse has rather bolted (I admit it: I'm am Michael Gove). If my name was really common, I'd perhaps be less careful, but as it's very distinctive and rare (there's a professor of medicine and a professor of nuclear physics out there with my name - which makes me optimistic about my promotion prospects), I decided to take up an alter ego. I've also toned down some of my more direct critiques of the institution - self-censorship to keep my job. But on the whole, I'm fairly independent, and I'm lucky enough to work in a sector which prides itself on employing loudly-opiniated oddballs. Left to myself in the private sector I'd soon starve down an alley. 


Having a glamorous secret identity has some advantages: I can talk about situations in general rather than be seen as self-interested, for example, and it offers a degree of insulation. I can maintain a division between my professional life and my online commentary existence - but this is also a drawback. The MMU PR blog, for instance, and many others I read, are written by named individuals: in the world of REF and professional regard which acts as currency in education, I've separated my blogging and academic identities to some extent, reducing my 'impact' and professional credibility. My blogging and tweeting has led to some useful networking, occasional pieces in the national press and other opportunities, but if I was really driven to public engagement, I'd merge Vole and my meatspace identities. 


That last word is the key one for me. Before postmodernism, we all thought that we were simple creatures: our names signalled a coherence and continuity of identity throughout our lives and activities. Modern theory rejects that. Instead, we're bundles of contradictory impulses and subject positions, in which names are ineffectual sticking plasters meant to reassure ourselves that we're the same person 'now' as 'then', at work and at home, internally and externally. The self is a 'narrative', and like all narratives, it has an author and multiple audiences. Remember Harold Wilson? The Labour leader smoked cigars in private but a pipe in public: semiotically, he understood their different meanings and constructed a public narrative (pipe = fatherly, trustworthy) at odds with his private inclinations (cigar = posh, which he wasn't, but he'd picked up the habit from somewhere and didn't want to stop).  


Social media has exposed the truth of this like never before, revealed by the paranoia of those thoughtful enough to worry about their online presence. Our online existences are manifestations of our multiple roles. I don't talk about family and relationships online, for instance - a quick Google would present me as an isolated misanthrope, which is only one (major) strand of my personality. My Twitter timeline reveals a hilarious, sarcastic master of popular culture (well, one can hope), while revealing nothing of my serious work for charidee (but I don't like to talk about that). Plashing Vole is a construction which sometimes makes me seem more intellectual, more hard-working, angrier and more serious than my offline persona (lazy fat bloke waiting to be sacked).  My letters to various newspapers are also performances: constructions of a leftwing academic seriousness which is part of a desire to remain within the expected paradigms of a lecturer (if you're interested in performance as the slippery core of identity, read Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: if you borrowed my copy, bring it back you bastard: I spent months carefully annotating that copy and don't want to do it all over again). 


Aside from the philosophical fascination of online/offline identities, there's also a political or ideological tyranny waiting in the winds. The PR blog made the very reasonable point that employers are engaged in surveillance of applicants, and that we should be aware of this. IN practical terms, however, this is likely to be short-lived: if we all become paranoid enough, our online presence will reveal an entire population of teetotal, asexual, church-going bores, just like our CVs, thanks to our careful 'curation' of e-activity. We'll all be working so hard to weed out any sign of personality that we won't have any time for mischief. At which point employers will get wise to this and give up. The other practical problem is that we can only control what we post - we've little sway over what other people post, say about us or interpret what we say. Reputation management is a Sisyphean task. 


More importantly, I worry that dread at the judgement of potential employers means internalising a disciplinary discourse which is unaccountable and ideologically loaded. If we spend every moment worrying about how some recruitment panel will interpret a sarcastic tweet or inebriated photo, we've given in to a hegemonic structure in which the perceived demands of 'business' outweigh everything else in our lives. In a better world, the opinion of Colin from Accounts on the subject of my taste in music, behaviour at parties or political beliefs would be entirely irrelevant. A decent employer should know that they're buying our labour, time and a degree of commitment, and not the whole person: whether you spend your weekends LARPing or wife-swapping in Wakefield (I assume the former leads to the latter int he fullness of time), should be a matter of supreme unimportance. 


By accepting that a Colin in our heads should be allowed to judge us is to voluntarily submit to the judgement of an élite which shouldn't be given control over our rich and complex lives. I shouldn't have to care whether Colin 'gets' sarcasm or not. I shouldn't have to police my opinions based on the reaction of an authority figure who hasn't the time or skills to properly contextualise a throw-away line about a subject of which he knows little. I should be able to get drunk and (one day) urinate on Margaret Thatcher's grave without worrying about how some corporate suit might misinterpret a moment in my past. 
If we unquestioningly internalise the discourses of corporate authority, are we free in any meaningful fashion? 


Your thoughts?


(PS: this is what Media Studies is about). 

Guess Who?

If you're a Google+ user, you'll have discovered that Google is 'encouraging' users to operate under their real names - and deciding arbitrarily whether or not its clients are telling the truth. Which might make problems for poor old Moon Unit.

It raises the question of anonymity on the web once more, and the deeper one of identity. As to the former: yes, 'real' names may promote civility and responsibility. Though if your name is John Smith, you can probably say whatever you want with no chance of identification offline.  I use my real name in certain online situations: on the forum relating to my sport, for example. That's because it's a discussion chamber and I wanted to be held accountable for whatever I say. In a small sport, we all know each other. Whenever I go to a competition, or referee, or act as child protection officer, those around me need to know that I'm honest and mean what I say, rather than wind things up out of devilment.

So why don't I use my real name on Vole? Partly because it's not safe: I do have an insecure job and managers who might well take agin' me. That said, Vole and my real name have been officially linked in the Times Higher Ed and the Guardian Higher Education Network, so the cat's out of the bag really.

The deeper motivation is the obverse of the names=responsibility argument. What's to say that my real name (imposed on me by parents, reflecting their cultural values) is any more representative of a 'real' me than Plashing Vole? If you know your Evelyn Waugh, you could trace the origin of my monicker and take a stab at what I'm implying. Identity isn't stable and discrete: it's messy, complicated and constantly in flux. Plashing Vole is a version of me; my offline identity is another me. Mostly, they're contiguous, but they're certainly not the same. My foul language and poor personal hygiene, for instance, aren't carried over into Vole: the freedom to comment on anything I like - without footnotes and structure -  are restricted to the blog.

Another point is that Vole is here to stay: it's not a sock puppet used to abuse people in passing. To a (very) small group of people, it has a history to which I am answerable. I hope you can trust PV in the same way that people can trust the carbon-based author. It's an identity: it's no more fraudulent than any other form of identification. It's inconsistent - but then so am the 'I' who decides what goes under my given name and what is ascribed to Plashing Vole. Google deciding that one is 'real' and trustworthy while the other is automatically unreal and untrustworthy is an ontological abuse.

There's also the matter of audience. Lots of you are personal friends in meatspace. You'll know better than most that Vole is a 'hyperreal', edited avatar of the person you know from day to day. That keeps me honest to some extent: I won't invent things out of principle, and because you'll catch me out, unless I tag something as fiction stylistically or explicitly. But there are groups of friends who know me from different places: university, work, fencing, solely through Vole and so on: none of you should expect complete consistency because identity is a matter of context to a great extent. When I go fencing, nobody knows or cares about Vole or about my professional life: to them I'm a fencer/ref/coach/child protection guy. My academic friends know nothing about what I do in Polish sports halls (oh, the horror of it all), and that's great: we pick and choose what to show each other, and what we take from each other.

Being forced to completely identify ourselves in all contexts may shut down some internets nastiness, but it would also shut down the playground of identities. Imagine being, for instance, a feminist in Tehran, or a socialist civil servant in Washington: appearing under your real name on Google would soon lead to very nasty consequences offline, whereas the ability to operate under a pseudonym gives them both the opportunity to indulge in fantasies, debate ideas, develop personal and political links in a safe place. Google wants to reduce identity to a single fixed point: what a blinkered, conservative, reactionary concept.

(BTW: I know there's an awful lot of philosophical writing I could invoke here, but I'm hungry and my mind's gone blank).

Bits'n'bobs

I'm an inveterate ripper-out of newspaper articles, turner-down of page corners and magpie for quotes. This one caught my eye the other day: it's by the formidable American journalist, Janet Malcolm:

"The invented I of journalism" as Malcolm calls it, is not a stable entity. One of the things she realised early on in her writing career was that, she says, "this 'I' was a character, just like the other characters. It's a construct. And it's not the person who you are. There's a bit of you in it. But it's a creation. Somewhere I wrote, 'the distinction between the I of the writing and the I of your life is like Superman and Clark Kent.'"

It seems particularly relevant - hopefully obviously - to our online lives, whether it's a Facebook profile that only presents your best features, or a blog such as this: you may have noticed that parts of my personal and professional life are off-limits. I have colleagues, friends and loved ones; quite rightly, I don't want to discuss them in this forum and many of them don't want to be discussed. I also edit out the boring bits of my life unless I think I can entertain you with them (coming next: tips for ironing your socks). I don't even talk about my meagre research very much because I recognise that your enthusiasm for Welsh and proletarian 1930s literature is less constant than mine. Other people are different. LitLove and The Red Witch are exemplary my favourite online academics, whereas Blossom shares her insight into the (fascinating) life of a student divorced mother with a candidness that I admire but couldn't (and wouldn't) share.

That's partly why I use Plashing Vole rather than my actual name: not particularly to hide, but because the I of the blog is not the rather greyer I some of you see in class, the pub or at home.

And on the same subject, anyone else who writes that Prospero 'is Shakespeare', I will fail you on the spot. Biographical criticism is a blind alley. If people could only write about what they'd personally felt or seen, we'd have no SF and very little other fiction. What's more, Prospero is a very sinister individual, not the kindly old gent people seem to think he is.

Meanwhile, as I head home to do some ironing while watching old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I'll leave you with some wise words from W. H. Auden, a man who liked his commas even more than I do:

…one does not have to be ashamed of moods in which one feels no desire to read The Divine Comedy… among the half dozen or so things for which a man of honour should be prepared, if necessary, to die, the right to play, the right to frivolity, is not the least'.

That is all.

Monday conundrum! What the hell is 'the British way of life'?

Ok, I'm still here. There's been a certain amount of traffic to my post on the government's plan to restrict freedom of speech to well-behaved citizens, and I'm still annoyed by the incredibly rightwing and intellectually vacuous nature of the idea. (The main discussion of this in relation to freedom of speech was in an astonishing interview on Radio 4)

However, Phil Woolas says that you can only have your say if you agree with 'the British way of life' (odd: you can say whatever you want as long as you agree), and you have to admit, there's a great argument to be had here. (What's he like? Try here).

So come on, what's your definition of 'British way of life'? Remember - you can't have anything specifically English, Scots or Welsh. Even the things that the Norn Irish unionists think are British aren't - e.g. wearing bowlers, hating Catholicism and fetishising the Queen.

'Britain' in its current state has only been around since 2000 or so - whenever the devolved Scots and Welsh assemblies opened. Before that, Ireland's withdrawal from the UK was 1922 or 1937 depending on your preference. Ireland was only technically 'in' since 1801, and Scotland was incorporated in 1601. 1563 saw the final conquering of Wales, and of course 'England' was merely a French Norman outpost for most of the 1066-1500 period. 'England' before that was a patchwork of Saxon and Celtic states. So really, it's a recent and unstable state, as Colley's Britons brilliantly demonstrates.

So what's 'British'? 100 years ago, you could have said that all the constituent nations got together to invade places, take their raw materials and hook them on opium (China, 19th century). Making things, inventing sports (playing them well was a colonial innovation). Speaking English was an English imposition on the rest of the UK, aided by eager sell-outs, but it didn't fully work. What else? Tea-drinking is quite popular in Ireland, India and China, though the former acquired the habit through the Empire.

There's a massive tradition of dissent and protest: the Peasants' Revolt, the Levellers, Diggers and so on during the Civil War, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists, the NUM, Marx and Engels living here, and the Poll Tax rioters. Parliamentary democracy is a possible contender, though plenty of other states got there first (go Iceland) and perfected it quicker, by letting women and the poor vote, and of course lots of places don't have an unelected upper chamber and a first-past-the-post lower one.

Monarchy? A mixed blessing, and hardly original (or indeed native). Beautiful weather and landscape are strong contenders. Perhaps mass participation sports - cycling and rambling, though they were big in Germany too, until the Nazis banned them. The pound? OK, though retaining it hasn't been much use. Co-operative Societies were invented in Britain - a Welshman (Robert Owen) opened the first co-operative factory in Scotland (New Lanark) and the first co-operative society opened in Rochdale in 1839.

Strong trades unions were perhaps a British innovation, and they were closely tied to the very democratic forms of religion which sprouted in the 18th century - Methodism in particular (there's a saying - unfortunately true - that the Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marx). How about the famous British love of an eccentric, from Beckford to racist comic, philanderer and Mayor of London (Alexander) Boris Johnson?

Beckford:

'Boris' and his friends at university:

I guess there's literature, about which I shouldn't have to say much. I'd also be tempted to say that the vibrancy of pop culture is quite a British thing, though borders are porous in this regard. Political satire and a dark sense of humour are strong threads, though Serbs and Russians apparently share the same gloomy outlook. Nostalgia? Individualism? Consumerism? Benefit cheating? Jeremy Kyle? Eating sausages and chips on Spanish beaches? Loving animals more than their children (except for foxes)? The BBC, the Guardian, Steve Bell or the Daily Mail? White people in stately homes or mixed race couples on the streets of Wolverhampton?

Swearing. If there's one brilliant achievement of the British, it's swearing. Not so much the Welsh, as Welsh-language swearing is mostly religious oaths, but there's definitely a national love of inventive, baroque, witty swearing, such as Malcolm Tucker.

It's hard, isn't it? Cultures aren't monolithic: they influence and are influenced. Within any society there are competing and co-existing beliefs. That's what makes life a) fun and b) progressive - the dialectic ensures that ideas are debated. The goverment's plan is to preserve some bullshit idea of what constitutes Britishness (and you just know it's going to be a terrible bunch of self-righteous platitudes) and fix it in amber.

So what's the perfect Brit? A sunburned fat bloke in a union jack hat, slumped in front of Jeremy Kyle, calling Gordon Brown a See You Next Tuesday? If you don't like it, you can go back where you came from. And I'll come with you.

Or, is it an eccentrically-dressed union member of mixed race taking to the streets in righteous anger at the way the most vulnerable in society are treated, accompanied by a fantastic soundtrack - whether it be Late Junction on Radio 3 or Radio 1 (or The Archers)? I sure hope so. The point is that, like all societies, this one is plural, dynamic and mostly brilliant - trying to define it is like nailing jelly to the wall.