Heil and Farewell

“It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.” 

- Cervantes

This morning David Bowie died, of cancer, aged 69. As you can imagine, the airwaves and social media are full of emotion, from sadness to shock. I'm saddened too, though human mortality is not as much of a surprise to me as it clearly is to many people. Being born in 1975, I'm too young (not a phrase I'll be able to use much in future) to have experienced Bowie's work in its original context. I suspect my first exposure to him was either his role in Labyrinth or his duet with Mick Jagger, Let's Dance. I recall the former with some affection, the latter with none. Some years later I bought and liked Low and Heroes, enjoyed the film The Man Who Fell To Earth and liked scattered songs from his other work. I also read about his pioneering embrace of financial instruments when he sold off futures in his royalties in the form of Bowie Bonds. I loved, by the way, Philip Glass's reworking of Low and Heroes into symphonies.

So in musical terms I'm an interested bystander. Bowie wasn't ever important to me in the same way Joni Mitchell, Tindersticks, Gorky's or Ligeti were, but I'm an admirer. However, I'm also an academic, and one of the uncomfortable things academics do is remember everything and point them out. So this morning I recalled the dark side of Bowie, particularly this and similar statements he made. 

My direct source for this is Standpoint magazine (not one I like but it's not given to make things up) and the same interview is cited in conservative historian Dominic Sandbrook's Seasons in the Sun – the interview is with Cameron Crowe in (apparently) Playboy in September 1976, following up comments in a similar vein he made to the NME a year earlier. Here's the full interview. 

Occasionally I teach literature or art by people who held deeply unpleasant opinions: Eliot, Larkin, Eric Gill to name but three. I do think that we should be capable of appreciating the art separately to the attitudes. Bad people have made good art. Good people have made good art. Good people have made bad art and bad people have made bad art – and that's before we even get close to defining 'good' and 'bad' in artistic and moral terms. However, I don't think that the attitudes should be forgotten or overlooked. With Bowie, everyone from the Prime Minister to the Archbishop of Canterbury (perhaps Eton had a copy in the prefects'  Beatings Chamber) was quoted without reference to Bowie's mid-seventies stance. It's not as if nobody noticed at the time - newspaper articles were written when he turned up in London dressed in black, riding in a black vintage Mercedes drop head and 'waving' (as he later put it) in a suspiciously stiff-armed manner:

Bowie isn't the first celebrity to flirt with – or even plunge deep into fascism or racist politics. Nothing Bowie has said or done compares with Eric Clapton's speech from the stage in Birmingham (also in 1976, clearly a peak year for pop racism), while a few years ago the editor of GQ magazine was fired for printing something facetious about Nazi uniforms being stylish. 

So, this morning I posted the Bowie quote on Twitter. A lot of people didn't know he'd said it. Some were shocked. Some were angry that I'd posted it. Some contextualised it within the cultural and political conditions of the time and noted that a minority of artists have either employed fascist imagery to shock, or have dabbled in fascism more substantially (Lemmy, I recall, collected Nazi weaponry, uniforms and so on). Some made the point that the work and the attitudes should be separated. Many took the attitude that you shouldn't be held responsible for things you say when you're on drugs. 

Here's a taste: I've removed the authors' names because I don't believe in publicly shaming people: I'll deal with the arguments instead. The drugs ones first:

I don't think this argument washes. Lots of people take large amounts of drugs. Very few of them make substantial and internally coherent arguments in favour of fascism across the course of at least a year. Is cocaine a gateway drug to fascism, or is fascism the natural habitat of people who like cocaine? Secondly, I'm not entirely convinced by any argument that uses the copious intake of illegal substances as a defence. Bowie was not spiked. Nobody forced him to repeatedly take loads of mind-altering substances. Nor do I see anybody claiming that it was just the drugs which produced the great music – so if he gets the credit for the songs, he gets to take the blame for the Nazism. I tend to go along with the interlocutor who put it like this: 

Likewise, I hugely admired John Peel for many reasons but I don't think that 'it was legal in Texas' is sufficient justification for him marrying a 15-year old girl. 'Legal in Texas' is no defence of anything. 

A couple of people made very interesting comments about the role of celebrity in our lives: that they're such public property that the uncomfortable details are washed away. A kind of cognitive dissonance. I think this is understandable and probably true. It's an extension of the 'death of the author' argument. The celebrity-as-text is transformed by the reader's purposes and cultural context and made anew.

This also links to the tweet listed above in the 'drugs' section that promotes Bowie as a 'provocateur'. I can see the argument – nobody more than Bowie operated on the basis that his entire visible existence was a performance of some sort, and perhaps his utterances should be understood in this way.

However, I do have a problem with this. If Bowie's point is that dressing in a Nazi-esque fashion, appropriating Nazi salutes and calling for an extreme right-wing dictatorship is simply a performance, it requires us to put aside the specifics of Nazism and fascism. Concentrating on the style or the attitudes demands that we put aside the mass extermination of Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, the intellectually-impaired, trades unionists and other ethnic, religious and political groups. It asks us to put aside the occupations and slaughter, the ghettos and the gas chambers. Bowie didn't just make provocative statements, including some about Hitler: he moved to Berlin which as well as having a vibrant artistic scene, was a divided, occupied city whose government, judiciary and media spheres still harboured lots of former high-ranking Nazis hurriedly rehabilitated as the Cold War took hold, while the general population consisted of many former Nazis and their victims. Call me old-fashioned, but I'd think twice about turning up in Cambodia wearing a Pol Pot t-shirt and explaining that he had style, or that I was just being 'provocative'.

 I enjoyed the robust exchange of ideas that Twitter enabled this morning. People gave me context and supplementary information. They provided context and new ways to approach the facts – some calmly, some passionately. Excellent – this is what it's for. The only really sour note was this one:

The sender blocked me. Again, normal practice on Twitter, and I'm big enough and old enough to be able to take it. What really rankles is that this was an academic. Rather than discussing the substance, like academics do as the core of our existence, she decided that intemperance and blocking was the way to deal with uncomfortable facts. A shame: I like following people with whom I disagree.

The header to this post includes a Tweet about letting the dust settle – a dry, amused and amusing point which deserves serious thought. When is the right time to introduce inconvenient elements? Should the Bowie fans be left to fill social media with uncritical assessments for a few days while their grief is fresh? (As an aside: thank heavens Twitter didn't exist in 1997. I'd have been lynched for my opinions on Diana). I think it's a judgement call. Everybody's talking about Bowie so I felt the time was right to introduce other aspects to the conversation. That may be insensitive but I don't think it's 'vile'. Perhaps we need a more grown-up culture in which we don't idolise those we admire, nor pillory those who err in our eyes. 

So you #standwithparis…?

One of the interesting things about social media is that it's so emotionally open. Anyone can turn up, express a depth of emotion – positive, negative, baffled – which will be echoed widely, with no entry or exit costs. It's become a means of easily identifying oneself with a cause or stance without consequences.

For instance, here's the Twitter avatar of a company called Accusoft, whose promoted tweet turned up on my timeline a day or so after the attacks in Paris.

I forget quite which one it was, but here are a couple more. Their avatar remains a tricolour with their corporate logo stamped on top (the symbolism is quite clear to me, but not perhaps to them), but the action of feeding promoted tweets into a timeline shortly after a mass murder, complete with appropriated flag didn't convey solidarity to me: it conveyed the opportunist appropriation of grief to sell products. 

Here's one of their tweets which purports to be a little more reflective, but it's so bland as to be meaningless, and immediately subverted by the stream reverting to promotional stock-photography type:

Does this really mean anything? Is it simply a PR office telling the boss that they need to look caring? Will it encourage these corporations to start paying taxes to improve security (yes, that is a trick question)?

However, this isn't one of my normal anti-corporate rants. These organisations are lazy and cynical, but so are an awful lot of people, many of them friends of mine. Try a search for #IStandWith on Twitter and you'll get tens of thousands of examples, ranging from people 'standing with' rescued dogs to the city of Paris. Many of them are good caring people expressing themselves in public as best they can. Here's a selection (which all appeared together just like this) ranging from the helpful to the banal to the sinister.

Once we've agreed that these sentiments are honestly and deeply felt, we have to ask whether they're any more meaningful than Accusoft's appropriation of grief. In short: are there consequences to 'standing with' anything or anyone? The point of 'standing with' is, as far as I can tell, to associate oneself with the oppressed and sharing their struggle. The image I have in my head is of civil rights activists joining Rosa Parks or the school children being bussed in Alabama, and sharing the beatings and abused meted out by the police. I'm also reminded of the late Simon Hoggart's political maxim that any speech which proclaims the speaker's unwavering devotion to motherhood, apple pie, happy children, clouds or freedom is just so much humbug because it's impossible to imagine anyone seriously opposing such things.

Because social media allows us to publicly endorse popular opinions without consequences, 'standing with' becomes little more than a form of smug self-indulgence. ISIS is unlikely to be keeping a list of people who stand with Paris, whereas Rosa Parks was arrested and her friends harassed and beaten. People: stop metaphorically #standingwith things. All you'll get is the emotional reinforcement of your personally-curated echo chamber, the lowest common denominator of community empathy rather than any meaningful form of political or emotional engagement. The same thing can be said for #jesuiswhatever and the other variations: they are in Baudrillardian terms simulations of unity without meaningful symbolic exchange. It's like going to a rugby match and shouting in pain when a player is tackled. I don't mean that those expressing the sentiment aren't genuinely pained by what's happened to our fellow human beings: I am horrified and moved too. But that's not quite the same as claiming to 'stand with' those who were directly or indirectly affected. It is in fact a denial of the reality of their suffering by inserting one's own distanced feelings into the situation by loudly and publicly associating oneself with an unjustifiable claim to be a participant. If I were a Parisian, or a loved one of the deceased, I'd be revolted by the armchair bravery of those claiming to be standing with me from behind their keyboard.

Yes I know this sounds harsh and unempathetic and dismissive of other peoples' feelings, but I do think that the facility by which these memes circulate promotes the sense that we've done something by expressing the shallowest sentiments. Life is hard and complicated and requires complicated responses, not emotional spasms.

Torybingogate

The 2014 Budget was predictable enough: savage attacks on environmentalism, treats for corporate Tory donors, pensioners abandoned to the mercies of the market, and bribes for core Tory voters: very much a standard election-year model.

What made it stand out was Tory chairman Grant Shapps' idea of appealing to the electorate in the form of this poster:

Presumably this was the work of some bright young thing in Tory HQ, but a number of senior people must have approved it for release. What's wrong with it? The use of 'they' distances the Conservatives and their government from 'hardworking people' which either seems arrogant or honest depending on whether you think our political leaders are hardworking or not. Then there's the assumption that the electorate are so simple as to be concerned only with 1p off beer tax and the implication that bingo is cheap.

It's almost as if the Conservative leadership still relates to the working classes like this:



So the tone's wrong, the positioning's wrong and on top of that, it's dishonest: the Bingo operators' association says that the tax break won't make a difference to their customers' charges at all. So it's just a gift to the gambling industry to encourage further Tory donations.

But there's another angle. We read all the time about parties' sophisticated electoral strategies, databanks, imported advisors etc. And yet it seems there's nobody with any understanding of the electorate and certainly nobody who has ever used the internet before. Could Grant Shapps – no stranger to online shenanigans – not foresee the mocking Twitterstorm that followed his encouragement to 'Please RT'. First came the horrified scorn. Then came the witty Tory Bingo calls with the hashtag #Torybingo, and finally along came Torybingo.com, which allows the likes of us to adapt the original template. Here are a couple of mine:

I assume that the Tories (and other parties) have heard of the phrase 'going viral' and want a chunk of it. What they haven't understood is that social media users have finely-attuned antennae for corporate propaganda, and a level playing field on which to fight it. This is, of course, why corporate interests are trying (and winning) the fight to turn the internet from an public square into a tightly-controlled pseudo-public space. Try as they might, institutions are too cumbersome and culturally-deaf to compete with the wit of some kid with Photoshop and no paymaster. Politicians and corporate executives get offended when we parody their products because they genuinely believe that the social hierarchies of meatspace are a) natural and b) should be reproduced online. Torybingo is just the latest in a pretty much infinite line of embarrassments.

The only down side is that while ridicule is a key weapon of postmodern resistance, it's not entirely clear whether it actually helps. For all this, the key Tory voter (rich white bitter older people) will vote in droves while the young and hip won't bother. Is this anything more than a passing amusement? I'm not sure.

How To Fail At Social Media The Tory Way

3 Easy Steps to mastery of social media.

1. Pick a hashtag. For example:

Just pluck it out of the air. Don't bother doing any preparation: conversations with people, that kind of thing. Once it's a #hashtag, it'll go viral of its own accord.

2. Watch the campaign take hold like wildfire:

Don't bother supporting it in any way, or engaging with other people on your social media network of choice. Just abandon it without making any effort.

3. Have a petition. Everybody loves petitions. Especially one that opposes 'cuts'.

This bit only works if you avoid mentioning that you're a government MP and minor functionary who voted for massive cuts to council funding. Genius: you impose cuts in Parliament where nobody can see you doing it, then oppose cuts in your constituency because the Council is run by a different party. Cue mucho coverage in your supportive local paper.

And the petition?

Wow! And who are these doughty campaigners for a larger state?

Gosh. So that's you, your 21-year old campaign manager who presumably did all this work, hopefully not this Aman Johal nor this Sam Paskin who tweets mostly about his collection of weaponry, and a local Tory student.

But don't worry if this campaign doesn't go viral. You can always have another poll demanding that local parking charges are reduced. That's a surefire winner:

38 Degrees, eat your heart out!

Keyboard warrior offers truce

It seems like every time I use this blog to think aloud, to consider the wider contexts of events in the news, or to discuss the highs and lows of my job, some weasel makes hostile hay with it, either about me, or about my job, colleagues and students. Which is a shame, because we need to be honest about these things. For instance, yesterday's lecture and seminar was really difficult because only a small number of students engaged with the material. The rest reminded me very much of this:



But going by recent experience, this will appear somewhere as either 'Students Are Morons Compared, Not Like In Our Day' or 'Subversive Lecturer Slags Off Students', whereas I'd like to exchange ideas with readers about why some classes work, and others don't, about what I might be doing wrongly and what I might do instead, about whether lectures still have a place, for instance. This rather saddens me. My experience of the internet is that despite the occasional troll, it's a place in which intelligent people can discuss ideas and situations in an informal but informed fashion. People comment on my pieces critically; they bring opposing or divergent views and I enjoy the debate. Very few people are simply abusive. This is great: I've learned from opponents and gained pleasure from the exchange of views even when I haven't been converted or converted them. It's the same on Twitter: I follow and am followed by people like @KateMaltby who describes herself as a 'Tory feminist' because she's interesting and thoughtful. I don't follow @ToryEducation (apparently run by Michael Gove's advisors) because it eschews discussion in favour of abuse.

It's just a shame that some in the media have failed to keep up with the times. The joy of new media is that we can all exchange ideas with a wider network than ever before. As you probably know, I'm a newspaper addict. I deliberately spend money on print media because they're essential to a functioning democracy, which is why David Cameron's threat to punish the Guardian is such a frightening thing. I get frustrated with my chosen papers (The Guardian, The Observer, Private Eye, the London Review of Books, New Statesman, The Sword, New Welsh Review, The Irish Times) at times, but no other organisations have the scope or the resources to conduct serious news gathering and commentary. The internet resembles Metro: cheap, simplistic, often 'human-interest' stories in bite-size chunks, derived from the wire services and PR releases. There are exceptions, of course, such as Politico (which has interestingly launched a print version) and Glenn Greenwald's new venture, but on the whole print media are still the go-to outlets for long-form investigative journalism and commentary. Andrew Rawnsley and Nick Cohen, for example, are the highlights of my week. They make me grind my teeth regularly, but their work reflects decades of expensive research, hard work and careful thought.

Yet where some outlets have failed is the reciprocal nature of new media. Rawnsley and Cohen are to varying extents responsible in the technical sense: they engage with their readers and see no contradiction between justified pride in their own expertise and the need to draw on the skills, knowledge and experience of their readers: we learn from each other. This is the utopian side of the social media revolution: billions of people in mutually enriching conversation. There are dissenters, of course. Plenty of old media figures jealously protect their occupation of the bully pulpit: like fundamentalist preachers, they see us as a barely-restrained mob of barbarians requiring their professional enlightenment and discipline, and they get very shirty when their work is critiqued or dissected in public. What could they possibly learn from us? Actually, quite a lot: while professional journalists have the funding, time and training for serious in-depth work (stop sniggering, it does happen), we keyboard warriors have the obsession to stick with particular stories, the weak social capital that comes with particular interest groups, and skills derived from our offline lives. As a trained literary critic/scholar, I bring wide reading, background knowledge, an eye for the wider context and significance of local or limited events, theoretical knowledge and critical skills to bear when I write about literature, politics, popular culture and whatever else catches my eye.

My audience is different too: a journalist has to write for a section of an idealised general public; I write for a group of people drawn to my blog voluntarily. The journalist has a captive audience of readers who may or may not care about that particular writer's views or interests (they may just want the racing tips); I have to compete with and connect to millions of other amateurs, but I don't depend on blogging to make a living. This means I'm free to some extent. I don't have to whip up outrage or air extremist views simply to sell copies (Stewart Lee describes Jeremy Clarkson as cynically 'having outrageous opinions for money'), or pretend that the world is simple and comprehensible. The worst that could happen to me is that my few readers dwindles to no readers – matching my peer-reviewed publications! I'll still have a job.

I couldn't write anything without the resources of the professional media to draw on: through them I learn new things, hear about new outrages or recent books to read: from people like me they occasionally pick up new stories and new ways of thinking outside the Westminster bubble. I think of us as complementary rather than oppositional.

In my own field, social media has widened my intellectual horizons. Before its advent, new developments in literary criticism depended on the slow process of journal and book publication, and the inherent costs thereof: some academic books now cost hundreds of pounds. There are queues to get published and impossible quantities of material to get through in the quest for useful work. Now, I can go to Academia.edu or Twitter and find an expert. And unlike the old days, I know that anyone I approach is happy to talk about their work: otherwise they wouldn't be on there. The same goes for authors, most of whom are really eager to talk rather than behave like gods passing down tablets of stone and not to be questioned: Iain Banks (as @amendlocke) was particularly enthusiastic. It's a democratic space: except for some mega-celebrities such as Fry or Gaga, you're only as good as your feed: any unknown Tweeter can be as witty or informed as a professional pundit or comic.

The professional boundaries are now porous in a good way: expertise is strengthened and disseminated more widely, at least amongst those privileged enough to have social media access. I publish work in peer-reviewed journals for one professionally-accredited audience and to further what might laughably call my career: I write Vole to air ideas I'm not ready to publish, and to apply things I've learned professionally to different contexts. I'm also on here to engage with people I wouldn't ever meet: fellow professionals in my field, but also anyone with an interest in the same sort of thing: I don't see the point of doing all that research and cogitation simply to talk to the three people who'll read my journal articles.

My attitude in lectures is that I'm no brighter than my students (sometimes much less bright) but that I've had a head start in years and resources on which I can draw to help them: it's a way of recognising and countering the inherent power imbalances encountered in education. My online existence is hopefully an extension of this – a way to engage and be engaged by the outside world, to demonstrate the relevance of my niche to the wider culture, to learn new stuff and to have some fun along the way. There's also a therapeutic aspect to it: I find academic writing difficult intellectually and psychologically, and thinking aloud in this way is helpful. I also passionately feel that academics, particularly in the humanities, get a raw deal in public discourse: there's always some blowhard politician or commentator slagging off medieval history or media studies, and the more of us who engage in public debate, the better. In fact, looking at Inger and Thomson's recent paper 'Why Do Academics Blog?', my motives are pretty much exactly those of my peers. Plus, it's a way to show off, not something I do 'IRL'.

Having been through the mill a bit recently, what with the Sun on Sunday trying to get me sacked, I'm conscious of having internalised a little of the hegemonic structures' disciplinary power. Should I talk about difficult teaching sessions? Am I allowed to have political opinions, or make tasteless jokes? How far off-piste can I go without my writing sounding like a drunk know-all with the in-depth knowledge of a pub-quiz champion? It's hard to honestly and openly discuss things - which for me is the essence of social media culture - if I'm aware that anything I say is likely to be used to attack me, my peers, my institution (which has been unfailingly kind to me) and my profession.

Answers in the comments box please!

Be my friend?

Got the new album by The National today. It's pleasant enough - doesn't distract me from the dreaded marking – but not a lot more than that. Are they the Indie U2 these days?

Anyway, having got all that about discourse, capitalism and education off my flabby chest yesterday, today's question is: social media and students – yes or no? One of the meetings I attended yesterday discussed the university's proposed guidelines on using social media and pedagogy. For the most part, the guidelines are fine and practical.

However, what wasn't addressed was the wider context. Should a university be herding students into the arms of distant corporations who will wring them dry for marketable data? Is it equitable to make elements of teaching depend on platforms some students don't want to use? Who owns this information, do colleagues and students understand the privacy settings well enough? What if they want out, and what if they say something they shouldn't?

One of my colleagues ran a module which required students to blog about various taboo subjects: one came back a few years later and claimed that he'd lost a potential job because they'd Googled him and found him confessing to a minor crime. We told them not to boast about their nefarious deeds, but everyone makes mistakes. Was it his fault? Or our responsibility to delete such things?

I sometimes use Twitter in class. If the group is shy and silent, I'll give them a hashtag (such as the module code) and ask them to send me questions like that, promising not to follow them or look at their other Tweets. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Although a lot of students aren't on Twitter and it could be seen as exclusive, I tend to feel that such a use is additional – anyone not using the platform can simply speak in the class. But I wouldn't want to make anything dependent on an external platform – I want editorial control and to be sure that privacy settings haven't sneakily changed, or that the organisation hasn't gone bust. These things are ephemeral: the university spent a lot of time and effort on establishing a Second Life campus. Second Life? Perhaps you're too young. It was literally all the rage on Friday December 3rd 2003. Or something. Now it's tumbleweed. Facebook use is already declining…

It's hard for institutions to a) keep up and b) not seem like the creepy old man in the playground. We can't tell which sites 'the kids' are going to be using tomorrow, and if we go all-in to get down with the youth, they might find that intrusive – people are researching concepts of virtual space, and whether individuals consider them 'private' or 'public'. Do you want your teachers or the institution Tweeting you, or 'liking' your pub photos? I know I wouldn't. On the other hand, many students see e-mail as hopelessly passé and appreciate a Tweet when a class is cancelled or an assignment's due.

The fuzzier element is the issue of social capital, weak or strong. Say you follow your lecturer, or your lecturer follows you. There's an element of control with Facebook (apparently: I'm not on it, and I've ensured that the various platforms I do use are furnished only with dummy names and email addresses) but slippage is easy. Either party might be horrified to realise they've just announced that they're not in today because they're hungover rather than 'unwell'. I already get emails at 3 a.m.: do I want queries by Twitter at any time of day and night? Are there professional boundaries that shouldn't be crossed? I asked this via Twitter yesterday and got an interesting range of responses. Some people saw no problem: social media isn't 'real' friendship and can be seen as a more relaxed space. Others run institutional accounts like Bath Spa's English account, which is chatty and relaxed without over-sharing (my department is thinking of starting one, though the boss is rightly keen to avoid it being vacuous and self-promoting). Gloucestershire University also runs a decent, modest English Department blog. Others said that Facebook friendship is reserved for ex-students instead of current ones. One respondent said that she would friend or follow people she's comfortable getting drunk with, which struck me as both funny and quite wise. You get drunk with people who get your sense of humour and make allowances for context, whereas student-teacher relationships automatically come replete with power imbalances. Another Twitter friend put it like this:

Twitter I only follow peeps I am a fan of. On fb I only friend those I can say Fuck in front of. Rules out a lot of lecturers.

Social media = socialising. Some I want to socialise with others I don't and viceversa. Its not the place for officialdom. 

Some more responses from academics (students and teachers), anonymised:

Too messy; tho I don’t use FB as a personal space—too many “work” folks on there— & I don’t twitter follow current UGs

 Our students and the SU really appreciate @EnglishBSU - it's been cited as an exemplar of its kind (ahem!).

wayyyy more helpful than waiting two days for a reply to an email. Definitely useful. 

No. Former students maybe, but not current crop. Alters dynamics of relationship. 

I'm not, for work/life balance reasons. I'm not with current colleagues either. 

I think this is something that develops when lecturing. You need clearer boundaries.

I'll add students post teaching&colleagues that add me. Use it as a work tool not personal. I live in with students so boundaries v important 

I wouldn't want to be, and as a student still don't 'friend' faculty members/academics unless they 'friend' me. 

I'm generally horribly relaxed. Probably far too open. 

Not so long as you have responsibility for marking their work and pastoral care you shouldn't. Once graduated is different. 

I have student Twitter followers; I don't follow them back 

Think there's something about public nature of Twitter that mitigates the social media fail often seen on Facebook. 

current students? Absolutely not. Past students? Maybe. 

Definitely not Facebook. A few follow me on twitter; I do not follow current students but a few former students. 

My supervisor & I bcame Facebook 'friends' after I finished though & I think that was right. 

There are limits, but imposing them requires too much guardedness. Best for me to just keep them separate! 

I’ve found both twitter and blogging to be both helpful and productive.

For me, it's about duty of care - if I have that, I have a responsibility to be professional. 

Being able to unwind and vent in a safe space for *us* matters. 

It's definitely useful, but only with staff who want to be out there. It certainly wouldn't work if it were forced. 

As I have added collegues, FB has become less personal for me. Thankfully I have other spaces. 

I would (and do) add colleagues that I have a friendship with - i.e. are not just colleagues. 

Good question... I think it depends whether they are compelled to have more contact than is purposeful. (Creepy treehouse.) 

(Further reading: http://www.dustyoldbooks.net/2013/05/on-influences-and-beginnings.html and the "Creepy Treehouse" article which I found very useful. But this is a fascinating spread of approaches. We've never had so many opportunities to communicate with/mock/spy on our students and for them to do the same with us. The boundaries are very fuzzy and we're just feeling our way towards a useful working practice.

What do I do? Well, a few students follow me and I follow them back, but the vast majority do so after graduation and I really value the network that's evolved from that. Most are fairly discreet and I never, ever reply to or reference anything I think they might blush at if they realised I'd read it. I also keep my real name off the account and don't use it for professional work: better for me, better for the university. Nor do I share personal information about me, though I do quote terrible essays sometimes, which I'm beginning to feel bad about. Certainly my instincts are changing all the time.

I'd really like your comments on this.

Grt. Anthr bldy txt.

So, happy birthday to the mobile telephone text message: first sent on December 3rd 1992 by Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, and it read 'Merry Christmas'. Not the most auspicious start ('It was a dark and stormy night'? 'It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen'?) but an important one. Vodafone, Papworth's employee, thought that text messaging would be a useful diagnostic tool for its engineers, not a consumer tool at all.

I read yesterday that the 3.8m inhabitants of Ireland sent 8 billion text messages in the January-March period this year. I'm stunned they haven't all lost their fingers.

Why is the text message so popular? Why not just make a phone call? I think it's a control issue. If you phone somebody, you cede control. They might not stick to the point. They might talk over you. They might disagree with you. They might object to the purpose of your call. A text is a short monologue. You can't be interrupted or contradicted. You'll be late and there's nothing the recipient can do about it. You can receive a text and ignore it for a while. You have the power.

And yet the humble text message is a marker of our existential and logocentric dread. We were talking about this in my lecture on mobile and social media yesterday. We send texts as part of our attempts to organise the world around us: yet the non-reception of texts is – in Kevin Barry's words – a little ego-death, inflicted several times a day. You have no (0) messages. Nobody acknowledges your existence. You are functionally dead. The logocentrism bit relates to the way we add all these little symbols. :), :3 or whatever betray a fundamental awareness that language is always escaping from us. Our typed words can't convey what we want them to bear, and can convey things we don't want them to carry - meanings are outside our control, fought over by us, by the words that pre-exist us, and by the reader. Context and tone are difficult to communicate, so we add emoticons, or lots of !!! or 'ha ha' and any other devices designed to restrict meaning by closing down the recipient's interpretive range. It's a struggle for power.

Power's at the heart of mobile communication generally. I had a little rant about this to the students yesterday. The infiltration of mobile phones and Walkmen, iPods and the like into shared space has led to the privatisation of public space. On the train, we used to talk to each other, or read, or look out of the window. There was a sense that we were fellow passengers with a responsibility to each other to make the journey as pleasant as possible. It was public space. With the rise of personal communication and entertainment devices, we've carved up this shared space into overlapping private spaces. I can block you out with my headphones. But my headphones leak into the space. I've appropriated the public space by treating it as my own. So has everyone else. I've chosen a private virtual space in which I commune with my chosen social network rather than make any kind of connection with the unchosen social network of people sharing physical space. No doubt my fellow passengers are psychopaths anyway, hence my retreat into my own head. By doing so, I demonstrate my superior willpower: I choose not to regard my surrounding and the people in it as being of any consequence.

That's not the only way in which power is manifested in mobile technology. Take this ad for the Palm Pre, an early smartphone:



Isn't technology great? You're free to be out in the lovely countryside without every being out of touch. But look more closely. What's she doing? Working: work is no longer somewhere you go and something you do for a set period. Instead, 'life' flows together – you're meant to be 'at work' wherever and whenever you are. Emails appear at midnight: deal with it. Meeting are scheduled at the last moment – tough. Family and friends and work are all categories to be mashed together and then 'organised': you're working hard. But the payoff is visually obvious here: the young lady is at the centre of the world, distinguished from the others by her (fraudulent) autonomy and different clothing. The world, quite literally, revolves around her: friends, family and even work: they don't have autonomy or freedom. You're being sold freedom when the actual product is… you: available 24 hours a day.

DON'T say 'cheese'

Looks like the Olympics - at which I'll be working - is going to be a barrel of corporate laughs. Apart from the cynicism of the main sponsors being McDonalds and various other corporate vampire squid, the restrictions on spectators, athletes and volunteers look utterly draconian.

This is on my tickets:

“Images, video and sound recordings of the Games taken by a Ticket Holder cannot be used for any purpose other than for private and domestic purposes and a Ticket Holder may not license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet more generally.”

So if the BBC says 'send in your favourite picture' - banned. I can't film a segment of the event I'm attending and stick it here on Vole TV. Nor can I post pictures - I'm only allowed to view them in the privacy of my own home.

Obviously I intend to ignore these rules, and I assume everybody else will too. And there's nothing they can do about it, unless they want to be in the papers every day for suing ordinary citizens. I can understand the rules about not selling images: there are plenty of professional photographers there who've paid a lot of money for access (though I don't agree with this system), but for us amateurs, it's insane.

The other rules are for Olympic staff. According to the Press Gazette:

Athletes and other ‘accredited persons’ are banned from uploading images to social media platforms. They can’t even tweet! And if they want to post a photo or image taken in the Olympic village, they must get consent from anyone appearing in it.

Again - no chance. I have no intention of taking anything embarrassing to the athletes, of advantage to rivals or anything like that. I'll be too busy to do much anyway - but forbidding me from tweeting my usual mundanity or posting a photo of a happy medal winner is bonkers. Thankfully, our sport's boss is much more sensible. She's told the volunteers to respect the athletes' privacy, focus and need for personal space at the highlight of their careers, by not requesting photos or getting in people's faces. Perfectly reasonable.

Be sure you'll be hearing from me on the other side of the barbed wire! Oh, and if you're thinking of running a Quadrennial Sports Event Themed promotion - like everybody else - make sure you don't use 'Olympics' or '2012', because they'll sue you. However, you can use 'Olympian' as much as you like - the Wenlock Olympian Games, at which I've won several cups - carries on gloriously unsued.

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). 

People who just don't get it, part 94

This is Chris Dodd, the former Senator and now head of Hollywood lobbyists the Motion Picture Association of America (see how corruption works?)

"You've got an opponent who has the capacity to reach millions of people with a click of a mouse and there's no fact-checker."

There's a man who really doesn't get it. Yes, there are some loudmouths doing slapdash things on the internet. I can see one reflected in the shiny screen of my MacBook Pro right now. But the strength of web culture is that there are millions of fact-checkers - and the vast majority of them aren't being paid to be the mouthpiece of philistine billionaire self-interested corporations (who have the resources, I would think, to do their own fact-checking. I write this stuff for free. Not only because nobody wants to pay me, but because free relates to my opinions too.

Here's my Guide to Social Media for Chris Dodds:

Lobbyists and PR: taking money to unreflectively have somebody else's opinions.
Gits with blogs: not taking money, propagating their own opinions.

That is all.

Gagged!

Hello all. Hope you haven't missed me (you'd be deeply sad if you did). I've been taking a refreshing break. I'm rested, but I'm certainly not a better or reformed person for it, so don't worry: 2011's diet of misanthropy and bitterness will carry over for the foreseeable future.

First up is this rather Orwellian report from Gizmodo, which discusses the Olympic Games organisers' plans to muzzle its volunteers:

workers are to:

• not to disclose their location

• not to post a picture or video of Locog backstage areas closed to the public

• not to disclose breaking news about an athlete

• not to tell their social network about a visiting VIP, eg an athlete, celebrity or dignitary

• not to get involved in detailed discussion about the Games online

I should say that due to LOCOG's tortoise-like efficiency, I haven't had this briefing yet, though no doubt they'll be applying the rubber truncheons and nipple clamps to your own dear Vole sometime in the spring.

Some of this is common sense: letting the world know that an athlete has an injury might affect another team's planning and give an unfair advantage. There are also some proper security concerns, but the rest is nonsense which I fully intend to ignore (I'll be less Vole, more Mole). For instance: I'm part of the fencing organisation. 2 seconds on the interweb reveals that Fencing will be at the ExCel centre. If that was a secret, there wouldn't be any spectators! That's just silly.

It's the last bit that bothers me. I won't suffer from being banned from tweeting that Richard Kruse brushed past me in a corridor. Nor will you. But 'detailed discussion about the Games' (and some pictures) were going to be this blog's daily diet for August. What is 'detailed'? Why shouldn't I offer a volunteer's perspective on the Games? I'm already pretty conflicted about working on this corporate festival (McDonald's!) - I'm not signing away my right to freedom of speech as well, nor am I going to become a PR mouthpiece, as they envisage:

volunteers will be allowed to retweet “official London 2012 postings” as much as they like

This is standard fare for major events and organisations: both in their inability to understand that they cannot, silence everybody, and in their belief that the event requires an army of tweetbots automatically broadcasting bland, monotonal boostery.* In the new world, the hubbub of individual commentary will provide the first draft of history. Some of us will be enthusiastic, others snark, others factual, others critical, some reasonable, some unreasonable. That's what helps makes the Games a real event, rather than a Baudrillardian or Ballardian simulation of one.

*I'm avoiding the obvious Canute/Knut reference because a) the legend claims he was trying to demonstrate to his courtiers the limits of regal authority and b) the story turns up 200 years after he died, and none of the medieval histories are reliable. It was probably made up.

Argument settled

My previous post discussed the role of social media in political uprisings. Thanks for your comments, by the way.

This photograph of Tunisians protesting outside the USA Saudi Arabian embassy very neatly highlights the positive role of new media, specifically Facebook - clearly Tunisians have been using the service to pass around information: probably the Wikileaks cables in which American diplomats assessed the scale of President Ben Ali's corruption. The demonstrators clearly think that all the other local dictators are vulnerable to the free flow of information.

Ironically, of course, Saudi Arabia is one of the worst human rights-abusing dictatorships in the world -- but it does control a lot of oil and buys a lot of American and British weaponry, so let's not dwell on it.

Unless this is a Facebook marketing stunt, of course.

Other states are looking foolish too. I particularly enjoyed this Wikileaks spat, on the illegal kidnapping of terror suspects for torture:

Turkey: 

"The Turkish government and state never played a part [in the secret transfers] ... and never will."

Leaked American document:

"The Turkish military had allowed us to use Incirlik as a refuelling stop for Operation Fundamental Justice detainee movement operations since 2002, but revoked this permission in February of this year. We understand OSD [office of the secretary of defence] and JCS [joint chiefs of staff] have been discussing whether to approach Turkey to seek to reverse this decision"

"Aging, scared newspapermen throw themselves at the latest mobile technology trend in a humiliatingly futile attempt to remain relevant."

I think The Onion's writers are getting bored by the tedious BS generated by anyone with a social network to hype:

While millions of young, tech-savvy professionals already use services like Facebook and Twitter to keep in constant touch with friends, a new social networking platform called Foursquare has recently taken the oh, fucking hell, can't some other desperate news outlet cover this crap instead?

"Foursquare is a little bit of everything—a friend-finder, a local city guide, an interactive mobile game," said company cofounder Dennis Crowley, as if reading from the same tired script used by every one of these Web 2.0 or whatever-the-fuck-they're-called startups. "But more than that, Foursquare is an [endless string of meaningless buzzwords we just couldn't bring ourselves to transcribe]." 

And on it goes, gloriously world-weary.

Update: it turns out that Foursquare is real and that some Dutch people used it to set up a site called PleaseRobMe ('showing you a list of all those empty homes out there', based on the idea that social media sites are full of people announcing their whereabouts!

Why I resist Facebook

I know, I'm a hypocrite: my personal details can be gleaned through a careful read of my blog and other social networking sites, like Librarything.

And yet: I still feel like I'm using those sites. No ads, for a start, and I pay for Librarything. Facebook, on the other hand, is a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up your personal details for sale to some very bad corporations, overseen by some extremely dubious individuals. And yes, I know it's useful. That's how it's successful. But it's more useful to them than it is to you.

Don't believe me? Then read this. PayPal's a sordid libertarian right plot too.

This bit of the Facebook terms and conditions is particularly Orwellian:

"Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg, photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience."

I wouldn't buy anything made in North Korea and I won't participate in this enterprise either.

Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web.

"TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". 

Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

Thiel's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. 

 I think it's fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax. He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it makes the banking overlords hard to attack: "You can't have a workers' revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu," 

Sign up to Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships.

The last word on social media

Thanks to Dan, who spotted these miserable bastards and thought I'd have something in common with them. They do, however, understand new media perfectly:

Twitter this, you hairstyled chancers

Rather than mark essays, I spent the last hour at Alchemy (a pleasant café which turns into something less salubrious at night), attending a 'Black Country Social Media Café'. It was as revoltingly smug, self-congratulatory and self-regarding as it sounds. Lots of businessmen on the make and people with 'directional' haircuts preening themselves for having heard of various items of software. A local 'journalist' (' ' because she works for the Express and Swastika) was present, as was a gimp with a camera. Needless to say, I hovered around the edges, repressing rage.

I'm offering a remedial style consultation today. I would like to stress that a custom-made t-shirt bearing your Twitter address is NEVER, EVER ACCEPTABLE. You arrogant, narcissistic idiots.