Scissors Paper Stone 3

Discussing #Murdoch, @paulmasonnews argues that the network defeats the hierarchy. Mason tries to argue that the fall of News International represents a triumph for "the network", with particular reference to Facebook and Twitter. He references a book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988) (link), and also name-drops Slavoj Žižek.

But of course that's only one possible interpretation of recent events, and only one meaning of the word "network". Reading Adam Curtis's piece from a few months ago, ironically entitled Rupert Murdoch - A Portrait of Satan, we might instead get a picture of News International as (at least until recently) a supremely powerful network, which has now been (perhaps temporally) outmanoeuvred by the establishment hierarchy it for so long tried to subvert.

The establishment probably cares as little about poor Millie Dowler as it does about any foolish and over-sexed footballer. But when her mobile phone turns out to have been hacked, it gives everyone the perfect pretext to express indignation about the scurrilous tactics of a newspaper that has for decades been entertaining the working classes with the foibles of the rich and famous, as well as detailed accounts of crime. (Just read George Orwell on the Decline of the English Murder.)

While we may all deplore the tactics of the News of the World, investigative journalism is one of those activities we all benefit from while turning a blind eye to exactly how it is done. And how are we to hold the establishment to account, if the establishment sets up the rules of the game to make real investigative journalism as difficult and unprofitable as possible? Some moral as well as political dilemmas here.

You're So Pretty

@the_beheld via @marginalutility asks Should We Praise Little Girls For Being Pretty? @nourishthesoul replies "It's wonderful to remind each other that we are all beautiful, but maybe we have it wrong?" Why I get tired of “You are beautiful!”

What's the purpose of commenting on a person's looks? There are three possible positive motivations - to make the person feel good, to make oneself feel good, or as an attempted building block in a relationship with the person (or her parents). There are also three possible negative motivations - to trivialize or attack the person, to put oneself down in comparison, or to trivialize or block an attempted relationship.

If you want a little girl to feel proud and important, then there are probably better ways of doing it than commenting on her looks. As the_beheld comments, "being praised for something you can’t help can feel hollow or even confusing". (The same applies to telling people how clever they are.)

Telling grown women that they are pretty, or that their daughters are pretty, may be an effective chat-up line on some occasions, but the line often carries a slightly bitter aftertaste, as if there is some buried hostility towards self or other. Some women and girls may become accustomed to hearing how pretty they are, possibly starting with their fathers, but that doesn't necessarily mean they believe it.

Perhaps the Sex Pistols had the right idea when their lyrics progressed from "pretty" to "pretty vacant".