Culture as a Lens on the Future

In my piece on the New Economics of Manufacturing (November 2015), I mentioned Jacques Attali's idea that culture can provide clues about the future.

For Attali, music is not simply a reflection of culture, but a harbinger of change, an anticipatory abstraction of the shape of things to come. from a review of Attali's 1985 book Noise

I have now been reading about a research project in Germany, which used literature, not to predict the future exactly, but to identify potential trouble-spots. The project was led by Jürgen Wertheimer, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Tübingen, and part-funded by the German Ministry of Defence.

The project was able to detect weak signals of sociopolitical and ethnic conflict, not only from contemporary novels but also from the cultural response they generated. For example, by analysing relevant fictional material, they were able to demonstrate worsening sentiment between the Albanian and Serbian communities more than ten years before the Kosovo crisis of 1998. Applying the same technique to Algeria, they picked up weak signals of impending crisis two years before the events of February 2019. They also provided advance warning of conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.

If verbal conflict provides advance warning of real conflict, can literary action also be used to defuse conflict? Governments clearly think so, intervening with positive propaganda to promote the desired messages, as well as censorship, exile or worse for writers who touch a sensitive nerve. But not only is this intervention often counter-productive, it also helps amplify the warning signals for those such as Professor Wertheimer who are looking out for them.

There is a simplistic view that media and culture can cause social and political events - this is known as the media effects narrative. For this reason, political actors often wish to control media and culture, as a way of managing social and political change. Does the control then become the message?

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Philipp Oltermann, ‘At first I thought, this is crazy’: the real-life plan to use novels to predict the next war (The Guardian, 26 June 2021)

Studienprojekt Cassandra - not to be confused with the US Project Cassandra (Wikipedia)

Invisible Contract

Something that Prince Harry said in his interview with Oprah Winfrey (aired in the US on March 7th and in the UK on March 8th). 

During their interview with Oprah Winfrey on Sunday, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex cast that invisible contract as close to a Faustian bargain, which royals accept for fear of tabloids turning on them. Barker

It is not that the royals enjoy their media duties, or view them as a responsibility, but that the only way to survive the press is to strike a deal with it. Bland

Alex Barker quotes David Yelland, former editor of the Sun.

There is no conspiracy. Both sides have complete contempt for each other. ... But the press and the royals need each other.

An unnamed royal expert told Archie Bland that politicians had similar arrangements.

“This is the same battle every prime minister has. There is a quid pro quo relationship – there’s a reason senior officials try to build relationships with editors. It’s about negotiating for favourable coverage.”

In his submission to the Leveson Inquiry (2012), Lord Mandelson denied the existence of an explicit Faustian pact between the Labour Government and the Murdoch organization involving commercial concessions. Quite a narrowly scoped denial, one might think. Particularly as Mandelson himself was sometimes cast as Mephistopheles by his political opponents.

In an earlier article (1999), Rachel Sylvester offered a more nuanced view of this relationship

The love affair between Blair and Murdoch has become an obsession for the left. ... But, in fact, the honeymoon between Blair and Murdoch did not last long after the general election. ... This is not a love affair, it is a marriage of convenience in which both parties will use the other to their own advantage when they can and then dump them when they cannot.

 

Clancy argues that

Media representations of the royal family are a prism; a central affective and ideological project to distance the monarchy from capitalist vulgarity and aristocratic debauchery, and reproduce monarchical power by producing consent.

 (The idea of the production of consent comes from Gramsci via Stuart Hall.)

 

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Alex Barker, The 'invisible' pact binding the UK royals and their tabloid tormentors (FT, 10 March 2021) (paywall)

Daniel Bentley and Lauren Turner, Leveson Inquiry: Lord Mandelson denies deal with Rupert Murdoch (Independent, 21 May 2012)

Archie Bland, How Meghan disrupted invisible contract between royals and press (The Guardian, 13 March 2021) 

Laura Clancy, The Corporate Power of the British Monarchy: Capital(ism), Wealth and Power in
Contemporary Britain (Sociological Review 69/2, March 2021) p. 330-347

Laura Clancy and Hannah Yelin, Monarchy is a feminist issue: Andrew, Meghan and #MeToo era monarchy (Women's Studies International Forum Volume 84, January–February 2021)

Rachel Sylvester, FOCUS: See you in Europe, Tony (Independent, 10 April 1999)

Alex Taylor, Harry and Meghan: What's the media's invisible contract with British royalty? (BBC News)

Vanessa Thorpe. Major's banned Faust ad revealed (24 October 1999)

Kevin D Williamson, The Infernal Art of the Deal (National Review, 6 August 2019)

The Exception Proves The Rule - Media Power

I have recently heard the argument that the successful campaign in the UK to promote the Rage Against The Machine single over the one promoted by the British TV programme X Factor demonstrates the possibility of consumer power on the Internet.

Well.

One retailer at the time described this event as a truly remarkable outcome - possibly the greatest chart upset ever. 

Sarah Phillips and Steve Thomson describe another example, in which a musician uses social media to mount a complaint against United Airlines. And Curran, Fenton and Freedman quote a campaign against Nike in the 1990s, drawing on a paper by Lance Bennett.

While the phrase exception proving the rule is widely misused, the correct use of the phrase expresses the idea that a rare and remarkable event draws our attention to the underlying rule that governs most of the time.

In other words, if these examples are supposed to show us what real consumer power looks like, then this power only seems possible in very exceptional circumstances. So what is this really telling us about consumer power on the internet?

Before the Rage Against the Machine campaign, X Factor had taken the Christmas #1 slot for the previous four years running, and X Factor continued to do extremely well in the charts.

Mariann Hardey also notes that Simon Cowell, the impressario behind X Factor, also had a commercial stake in the Rage Against The Machine. Dr Hardey interprets this as proof (in case we needed it) that advertising works ... this is a far cry from consumer power in action.

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BBC News, Rage Against the Machine beat X Factor winner in charts (20 December 2009)

Lance Bennett, Communicating Global Activism (Information, Communication and Society, 2003)

James Curran, Natalie Fenton and Des Freedman, Misunderstanding the Internet (2nd edition, Routledge 2016) 

Mariann Hardey, The Power of social media to kill in the name of ... (22 December 2009)

Sarah Phillips, United breaks guitars - The Rise of the Prosumer (Ipsos Health, July 2010)

Steve Thomson and Sarah Phillips, United breaks guitars (EphMRA Conference, June 2010)

Wikipedia: Exception that proves the rule, United Breaks Guitars

Bias or Balance?

@_KarenHao has written a detailed exposé of Facebook's approach to ethics. In addition to some useful material about political polarization, which I have discussed in previous posts, the article contains some insight into the notion of bias preferred by Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan (VP Global Public Policy). 

The article describes the work of several ethics teams within Facebook, including SAIL (Society and AI Lab) and Responsible AI. There were various challenges that these teams identified as important, including polarization and misinformation. However, because of Kaplan’s and Zuckerberg’s worries about alienating conservatives, they were directed to focus on algorithmic bias.

Narrowing SAIL’s focus to algorithmic fairness would sideline all Facebook’s other long-standing algorithmic problems. Its content-recommendation models would continue pushing posts, news, and groups to users in an effort to maximize engagement, rewarding extremist content and contributing to increasingly fractured political discourse.

The Responsible AI team produced a tool called Fairness Flow, intended to measure the accuracy of machine-learning models for different user groups. The research team took the view that

when deciding whether a misinformation model is fair with respect to political ideology, ... fairness does not mean the model should affect conservative and liberal users equally. If conservatives are posting a greater fraction of misinformation, as judged by public consensus, then the model should flag a greater fraction of conservative content. If liberals are posting more misinformation, it should flag their content more often too.

But according to Hao, Kaplan's team took the opposite view:

they took fairness to mean that these models should not affect conservatives more than liberals. When a model did so, they would stop its deployment and demand a change. Once, they blocked a medical-misinformation detector that had noticeably reduced the reach of anti-vaccine campaigns, the former researcher told me. They told the researchers that the model could not be deployed until the team fixed this discrepancy. But that effectively made the model meaningless.

On this evidence, Facebook seems to be following pretty much the same narrow approach to balance and impartiality that responsible news organizations claim now to be trying to move away from. Perhaps the most egregious example of this approach in recent times was the coverage of climate change. For many years, the BBC felt it necessary to invite a climate change denier to debate any discussion of climate change. In 2018, they acknowledged that this was a mistake.

Politicians often complain to news organizations that their party is being treated unfairly. The traditional belief is that if you are getting similar numbers of complaints from both sides, you are probably getting things about right. However, this assumes that politics is symmetrical, with exactly two sides to any given argument. Professor Angela Phillips, one of the founders of the Media Reform Coalition, quotes research from Loughborough University showing that the BBC’s obsession with balance took Labour off air ahead of Brexit, because of the belief that a fair balance between Remain and Leave could be largely achieved by close coverage of the conflicts within the Conservative party.

One politician who has regularly complained about a lack of coverage on the BBC is Nigel Farage. Writing from a Scottish Nationalist perspective, the Jouker argues that the BBC responds to such complaints by giving him the oxygen of publicity he craves, while denying equivalent or fair coverage to the SNP. And as Simon Read notes,

It was the mainstream media that gave Mr Farage all the publicity he has wanted over the past couple of decades, including a record number of appearances on the BBC’s Question Time and his own show on radio station LBC. ... Without a doubt, he is the establishment – apart from his failure to become an MP despite 25 years of trying – and to paint himself as otherwise is rather disingenuous.

Stuart Cosgrove argues:

Due impartiality is one of the load-bearing props of the BBC’s producer guidelines. Not only is it a concept that is easily unpicked, I would argue that it has run its course as a guiding principle and is now singularly unsuited to a society where the media is fragmented, where views do not sit comfortably on the see-saw of balance and when the digital world has disrupted television’s authority.

Quite so.

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Damian Carrington, BBC admits we get climate change coverage wrong too often (The Guardian, 7 September 2018)

Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, Media Coverage of the EU Referendum 5 (Loughborough University, 27 June 2016)

Stuart Cosgrove, Emily Maitlis row exposes BBC's outdated obsession with due impartiality (The National, 31 May 2020)

Karen Hao, How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation (MIT Technology Review, 11 March 2021)

Angela Phillips, How the BBC’s obsession with balance took Labour off air ahead of Brexit (The Conversation, 14 July 2016)

Simon Read, Beware Farage's advice (FT Advisor, 21 October 2020)

The Jouker, BBC has explaining to do over record Farage Question Time appearance (The National, 10 May 2019)

See also tweet by @leobarasi via @tonyjoyce

Related posts: Polarization (November 2018), Polarizing Filters (March 2021), Algorithmic Bias (March 2021)

 

Optimizing for Outrage

In today's news, Piers Morgan's outrage about the previous night's television boiled over. Mr Morgan was a regular and highly opinionated presenter on ITV's breakfast show Good Morning Britain. On this occasion, the controversy led to his departure from the show.

As it happens, just last week I was listening to a BBC Media Show podcast, recorded late last year, in which he was discussing the phenomenon of outrage with Amol Rajan and Helen Lewis.

Jasper Jackson has observed the commercial purpose of outrage.

As digital publishers have learned, the best way to get the shares, clicks and page views that make them money is to provoke an emotional response. And there are few things as good at provoking an emotional response as extreme and outrageous political views.

Writing about a woman who has sometimes been described as a professional troll, Jackson notes how she benefited from broadcasters' attempts to create an illusion of impartiality.

It is ironic that Hopkins’s career was initially helped by TV’s attempts to provide balance. Producers could rely on her to provide a counterweight to even the most committed and rational bleeding-heart liberal.

Politicians can use outrage as a way of gaining media coverage, and some of them get elected as a consequence. (I'm sure I don't need to name any examples here.)

Besides outrageous statements and performances by media stars, politicians and general rabble-rousers, there is also a tendency to publicize outrageous comments from unknown or even anonymous sources. If hundreds of people respond on social media to some event, and one of them says something completely idiotic, there is a strong possibility that this is the one that will be selected by journalists keen to make the story more interesting. In her conversation on the Media Show, Helen Lewis referred to this as nutpicking, using a term coined by Kevin Drum in 2006.

This blog is named POSIWID, which stands for Stafford Beer's maxim: The Purpose of a System Is What It Does. While we don't regard this as a universal truth, it can often be a useful heuristic. President Obaba's digital chief Michael Slaby has just published a book on the relationship between the tech giants and the public sphere, in which he argues that the outrage is deliberate.

The systems are not broken, he tells the Guardian. They are working exactly as they were designed for the benefit of their designers.

I have ordered a copy of Slaby's book, and I may have more to say when I've had a chance to read it.

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Kevin Drum, Nutpicking (Washington Monthly, 11 August 2006)

Jasper Jackson, The Economics of Outrage: Why you haven't heard the last of Katie Hopkins (New Statesman, 26 May 2017)

Amol Rajan, Why Piers Morgan Left Good Morning Britain (BBC News, 9 March 2021)

Amol Rajan, Helen Lewis and Piers Morgan, The Economics of Outrage (BBC Media Show, 14 October 2020)

David Smith, Optimising for outrage: ex-Obama digital chief urges curbs on big tech (The Guardian, 1 March 2021)

Michael Slaby, For All the People: Redeeming the Broken Promises of Modern Media and Reclaiming Our Civic Life (New York: Disruption Books, 2021)

Wikipedia: Nutpicking

Related post: Trolls are like ghosts (December 2020)

Polarizing Filters

In photography, a polarizing filter can manage your reflections and darken your skies: this may be a good metaphor for what happens in media and communications. While filtering and polarization were (and remain) well-known phenomena within traditional media, there are enhanced mechanisms on the Internet, whose effects are still not fully understood.

The term filter bubble was introduced by Eli Pariser around 2010, drawing on earlier work by Nicholas Negroponte and Cass Sunstein, to refer to a phenomenon previously known as echo chamber or information cocoon. If you get all your news from a single partisan source - for example, a single newspaper or TV channel - you could easily get a one-sided view of what is going on in the world. In the USA, the CNN audience doesn't overlap very much with the Fox News audience. Barack Obama is one of many who have expressed concerns about the consequences of this for American democracy.

The concept is easy enough to challenge if you take it too literally.

The images of chambers and bubbles conjures up hermetically sealed spaces where only politically like-minded participants connect and only ideologically orthodox information circulates, but this seems highly improbable. ... We cluster but we do not segregate. Bruns pp 95-96

Or if you imagine that filter bubbles are a technologically determined problem associated exclusively with the Internet. As Ignas Kalpokas notes in his review of Bruns, 

It is easy to slide into a form of fundamentalism, particularly when researching something as pervasive as social media, by simply assuming that the architecture and policies of the dominant platforms determine everything. ... Once we attribute causation to technology, we can comfortably and conveniently avoid responsibility for any societal ills and the ensuing necessity to put some effort towards ameliorating them. Kalpokas

However, the problem identified by Sunstein twenty years ago was not just about filters and fragmentation, but also about group polarization - the fact that there are internal and external forces that push individuals and groups to adopt ever more extreme positions. This is akin to Bateson's notion of schismogenesis. Axel Bruns stresses the importance of this.

The problem, in short, is polarisation, not fragmentation, and such polarisation is not the result of our use of online and social media platforms. Bruns p 105

I agree with his first point, but I want to qualify his second point. While the internet is certainly not the only cause of political polarization, its influence cannot be completely discounted. The techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has identified a specific mechanism on the Internet that appears to have a polarizing effect similar to that predicted by Sunstein - the recommendation algorithms on social media designed to keep users engaged for as long as possible, showing them progressively more outrageous and extreme content if that's what it takes. She argues that this is built into the business model of the tech giants. 

This is consistent with something Des Freedman noted in 2012,

The digital sphere is not a parallel economy but one that accentuates the tensions between the creativity and collaboration of a generative system and the hierarchies and polarisation prioritised by a system that rests, above all else, on the pursuit of profit. Curran Fenton Freedman p 92 my emphasis

In the same volume, Natalie Fenton noted Sunstein's argument that group polarisation is likely to become more extreme with time (p 168).

Many of the comments under Dr Tufekci's CBC interview are from what one might call nudge denialists - people who point out how easy it is to switch off the auto-play function on YouTube, and who claim never to be influenced by recommendations from the tech giants. Yeah, right. But that's not the point. Nobody said you can nudge all of the people all of the time. But the tech giants are certainly capable of nudging some of the people some of the time, at massive scale.

As a former computer programmer herself, Tufekci is able to explain the extraordinary power of the recommendation algorithms deployed by the tech giants. The tech giants choose to develop and use these algorithms in the pursuit of profit; and legislators and regulators around the world may or may not choose to permit or control this. So this deployment is not a matter of technological determinism but is subject to social and political choice. I wonder who is best placed to nudge governments to do the right thing?

 

Update

A few days after I posted the above, further details emerged about Facebook's approach to polarization, including a detailed exposé by @KarenHao (click on her name for Twitter discussion), which in turn appears to have prompted an internal Facebook meeting on Polarization and our Products reported by Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman.

Another Update

John Naughton's latest article has alerted me to a quantitative study of internet usage and polarization, published in 2017, which appears to show that the effects of political polarization are most marked in those demographic groups with comparatively less internet use.

While this evidence provides a warning not to overstate the Internet Causes Polarization thesis, it doesn't fully refute it either. A plausible explanation of these findings is that those who are less familiar with the workings of the Internet may be more vulnerable to its effects. I look forward to seeing further empirical studies.

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Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups (PNAS, 114/40, 3 October 2017) HT John Naughton, Is online advertising about to crash, just like the property market did in 2008? (The Guardian, 27 March 2021)

Axel Bruns, Are Filter Bubbles Real? (Polity Press, 2019)

James Curran, Natalie Fenton and Des Freedman, Misunderstanding the Internet (1st edition, Routledge 2012). Note that some of this material didn't make it into the 2016 second edition.

Karen Hao, How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation (MIT Technology Review, 11 March 2021)

Ignas Kalpokas, Book Review: Are Filter Bubbles Real? by Axel Bruns (LSE Blogs, 17 January 2020)

Ryan Mac, Facebook: Polarization and Our Products (Twitter, 11 March 2021)

Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman, Facebook is good for America actually, says Facebook executive (Buzzfeed News, 12 March 2021)

Thomas Nagel, Information Cocoons (London Review of Books, 5 July 2001)

Eli Pariser, Did Facebook's big new study kill my filter bubble thesis? (Medium/Backchannel, 7 May 2015)

Cass Sunstein, The Law of Group Polarization (John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics Working Paper No. 91, 1999)

Zeynep Tufekci, YouTube, the Great Radicalizer (New York Times, 10 March 2018). Is YouTube Radicalizing You? (CBC via YouTube, 22 April 2018)

 

Wikipedia: Echo Chamber (Media), Filter Bubble, Schismogenesis,

Related posts: Social Networks and Received Opinion (July 2010), The Pursuit of Truth (December 2016), Polarization (November 2018), Technological Determinism (December 2020), Optimizing for Outrage (March 2021), Bias or Balance (March 2021)

Polarization

Some of my posts recently have mentioned the work of @zeynep and others on the polarizing effects of social media platforms, especially YouTube.

But this phenomenon is not restricted to the Internet: traditional mass media is subject to similar effects. Following an extraordinary confrontation between CNN and the White House, Michael Massing reviews CNN's political coverage and finds it to be extremely one-sided. It appears that Trump and CNN each benefits from constantly attacking the other. Massing calls this codependency, but I believe a more accurate term would be symmetrical schismogenesis. This concept, originally developed by Bateson and elaborated by some of his followers including Jackson and Watzlawick, refers to the situation where two parties mirror each other, the behaviour of each serving to reinforce the behaviour of the other.

Who benefits from this polarization? The media platforms (YouTube, CNN) are essentially selling eyeballs to companies that want to advertise stuff. This is not just about the number of eyeballs but the number of eyeballs in relevant demographic categories. Thus for example gender or socioeconomic polarization may be helpful to this mission if it helps produce an audience that is particularly receptive to whatever is being advertised. However, polarization can also produce effects that are unwelcome to risk-averse advertisers - for example, associating their brands with controversial content, or even exposing them to the risk of consumer boycotts.

Writing in 2013, Markus Prior notes the correlation between cable news consumption and political polarization, but also notes the way that increasing choice on cable networks allows non-partisan viewers to avoid watching cable news altogether. Thus the apparent polarization would appear to be a consequence of a self-selecting audience.

Massing regards CNN's coverage of Trump as "seeming uninformative, repetitive, and nakedly partisan". This echoes a more widespread complaint about 24 hour rolling news: that it fills the airwaves with endless chatter (which Heidegger called Gerede and the Lacanians call Empty Speech.)

On cable news, there are two feedback loops that reinforce this phenomenon. Firstly, the partisanship alienates non-partisan viewers, thus further concentrating the audience. Secondly, people with genuine knowledge and insight quickly discover that the platform doesn't give them a fair opportunity to communicate to an open-minded audience, and therefore abandon the platform in favour of those who are happy to spout dogma on a variety of topics.

On YouTube, these two feedback loops are less in evidence. There is a wealth of good content on YouTube if you know where to look, including Zeynep Tufekci herself talking about this very phenomenon. (But just compare the numbers of views of selected videos on different channels.)

• Democracy vs. Clickbait (Donoho Colloquium) - 687 views
• The Algorithmic Spiral of Silence (MozFest Mozilla) - 2.3k views
• We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads (TED) - 514k views

(view numbers as shown on 10 November 2018)

Update (March 2019)

@charlesarthur observes that even politicians aren't always immune to the polarizing effects of social media. He suggests that the closed WhatsApp groups now favoured by all political factions are radicalising their members "so they egg each other on to take more and more extreme positions", and notes that this kind of effect has been understood for a long time. He references Cass Sunstein's 1999 paper on the Law of Group Polarization.

Incidentally, Sunstein is also known for his work on Nudge Theory, which is usually described in terms of nudging people in a beneficial direction. But the psychological mechanisms of the nudge would appear to work in any direction.

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Charles Arthur, Social media polarises and radicalises – and MPs aren’t immune to its effects (Guardian 11 March 2019)

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)

Michael Massing, Trump and CNN: Case History of an Unhealthy Codependency (NYR Daily, 9 November 2018)

Markus Prior, Media and Political Polarization (Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2013. 16:101–27)

Jeff Sorensen, 24 Hour News Killed Journalism (HuffPost 20 August 2012)

Cass Sunstein, The Law of Group Polarization (John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics Working Paper No. 91, 1999)

Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas and Don D. Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication

Wikipedia: Nudge Theory, Schismogenesis

Related posts (with additional references): The Pursuit of Truth (December 2016), Ethical Communication in a Digital Age (November 2018), YouTube Growth Hacking (November 2018), Polarizing Filters (March 2021)

Unreliable Evidence (Tom Cruise)

The LA Weekly has found a new way of (a) speculating about Tom Cruise's sexuality and (b) driving traffic to its website. (I wonder which of these two goals is uppermost.) 5 signs that Tom Cruise is Gay (June 2012).

5. Gay men fancy him. But then so do a lot of straight women. Perhaps straight women sometimes fancy men who turn out to be gay, perhaps gay men sometimes fancy men who turn out to be straight. The LA Weekly describes a scene in which Cruise dances in his underpants as "homoerotic", presumably because gay men find this scene erotic. (I should not like to speculate whether the journalist is speaking from personal experience.) But if straight women also find this scene erotic, wouldn't this scene also count as "heteroerotic" or "metroerotic"?

The LA Weekly provides a helpful link to the scene, for those readers who want to test their own erotic response to it.  Will it conclude that those readers who click on this link are probably gay?

4. He is fit. Oh dear.

3. Sexuality might be one possible explanation for joining the Church of Scientology.

2. An ex-wife made some caustic comments about his sexuality. Ex-wives often try to maintain a dignified silence about their ex-husbands, but the occasional barb may still slip out.

1. Family Guy jokes about Tom Cruise's sexuality. Actually, lots of people joke about it.


Like many other successful celebrities, Tom Cruise has a well-constructed image, which brings him a great deal of publicity and admiration from both sexes. This image is co-created by Cruise himself and his agents on the one hand, and by the media on the other hand. An ambiguous sexuality is probably an asset, and his publicity agents might advise him to be careful not to provide convincing evidence one way or the other. The signs produced by the LA Weekly may tell us something about the Tom Cruise image and the public reaction to it. Only an obsessive fan would believe or care whether this image is a truthful reflection of the true Tom Cruise.

Celebrities often lose the ability to distinguish themselves from their own public image. We know this only because some of them recover from this state, and are able to talk about it in later life.

What I'm interested in here is the nature of the argument produced by the LA Weekly, and what it implies about the LA Weekly worldview. The alleged signs are not only inconclusive but reflect a backwards causality - confusing cause and effect.

Wardrobe Malfunction

Minor celebrities, especially female, dress to impress. Specifically, they hope that some unusual and daring costume, possibly with an apparently inadvertent flash of body parts, will get them covered in the media, which refer to these flashes as "wardrobe malfunctions". This term was coined after a Superbowl appearance by Janet Jackson in 2004.

Before her marriage to Prince Charles, Lady Diana Spencer was photographed in a long skirt with the sun behind her, so that her legs were visible through the fabric. She was not thought to have planned this. But if a celebrity poses for a similar photo today in the thinnest of materials, we may assume she knows what she is doing. (Later in her career, the Princess of Wales was thought to have become much more conscious of her image.)

Women, however famous, have a perfect right to go about their normal business without some nosy journalist commenting on the visibility or lack of underwear or their physical condition (weight, cellulite, pregnancy, etc.). But when they attend a publicity event in the hope and expectation of being photographed, and then pose glamorously for the cameras, then surely their appearance is self-consciously planned, and they (or their publicists) are colluding with the salacity of the gutter press. This must be especially true for those women whose celebrity is based on image rather than substance.

If the function of the dress is to titillate the public, then a true malfunction only occurs when the dress fails to achieves its proper function - in other words, when the body parts remain decently concealed. (Even when the dress actually comes apart at the seams, some observers may imagine this to have been engineered, and the flustered embarrassment to have been rehearsed.)

Meanwhile, with characteristic hypocrisy, the tabloid press pretends to be shocked by the more gratuitous flashes, and refers prudishly to the person's "modesty". As if.

Synchronous Consumption

In his blog Buy One Get One Free (Jan 2013), @RSAMatthew finds the survival of broadcast TV surprising.

"The desire to participate in social media conversation has also made it imperative for enthusiasts to watch programmes as they are broadcast. This has been an important factor in the totally unexpected return to popularity of Saturday night family viewing."

Unexpected by whom? Are we to suppose that this popularity is pure accident? Is it not possible that broadcasting companies have deliberately engineered programmes that require live mass viewing?

Matthew's father is the eminent sociologist and broadcaster Laurie Taylor.

Daniel Smith, Spleen and Modernity: Baudelaire and ‘alternative’ consumption (July 2010)

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.

The Purpose of Conspiracy Theories

#BGT Prompted by recent allegations suggesting that "Britain's Got Talent" (which she refers to as "Simon Cowell's talentless contest") was fixed, Marina Hyde suggests that we concoct conspiracy theories in order to excuse our twisted fascination with things (Guardian 3 June 2011).

"So what are we to make of people's need to believe in conspiracy theories such as the one floated above? In his famous essay on conspiracy theories in America, the historian Richard Hofstadter noted that a significant part of these tales is psychological projection – people ascribe their own worst traits to the imagined enemy, thus relieving themselves of various kinds of responsibility. And so with an increasingly savvy reality TV audience, who understand that Cowell always wins, yet watch in ever greater numbers and have to find a way of elevating their involvement into something more than a mug's game. Both fans and haters need to develop outlandish conspiracy theories because they can't actually believe millions upon millions are genuinely in thrall to this stuff."

Richard Hofstadter "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964)

Hofstadter's essay and other materials about conspiracy theories can be found on the website of Dr. Kenneth A. Rahn, Sr.  See especially The Academic JFK Assassination Site and Nonconspiracists United.

On Reputation

From @CJFDillow on the externalities of superinjunctions.

"People can allege that Jemima Khan is shagging Jeremy Clarkson and say that the press isn’t reporting this because of a superinjunction. ... In this way, Ms Khan’s reputation is damaged by the existence of super injunctions (though the social cost of this is mitigated by the fact that Mr Clarkson‘s reputation is enhanced)."

Ms Khan attracted a lot of publicity to herself when she chose to protest about various allegations about her and Mr Clarkson that had been circulated on Twitter. Most people looked at the allegations and dismissed them as highly unlikely. The story, repeated with glamorous pictures in all newspapers, has merely served to remind us about her wealth and beauty, and has probably only enhanced her reputation. Perhaps the real purpose of her protest was to deflect attention and credibility from some other allegations. (See my post on Google-spinning.)

Chris assumes that Ms Khan's reputation would be sullied if she were discovered to have had a relationship with anyone outside the usual round of actors and sportsmen and other good looking airheads. Although I'm not a fan of Mr Clarkson, I imagine that a wealthy and bored woman might find a discreet relationship with him to be quite interesting, and I can't see that her reputation would be particularly damaged. It's not as if she were caught attending one of Mr Berlusconi's or Mr Mosley's parties, or spilling out of nightclubs in a dishevelled state.

Meanwhile, Chris assumes that Mr Clarkson's reputation is enhanced by these allegations. Again, I can't see that a popular and happily married journalist wants to be associated with bored heiresses, let alone by their indignant denials.

Decoding Disclosure

In her piece #WikiLeaks no favor to historians, Kiron K. Skinner believes there will be some unintended consequences of the recent deluge of WikiLeaks.

"Policy makers, intelligence analysts and statesmen [will] find it necessary to write to each other in code. ... Once frank and private interactions among statesmen will become more diplomatic. ... This will probably lead to greater secrecy and manipulation until technology devises yet more powerful lenses to reveal even the most private state encounters."

But surely historians have always been trained not to take any documents at face value. It stretches belief to imagine that private interactions among statesmen have ever been totally frank, or that official documents have ever been completely objective. Dr Skinner advocates other forms of historical document, such as contemporary interviews with political actors, but of course these cannot be taken at face value either.

Powerful people often oscillate between discretion and indiscretion. Journalists and spies have many ways of tempting people to boast about their knowledge and influence (Vince Cable being a recent victim of such techniques - see BBC News). Given the complex psychological and political factors that trigger specific instances of disclosure, there is no reason to believe that those items disclosed are either consistently more important or consistently less important than those not disclosed. As it happens, many of the WikiLeaks disclosures are pretty banal, and some commentators have gained the impression that the life of the professional diplomat is also pretty banal, but this impression may simply be a consequence of the WikiLeaks process together with selective media reporting. Anyone who believes that WikiLeaks provides some kind of "truth" should read Slavoj Žižek Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks (LRB 20 January 2011).

Scandal sheets such as Private Eye have always had coded ways of disclosing information. For example, famous people are often described as "tired and emotional" (drunk) or "discussing Uganda" (having sexual intercourse).

Historians will continue to have to wade through bureaucratic self-justification, empty boasting and unsubstantiated rumour, filtered through a gauze of topical references and codes, and to try and understand the hidden power of negotiating positions that were never made explicit. (Žižek mentions a crucial meeting in Portugal in 1974.) WikiLeaks isn't going to change this very much.

Purpose of Denial 3

The more the American mainstream media deny that President Obama is a Moslem, the more Americans choose to believe that he is.

Apparently this belief is more prevalent among college-educated Republicans than the rest of the population. How Republicans Learn That Obama Is Muslim (New Republic, 27 August 2010) This raises some intriguing questions about the relationship between education and knowledge.

Jeff Poor suggests that the media are to blame. "By consistently using questions about Obama's faith and his citizenship as fodder to demean conservatives, specifically the Tea Party movement and thereby creating a general mistrust by saying vile things, have the mainstream media perpetuated the very allegations they are abhorred by (sic)?" (Newsbusters, 19 August 2010) At least on this point, Charlie Brooker seems to agree. "Seriously, broadcasters, journalists: just give up now. Because either you're making things worse, or no one's paying attention anyway."  'Ground Zero mosque'? The reality is less provocative (Guardian 23 August 2010). Brooker complains that the terms of the debate are grossly misleading, and grudgingly admires right-wingers for their ability to create snappy-but-misleading nicknames – like fun-size chocolate bars and the Ground Zero mosque. Buzzwords for blowhards (Guardian 30 August 2010).

Jeff Poor quotes CNN political analyst James Carville, who describes himself as "flummoxed" by this result, and claims that "the quality of information to people today is exponentially higher than it was in 19th century England". Now I wouldn't necessarily expect a political journalist to know what the word "exponential" meant, but I wonder whether the quality is higher at all.

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Once upon a time, some people were bothered whether Disraeli was Christian or Jew, and some people were uncomfortable about electing Kennedy as a Catholic president. But they are now mainly remembered for what they achieved while in office, not their religious affiliation. Meanwhile, Mrs Thatcher's legacy is not feminism but Thatcherism. Obama will not be remembered for his birthplace, or the religion of his forefathers, nor even for being the first black president; he will be remembered for the successes and failures of his presidency. And perhaps one day, people will wonder why anyone cared whether he was a Moslem or not, and moderate Moslems will be as accepted in mainstream American politics as Catholics are now. (Let it not be forgotten that large sums of money were once raised from American Catholics to support Irish terrorism.)

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John T. McGreevy and R. Scott Appleby Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque Controversy (New York Review, 27 August 2010)

Adam Serwer, Build More Mosques (American Prospect, August 26, 2010)

Bigot Brother

The producers of Celebrity Big Brother (Channel Four and Endemol) must be secretly delighted with the latest scandal, in which Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty is apparently being bullied by three white working class females. [BBC News, Shetty Profile] 

 "Is this racism or class warfare? You decide. Viewers can phone a premium rate number to express their preference for multiracial tolerance."  

As if. As if "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" would want to put more money into Endemol's coffers. David Cameron has advised right-minded people to switch off instead [BBC News]. (In the past such advice from a Conservative Party leader would have doubled viewing figures, but those days are long gone.)  

Update: Apparently the phone-in profits have been given to charity. So that's all right then. 

The rest of the media are enjoying the scandal as well, discussing the offensive behaviour at great length. In yesterday's Times, columnist Carol Midgley wrote some sensible things ("Far from 'not tolerating' bullying, the brains at Endemol have deliberately caused it. And it is not just Shetty who is the victim.") but then spoiled her article by using an offensive racial term to describe one of the contestants. (I am shocked, shocked that the Times subeditors permitted this term.)

Carol Midgley Pedigree v pit bull: Big Brother's cynical face (Times, January 17th, 2007)

Today's Times reminds us that "what we see on Big Brother is only one of many possible stories" - in other words, so-called "reality" is selective and ultimately subjective. According to Burhan Wazir, the scenes selected for broadcast by Endemol will have done no harm to Shetty's career, but have probably destroyed the careers of the three Z-list celebrities portrayed as having bullied Shetty.

Burhan Wazir, They're in big bother (Times, January 18th, 2007)

Above all one Jade Goody, a previous winner of Big Brother. Endemol executives must be thinking of the immortal lines of Eminem: "We created a monster, now everyone wants ter see Jade Goody evicted ..." 

One of Shetty's first starring roles was in a film called Main Khiladi Tu Anhari (1994) [Review by Philip Lutgendorf]. I understand this is the Hindi for something like "I'm good-looking and successful, and you are an ignorant slob." Quite so.  

Wikipedia: Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells

Unambiguous Threat

We are asked to believe that the mass media (including television and internet) are inherently progressive, and support democracy everywhere. In September 1993, Rupert Murdoch claimed that satellite TV was "an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere". China immediately banned private satellite dishes. 

Murdoch then embarked on a long process of placating, reassuring and (as many websites describe it) courting the Chinese authorities. But according to the BBC (19th September 2005), he remains disappointed with the results of this process.

Actually, unambiguous threats are a bit unfashionable, even in military circles. In 2000, one of Clinton's military advisors, US Admiral William A. Owens, said that ambiguous threats posed a greater challenge than unambiguous ones. (Revolutionizing Warfare, Blueprint Magazine 2000)

Like us, our allies face an ambiguous world. The need to cut through ambiguity, especially at operational and tactical levels, has replaced the need to offset the prowess of a superior adversary posing an unambiguous threat. Sharing dominant battle-space knowledge - the key to modern deterrence - will reassure our friends and allies.

It now seems that some media giants are happy to share "battle-space knowledge" with the Chinese authorities. For example, Yahoo passed the identity of a journalist to the Chinese. (Murdoch criticized this decision.) And Microsoft is willing to enforce the Chinese vocabulary blacklist (which includes the word "democracy"). So much for Thomas Friedman, who argued in his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree that two great democratizing forces—global communications and global finance—would sweep away any regime which is not open, transparent and democratic.  

Sources: Bloomberg, Guardian, Andrew Leonard, George Monbiot.