We’ve never been so simultaneously busy and had so much free time before. Smartphones and social media allow us to steal moments in between our broader activities and share these little breaks with others. 15 years ago, walking through the city to your job you’d be left with little else but the thoughts in your head. Now, you can stake out that time to share and speak to those that matter to you. Ten seconds here or a minute there, it adds up. These moments we steal and these places we inhabit between our broader actions become intimate to us. Our friendships and relationships with those online, in many instances, feel equivalent to a similar relationship offline. It all depends on how you approach the medium.
The experience of your average Joe or Joanne using twitter is vastly different from that of a celebrity. Celebrities come from a place of established social capital, and leverage that online. Having worked for the most part hand in hand with or through traditional gatekeepers, many celebrities relish the degree of independence and connectedness social media gives them. Plain and simple, they would not be on these social media platforms unless they gained some benefit from them. Using twitter is not mandatory, regardless of what your local SMEG tells you.
Were you to approach the average famous rugby league player, say at your local pub, and inform them of your desires and required accoutrements in regards to intercourse with their recently deceased mother then I daresay you’ll find a most Darwinian response visited upon you. Where the rubber meets the road is the situation where a violent outburst is provoked but it cannot be channelled into an instantaneous solution. This is trolling in its purest form, inciting a target to become furiously angry when they have no avenue for dealing with that anger. It’s a twofold victory, first having the target cede their emotions to your will and secondly imagining them seething and furious, unable to do anything. That celebrities are now being exposed to the disdain of the occasional furious punter is not a cause for massive legislative overhaul, though it seems that in NSW, at least, the government is committed to supporting celebrities that dish it out but cannot take it in kind. That a football player has reached out to the Prime Minister (who herself is going through quite an awful grief-related situation) when confronted with a situation that violence could not solve, speaks volumes about the proposed solutions to ‘twitter trolls’.
People have said awful shit about celebrities since the dawn of celebrity itself.
Hell, comparing the average abuse a celebrity on twitter gets to what happened to Socrates, in many instances the idiots are getting off lightly. Gatekeepers have always traditionally clung to power. The media response to condemn twitter and other competing sources of information reeks of the self-serving. The media are eagerly braying for increased regulation to undermine and denigrate channels they do not control, like the parasitic rent-seekers they are. For all of the bravado and posturing about freedom of speech under the proposed Finkelstein ‘media regulations’, these hypocrites are the ones crying loudest for the regulation of their competition. That we are honestly considering legislation to deal with the fact that celebrities can no longer exclusively control who they interact with, and may have to occasionally suffer the exhortations of the unwashed, is farcical in the extreme.
Our knee-jerk reaction for a legislative solution when issues of complexity arise is not a uniquely Australian condition. Our braggadocio in proudly proclaiming our ignorance while attempting to fashion such a solution is. That we are letting the idiotic and unlettered opinions of sports stars and models control the discussion on how the state deals with expression online is truly a hallmark of what a cultural ghetto modern Australia is. The political response is merely a product of the culture that created it. In NSW, the O’Farrell Government seems hell bent on finding any number of new and interesting ways to extend the Crimes Act and put to bed pesky ideas of civil liberties as anything other than temporary extensions of privilege by the state. That Tony Abbott on one hand can thunder about the attacks on our free speech being proposed by the Gillard Government but on the other say the police should do more to tackle offensive speech online truly underlines the crisis of populism this country has gleefully embraced. That the ALP seems to have pissed away any pretensions of standing by the rights of the accused is, disappointingly, par for course.
I feel the crux of this issue bears repeating: when prompted, the Premier of NSW said on twitter that he would refer abuse – which is, incidentally, not illegal – to the police. It seems NSW is still victim to the ‘opprobrium against immorality’ complex that Bob Carr so expertly crafted. The news cycle spat up any number of absurdities that confused the elderly and Carr, man of action that he was, vehemently declared that he would make sure no such injustice was ever visited upon Daily Telegraph readers ever again. The enormous power of the state, continuously extended through this escalating media/political ouroboros is the only solution to any problem. The current fervent environment to protect those who need the least degree of protection has left a vile taste in my mouth. The piper must be paid, this media fiction must be set to rights and no amount of our hard-won liberties are safe from a torch-wielding mob convinced morality is on their side. Ideally this will be the standard media circle-jerk which will die out without much of an overall legislative impact.
If not, and if we continue to let the terms of state power be dictated by confected self-serving media campaigns, we, in the words of a very wise man, sacrifice liberty for security and clearly undermine our claim on either.
First published on Internet Hugbox
Image by Mixy Lorenzo via Creative Commons Licence
