Three chapters about social media

A final paper to my English course Englannin ammattitilanteet toimittajan työssä in autumn 2012. Sorry about the mistakes in spelling.

Chapter one: The big picture

History has certainly been happening, pyramids trembling and regimes unraveling

Dictatorships being shaken in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Bahrain and now in Libya 
And in media, an army of indie-pioneers has emerged to pwn injustice through the cyber sphere

Facing riot gear with status updates and Twitter feeds bringing peeps to the streets in corrupt states 
And while the West stands by and applauds the protests posing as the model of freedom for the rest

The world asks: where will the revolution begin next?

[The Juice Media, the Rap News part 7: The Revolution]

The way I see it, the most important change that internet has brought to us is that many things can be read, heard, shared and seen freely. Material issues have turned to bits and numbers that move between cords and lines. To get one’s hands to these information flows is relatively easy and cheap.

In many cases, this revolution has turned things to better. Musicians can share their music worldwide. We all can get in touch with our friends worldwide with one click. Transfer of money, information, pictures and entertainment has never been this easy. Every single sector of business has to adapt to these changes.

Journalism is one of those who have massive problems orientating to the new world. Many mighty or less mighty traditional newspapers have gone bankrupt, something that no one could have predicted two decades ago. This has lead us to an almost twisted situation: the pioneers of free speech, the newspapers, are in some way getting slightly conservative. They are now the ones trying to regulate free information and trying to push internet users to get less free information. Papers such as The Guardian, the New York Times and Helsingin Sanomat are covering their stories with a pay wall. In days, masses whined about the papers' decisions and threatened to change the media.

Fair enough. But what many people tend to forget is the papers have all the reason and the right to what they do. They have every right to try to protect their livelihood and quality journalism. Unless you happen to be a national broadcast like YLE (not saying there shouldn't be one in every country), you'll probably have sleepless nights wondering how the hell are you going to get sponsors to get journalism to get readers. Pay wall is one, if fragile, effort to solve this problem.

The way I see it, we internet users have gotten a bit bloated: free, non-costing is now an intrinsic value. It’s self-evidence. It’s something we all except to get, one way or another, when we once again open our computers. Either by reading a reporters’ work for free in the internet or downloading music and films.

Since I’m guilty of both, I’m not attacking against the principles of the free, transparent information. Internet can pretty much be the most amazing thing ever happened to our world. Yet when I got the chance, I instantly downloaded Spotify to pay for my music. And when I saw Helsingin Sanomat’s pay wall, I just thought: ok, not nice, but this is their choice. The material isn’t made by me, my livelihood isn’t concerned, and since I subscribe to the paper, I can as well log in with my account. I didn't feel my liberties insulted. Problem solved.

I was among the ones marching in the streets to oppose the ACTA treaty, the notorious plan of establishing international standards for intellectual property rights enforcement, and would do it again. But what I’m saying is that we consumers should still remember some basic principles. Sometimes struggling against the free flow of bits is totally doomed (like making some kid pay over 400 000 euros for downloaded music) but sometimes a reasonable, fair way to restrain people’s everything-for-free-to-me-right-now-lust can be worth trying.

It’s better than losing the whole journalism along the reporters.

Chapter two: The possibilities of free information

Keep your wits about you: the battle lines are merging, an information war, with an appetite for turning 
The great walls of China, Palestine and Berlin into fire walls, black lists, a wire curtain

over this small, crucial, window of opportunity: 
The internet - unprecedented global community - 
An epochal evolution, telepathic synapse while all major media source have been hijacked

Picture this as we part: Our perception of reality expressed as a chart; 
we've lost TV to Murdoch, the press to the sharks; this internet our last channel to connect to the mark. 
No rhetorical questions at last:

If we lose this frequency we’ll be left in the dark.

[The Juice Media, the Rap News Part 4: WWWAR on the Internet]

There’s a village A. Nearby, there’s another village X who sells fish to village A, because it’s very big and its people are used to eat a lot of juicy, fresh fish. The inhabitants of village X are however getting frustrated: they have mouths to feed themselves and they’d like to have more fish. X’s leader, powerful mister Mayor holds strict power in the village. He won’t accept any criticism or anything that would violate the fertile trade between the two villages.

One day, Mister White, a journalist and an activist in the village A gets his hand to extremely rare information, that is given to him by Mister Red working in Village A’s army. The information is stunning: it shows that leaders of the two villages have made secret deals of silencing any threats that the fish trade would face. Also it shows that most of the cash created by the fist trade ends up to mister Mayor and his family. Thirdly, the papers reveal a video of village A’s troops killing random people from the Village X.

Mister White reveals these files to the whole world.

What would be the reasonable ending to the story? That the leaders and those responsible of these suspicious deals would face consequences? That the unhealthy and undemocratic politics were thoroughly fixed?

Despite the backings of most of the people of both villages X and A, Mister White gets persecuted and condemned by super powers. People from villages around the world gives money to Mister Whites foundation to reveal more secrets, but the donations are cancelled by the middleman of the money traffic after receiving angry mail from Village A’s government.

Mister Red’s fate was harder. He was thrown to jail, where he was kept in a torture-like conditions. Why? Because his revelations could be a threat to the people executing "the fish trade" and all the machinery behind it. That's true and alarming. But which one is the greater evil: the ones carrying out such action that doesn't tolerate daylight, or the one revealing it all?

I know that the story of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange can’t be shortened to that story about two villages. For example the leaks have put lives in danger, and that’s a real problem. But the tale gives a hint. If we all try to forget the huge media and propaganda war, the statements, the rumors and the conspiracy theories around the whole WikiLeaks case, and ask ourselves: What in principal is right and what stands for justice? Have we forgotten the value of truth, if it ever had any?

Wasn't the only thing revealed the ugly truth?

You may think I’m biased and subjective here. I guess that might be true, since I have (and I’ve many times had) difficulties understanding the criticism towards the whole WikiLeaks case. Part of it I understand, yeah, but there’s something else. Some journalists can’t stand the idea. I’ve read an executive of Helsingin Sanomat harshly ridiculing Assange. I’ve clashed verbally with more than one of my fellow students, who seemed to think that the guy revealing the ugly fish problems, thus endangering the people involved, is the villain. I hope that many journalists aren’t that satisfied with the status quo, in which people’s suffering, the poverty and the destruction of nature are outsourced far away to other countries and continents. If they are, we might just need more WikiLeaks.

Chapter three: The threats of free information

It’s only the start of 2012, but already, coast to coast we

hear reports that humanity has evolved, globally 
now that we know the cause of all our woes: Joseph Kony!

The world’s now on a better path and the panacea 
seems to have come from this hero white man here
whose internet video played a vital role in 
highlighting the plight of Uganda’s child soldiers

It went viral and spread with unprecedented speed 
shared over twitter feeds and endorsed by celebrities.

[The Juice Media, the Rap News Part 12: Yes we KONY?]

Whereas the social media has rightfully earned its good reputation of a tool of communication and spreading the information (and as WikiLeaks showed, sometimes even the truth) it is still one of the most too-well-treated-things on Earth. In Finnish we have this word “Pyhä lehmä”, “The Holy Cow”, that shall not be criticized or underrate. Finnish high school system is a one good example, but the social media is another. I as well have praised the social media and the assets of free, fast information. WikiLeaks is a good example of a project that’s trying to use the masses of digital information for “good” (in my opinion, at least). But who said it couldn’t be used to provoke masses using untrue claims? Who said it couldn’t be used as a tool of propaganda or repression? Well, it can and it is.

“Example?” asked Samuel L. Jackson in the legendary car scene in Pulp Fiction. My example is Kony2012, the campaign film that was posted on YouTube last April. It’s about child soldiers in Uganda and a notorious war lord Joseph Kony who’s been recruiting them. The film, made by the organization The Invisible Children, and the director Jason Russell (in the picture) ask people all around the world to pressure the US Government to send more troops to Uganda. They did.

I’m not into the conspiracy theories that claim that Russell was on the weapon industry’s agenda the whole time and this whole was a big, well-planned scheme. I think that he really had a good intention and a pure heart when he made this campaign. However:

The film was extremely black and white. It simplified the very complex patterns of global struggle for power, the long historical backgrounds, the ethnic and the economic issues concerning the whole situation in Uganda. It seemed to have forgotten some of the facts, too: for example, Joseph Kony hasn’t been in Uganda for years now. And the tiny fact that the United States has deployed troops to Uganda since 2008. You can check here for more criticism about the factual errors of the film.

So far, the video has almost a 100 000 000 views on YouTube. Without taking a stance on global politics any more, I think that example shows that the same masses that took over the streets in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia, can be conjured to fight for other themes as well. It just demands a good campaign, good timing, emotional message and a story of a bad guy and a good guy – that always goes for bid crowds.

But the people living under tyranny when the Arab spring started knew what they were feeling and what they were doing. The same can't be said about the majority of Western public applauding for Russel's ready-made medicine to clashes in faraway land, all because it sounded good and didn't demand anything but a click.

In the middle of the revolutions, repressions and YouTube, we all should remember that even that the whole world sometimes seem to be within our reach, this in an irritating challenging globe. It knows no easy solutions.