On Tweeting and a little tipple

There's a very interesting article by Malcom Gladwell in the current (October 4th) issue of The New Yorker, on the reality/perception gap in the professed value of online social networks, specifically as an enabler for social activism.

I had an opportunity to hear Gladwell speak back in 2005, while he was still riding the crest of the Tipping Point wave, and it cemented my view of him as someone who does a very good job of stating the obvious, but making it sound bold, exciting and new. However the success that he has enjoyed and the reverence with which he is held within the Web 2.0 world indicates that a) his ideas are apparently not obvious to everyone and b) there are a lot of folks in the Web 2.0 world that really don't have that great an imagination. The first point surprises me, the second less so, given the fact that this is an industry that for at least three years based the majority of its business plans on a five page article in Wired (clearly indicating that the Harvard Business Review was hovering at that time somewhere between 'Tired' and 'Expired').

What Gladwell does best, in fact has made a career of doing, is restating an existing thought prevalent in some areas, and by doing so he allows others outside those thought spheres to adopt those ideas by saying, "Malcom Gladwell says this, so it must be worthwhile". He is the personification of a Tipping Point, once he vocalises an idea, it becomes acceptable to the mainstream.

In many ways this resembles the recent media coverage of Brian Cowen's hung-over radio interview; there were many journalists drinking with him until 3am the night before and they all knew he was probably hung-over or still drunk when he did the early morning radio interview, but none would actually risk a potentially career-limiting move and report the news of this until Simon Coveney TD tweeted about it. They could then happily report on his Tweet and the allegations it contained, but none were willing to write about the incident itself until a 3rd party had already done so. Coveney's Tweet gave them permission to write about the event without taking any risks themselves.

In a similar fashion Gladwell enables people to adopt ideas without taking risks; one may be aware of an unorthodox business practice but be unwilling to risk ridicule by implementing it, however once Gladwell has popularized it the risk is no longer so great.

It was thus with some interest that I read his most recent article in New Yorker, wherein he turns his attention social activism, comparing 1960's actions of civil disobedience in the South with the coverage of last year's protests in Iran. During this so-called "Green Revolution" in Iran, the media fell in love with Twitter. Folks turned their profile pictures green as a show of solidarity and the images of Neda Agha-Soltan flooded the tubes, her personal tragedy becoming the iconic image of the uprising. It was the perfect Revolution 2.0, a pro-democracy movement rising up against a hated enemy of the US, demanding economic and social freedoms and using the power of the internet to fuel its progress. It was an open source Revolution, the whole word could take part and together tweet-in-tweet the world would overthrow the forces of oppression.

Only none of this was true.

Well, some parts were true, the parts about a movement rising up to demand more social freedoms, those parts were true. The whole bit about the Twitter revolution, not so much. As Gladwell puts it:

In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. "It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi."

Welcome words, even if they come over a year after the events themselves.

The power of the interent as a tool for radical reform, or as an enabler for social justice, has been something of an ideological blindspot for me. As someone emerging from the corporate Web 2.0 environment I had a strong desire to put my industry knowledge to a better use than online advertising. For over a year I worked with political groups, NGOs and activists advising them on ways to harness the possibilities of social media and I desperately wanted Web 2.0 to usher in a dawn of true participatory social action, but by June 2009 I was demoralised and disillusioned, not by the tools themselves but by the behaviour such tools engendered in their users, the aggression, incivility, impatience and, most damaging as far as social activism goes, the overwhelming passivity.

Tools such as Twitter do not encourage creativity, they do not encourage dialogue, they do not encourage action. All they encourage is the willing adoption of a strict hierarchical structure of leaders and followers, and a false sense of participation. Writing at the time of the Iranian protests I said that:

"What annoys me about the media coverage of Twitter though is that in the absence of any visible leaders at the Iranian protests, Twitter has been seized on as the personification of the movement. The US media cannot cope with autonomous collective action, they need a figurehead to interview, to wrap a story around, to deify or to hang. The concept of a non-hierarchical spontaneous movement is alien to a Capitalist culture, which cannot understand how a group might function without clearly defined roles of leaders and followers.

And into the void fits Twitter so very neatly, a tool designed to enable leaders to broadcast to followers, that engenders strict hierarchies and encourages collective passivity. Turning your icon green will not support change in Iran. Tweeting others to twitition Google to Google-Doodle for freedom or update images of Tehran on Google Earth will not save a single life. The only way to effect change is to get off your backside, away from your computer, and go out there and do something."

While Gladwell disagrees on the value (or otherwise) of hierarchical structures in a protest movement, arguing that radical leftist movements only work because of strict hierarchical cells (to which I would point out the collectivist structure of the Zapatistas), he does believe that a movement can only be successful with actual feet on the ground, with real people taking real risks. Social networking tools in fact discourage activism, because they facilitate a level of faux-participation by making it easier to support something without actually having to take any risks, as he explains:

"Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro."

I once had a discussion with Vint Cerf about my belief that the Internet would make everyone stupid, that instant access to information would discourage true research just as calculators fostered innumeracy or word processors allow me to get away with atrocious spelling. He of course disagreed, but if I were to revisit this conversation with him I would now modify the basic premise of my argument ever so slightly; Capitalism has transformed people into consumers, consumers are passive users of objects. The internet commodifies and objectifies information and social activity, thus social activity online becomes an oxymoron, for the internet itself engenders social passivity. Thus the internet will not make us stupid or lazy, for we are already predisposed to such states, all the internet does is allow us to easily give in to our basest desires. It is an enabler. It is the Tipping Point for our collective Id.

My reformulated question for Vint Cerf would now be, "The internet will allow us to be lazier than at any time in human history. Do we have the collective strength to resist?"

Despite the aforementioned flaws Gladwell's article, like much of his writing, is an enjoyable read, and well worth taking a few minutes more to read in its entirety. If as many people jump on this latest bandwagon as have on his previous wagon trains, my question for Vint might start to be greeted by others with less mirth.

Which would be nice.

On the National Protest Stroll

This afternoon saw my second visit of the day to Kildare Street as I moseyed along and joined in all the Trade Union-y fun and goodness that is today's EU-wide day of action and protest. The march began outside Anglo Irish Bank's offices on Stephen's Green, snaked down Dawson Street and finished up on Molesworth Street, possibly the shortest route a protest march has ever taken, more of a protest stroll really.

According to the latest news reports some 50,000 marched in Brussels, with widespread disruption in Madrid and other Spanish cities, Greece and elsewhere. Here in Dublin, despite this being an ICTU backed event, union support seemed conspicuous by its absence, with numbers in Dublin reaching 1,500 at a push.

Indeed a lot of criticism has been leveled at the unions for their half-hearted support, with almost no publicity appearing for this march and what little there was coming from political groups like The Socialist Party, rather than from the unions themselves as in the rest of Europe. While union leaders like ICTU President Jack O'Connor did speak at the event, it was interesting to see that a good few of the placards on display were as scornful of union leaders and the Croke Park deal (which ICTU ratified back in June) as they were of the government; Union leadership is perceived as being altogether too close to Fianna Fail's ruling aristocracy, and its hard not to see why.

Also interesting to see were the small groups of single-issue protestors along for the opening of the Dail, railing against issues from hospital cuts to the Civil Partnerships Bill. Disappointingly no-one had brought along any "Careful Now", or "Down with this sort of thing" placards, very sloppy work altogether.

All in all a bit of a damp squib really, certainly in comparison to the rest of Europe, or even our own national Day of Protest back in February 2009, when over 100,000 marchers stretched from Parnell Square to Kildare Street, possibly the last time the unions showed anything resembling true leadership.

Fintan O'Toole has argued that we are bred in this nation for servility and passivity, that over the centuries the rabble rousers, ne'er-do-wells and other troublesome miscreants that in other countries are the first to storm the barricades have instead emigrated when the going got tough, rather than staying behind and trying to change things. Generation after generation the best, the brightest, and the angriest have all left our shores until those of us left behind resemble little more than herds of docile sheep (I may be paraphrasing here a bit). With Ireland facing nearly the greatest economic crisis in the EU, the public response in comparison to Spain, Greece and elsewhere has been embarrassingly pathetic. Today's march highlighted our own weaknesses as a population, and unfortunately has little long term value beyond proving O'Toole's thesis.

Still, I'm glad I was there, even if it had no effect.

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A very economic crash

As anyone who followed last May's half-hearted attempt to storm the Dail by Richard Boyd Barret and his SWP chums knows, the best way to gain entry to the Dail is through the front gate, in a cement truck.

Yup, as I worked my way slowly through my RSS feeds this morning I caught a breaking story from The Irish Times announcing that a cement truck had been driven into Leinster House, with the words "Anglo Toxic Bank" on it, so naturally I grabbed my camera, hopped on a bike and raced off to take a look for myself.

As I arrived at about 8:40 the Gardai were in the process of attaching it to a massive tow-truck and removing it, no easy feat given the fact that the protester had apparently cut the break lines and electrical cables. I had a chat with one of the Guards and apparently no damage was actually done to the Kildare Street gates, the driver stopped short of the gates, cut the cables and then hopped out one of the windows and ran off, though he didn't get too far before being arrested.

Its hard not to stand back and call this a work of genius. Nobody was hurt, no public property was damaged, and a very effective point was made, and it makes a great start to the Europe-wide day of protest.

Looks like at least some of the people are mad as hell, and aren't going to take it anymore.

About time too.

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Breakfast in America

New York, Saturday AM, breakfast.

A truck drives past, a moving billboard transporting scenes of death and destruction; a soldier wears his war face, helicopters fly overhead, colours glowing in the nuclear hues of hyper-reality, as if the whole world is wearing fake tan. At first I barely take notice, another ad for another game, $39.99 for 24 hours away from the nagging disappointment of a cavalcade of poor life choices, but then the Real snaps into focus, the ad is for no game.

The truck is an ad for war, for death, for destruction, just one part of a multi-million dollar campaign for army recruitment. A decade ago games promised an experience as authentic as the Real. Today the army promises to make the Real true to the game.

Breakfast in America is the future Virilio warned us about.

An Instructed Minority

In the current issue of The Philosophers' Magazine, Alan Haworth contrasts the traditional UK First Past The Post electoral system with Proportional Representation, trying to understand what "Rule by the People" actually entails and if PR genuinely offers a greater opportunity for genuine democracy. In the end he doesn't really like either system, and advocates a web-driven e-voting form of Athenian Democracy, where all issues can be debated online and every citizen has the opportunity to vote directly on legislation.

However the concept of the web as a forum for constructive debate is often promoted most by those who have engaged with it the least. Unfortunately, and more often than not, the baser elements of human nature seem to be reinforced by the twin pillars on which the web (thus far) has thrived, anonymity and speed, and reactionary comments, provocative trolling and a general lack of civility have thus far been the bane of most attempts at open discussions. The interactivity promised by Web 2.0 has manifested as little more than a virtual Tea Party rally, fueled by fear and hate, poorly educated, misinformed and with atrocious spelling.

Perhaps the future promoted by Facebook, a walled garden within which no private actions exist, can curb this, indeed this is the route that Michael Birch is taking with his new political discussion start-up Jolitics, that currently requires a Facebook login to participate in the closed beta. If there is a digital paper-trail that links you to every post and comment you make online, will civility in discussion ensue? The Tea Party movement itself would suggest otherwise, as many at the rallies are proud to be interviewed and have their voices and views heard. They do not crave anonymity, they crave an audience and attention, and the respect of their peers.

This is the problem at the core of most large and open discussions, that all too often the motivation behind participation is not to solve a wider problem or to come to a mutually beneficial conclusion, it is instead to establish an internal hierarchy within the discussing group, a pecking order with each individual participant attempting to place themselves at the top. This conflict leads to polarizing and radicalizing views, not consensus, as individuals vying for power gravitate towards the margins of the extreme to distinguish themselves from their rivals.

A representative democracy attempts to circumvent this trait by placing power in the hands of a limited number of elected representatives, acting on behalf of the people. In a smaller group with well establish rules true debate should be possible, and the question thus becomes what is the best way to select such representatives to most accurately express the will of the people. Haworth examines one such examination as presented by John Stuart Mill, a strong advocate of PR:

In the relevant chapter of Representative Government he defends PR (based on the single transferable vote) on a number of grounds, but - most emphatically - on the grounds that it is the only system capable of guaranteeing a Parliament "containing the very elite of the country", and of thereby supplying a "supplement, or completing corrective, to the instincts of a democratic majority", namely an "instructed minority"
- Alan Haworth, The Philosophers' Magazine, Issue 51, p60

As an advocate of our current STV PR system, though decidedly not a utilitarian, in times past I may have been swayed by this argument. However events in the last 24 hours, as reported in the Irish Times, clearly demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt the error in Mill's thesis:

"Minister for Science Conor Lenihan is to officially launch a book exposing the “fiction of evolution”. Mr Lenihan will attend the launch of The Origin of Specious Nonsense by Dublin writer John J May in Buswell’s Hotel on Wednesday evening. According to the book’s website Mr May says evolution “cripples sanity, promotes myths and obscures reality”. He also said anyone who teaches evolution is “either ignorant or deliberately suppressing the known scientific facts. “It [evolution] is a toxic poisonous mind virus which destroys the hearts immune system against hope and common sense,” he added. Mr Lenihan said he is not launching the book as Minister for Science but rather as a TD because Mr May is a constituent of his."

Understandably this news caused some not inconsiderable consternation in what passes for our Public Sphere, and it was announced this morning that the author had withdrawn his invitation to the Minister.

Lets reflect on this for a moment. The Minister for Science believed that it was appropriate in his capacity as a public representative to launch an anti-evolution book because, in his own words, “diversity of opinion is a good thing”. No doubt in his previous role as Minister for Integration he would happily have attended a few BNP rallies for similar egalitarian reasons. A diversity of opinion is always preferable to a monoculture of the mind, but at least some token effort should be made towards quality control.

Let us hope, for all our sakes, that this is not Mill's "elite of the country".

Perhaps the best solution is to reexamine Haworth's Athenian model, allowing for wider decision making by referenda (like the Swiss model, along the lines proposed by Direct Democracy Ireland), tempered by a Council of Ministers drawn randomly from the citizenry akin to Labour's proposed Constitutional reform forum. Strict term limits (only serving once for a single term of a year, maybe two) and the randomness of selection should reduce opportunities for corruption and graft, and can anyone argue that random selection is any less valid a selection method than our current one based on hereditary membership of a small number of political dynasties?

We are a small nation, and despite (or indeed, because of) being shockingly over-represented in terms of the number of public representatives, there remains a corresponding dearth of true democracy. It is not enough to simply change the people within the system once every five years, it is the system itself that must be changed.

...can only get better?

I bumped into one of the architects who designed our building this morning while purchasing my morning caffeine (as in "I met him this morning", not "he designed our building this morning", but you probably figured that out already).

This was not so much of a surprise as, in a gesture of true craftsmanship, he situated his office in our building upon its completion, no doubt to his continued regret given the ease of access this gives residents to his ongoing advice when any problems with the building have arisen, with questions ranging from "What is the carrying capacity of our balcony?" and "Is the rain water in our toilet supposed to be that colour?" to "Why can I hear voices through the glowing crack in our wall?" and "Is that a load-bearing marrow?". All perfectly cromulent enquiries, as you can see.

We are thus on reasonably good speaking terms, and so it was natural of me to ask him this morning by way of greeting, "How are things?". In hindsight, asking an architect such a question in current economic climes was, perhaps, something of a mistake.

He paused. Took a deep breath. Paused again.

"I have come to believe," he opined, "That asking such a question borders on the rude"

He paused again.

"One must be more specific; How is this coffee? How are your family? The phrase 'Things' covers far too wide an area to allow for a proper answer."

'Things' must be pretty bad for architects, so.

I watched the repeat of part one of "Freefall" last night, after catching the original broadcast last week. Essentially a series of interviews with politicians, economists, bankers and journalists, it traced the events leading up to the unilateral bank guarantee given to Irish banks by the government in 2008, the 'events' being a bonus-fueled mass-hysteria amongst lending officials in a compete absence of any sort of functioning regulatory environment that brought their institutions to the brink of complete collapse, followed by a late night visit to the government by the heads of AIB and B of I with an ultimatum as subtle as "its a lovely economy you have here Minister, sure wouldn't it be a shame if anything 'unfortunate' were to happen to it", cue melodramatic music and the sounds of large cheques being cut.

This, we knew.

What was interesting was the direct assertion that either the Banking heads were criminally negligent with the information they supplied to the government when they overestimated the strength of their reserves, or they outright lied. We're not talking about Anglo Irish or Irish Nationwide here, Fianna Fail's private financiers, we're talking about the two largest financial institutions in the country threatening the government that without unilateral suport with public funds they faced total collapse within 24 hours due to a lack of liquidity whilst simultaneously erroneously portraying the strength of their assets through either criminal malice or criminal incompetence.

It was also interesting that RTE got such candid access to the parties involved, particularly Brian Lenihan, who seems to be focused on securing his future as Brian Cowen's replacement by adopting a mantra of "Based on the information I was provided at the time there was no alternative. If the decisions turn out to be wrong it is because the information I was given was wrong", in other words 'Its not my fault, the banks lied to me'. Unfortunately playing the ignorance card does't really work when you are the Minister for Finance, and its your job to know what is going on in the financial sector; its a bit like the police saying they had no idea that criminals were selling drugs, because every time they asked the criminals if they were they selling drugs, the criminals told them they weren't, and sure why would they lie?

The question must then be asked of the Minister if he deliberately looked no deeper, or if he was genuinely that incompetent?

The second part of the program is on tonight. While the whole thing is very much an exercise in 'Hindsight is 20/20', and we could have done with a lot more examinations like this by RTE at the time instead of an endless cavalcade of property shows and Eddie Hobbes, it makes for interesting viewing nonetheless.

Criminal malice on the part of the Government or criminal negligence, what a fantastic state of affairs for the nation to be in.

'Things' are be pretty bad for everyone, so.

Photo: Liffeytown @ The Ha'penny Bridge this morning, part of the Fringe

Look, an extruded plastic dingus

Well what do we have here? It seems Dublin City Council have decided to put up a number of Cyclehoops in the city centre.

Designed by Anthony Lau (who's Tweets you can follow here, if that is your particular cup of tea), the Cyclehoop can be bolted on to an existing signpost and provides parking space for two bikes. Of course while signposts are already widely in use by bicyclists, it is also fairly common to see such attached bikes subsequently collapsed on the ground with wheels "accidentally" trampled on by "careless" passer-bys, so at least this will keep the bikes upright.

The attached instructions read "Lock both wheels and the frame to the cyclehoop", which probably isn't much good if you only carry around a single d-lock though.

Still, I am pleased to see the City Council continuing to improve conditions for cyclists, even if it is a facility that I myself will rarely use. Unfortunately I don't trust my fellow Dubliners even for a minute as far as bikes are concerned; the amazing Snag Breac once had her bike stolen from outside our old ground floor flat while she was standing in our doorway less than five feet away from the bike itself, and I don't know any cyclist here who hasn't had at least one bike stolen. As far as I can tell no bike is really safe on a street, no matter how good the lock. This is why the Dublinbikes scheme suits me down to the ground, once the bike is returned to a bike station it ceases to be my concern.

As an aside this would also be my attitude towards children, specifically other people's children, as in, yes, they are fun to play with for a while, but I'm rather glad when I can give them back after a few minutes and they become someone else's problem. I think I am genetically predisposed to being a post-divorce deadbeat weekend dad.

Which is probably not a good thing.

Anyway, Cyclehoops are here, Yay!

Anger is an energy

Since Sunday I have spent a significant portion of my time traveling to and from my grandparents' house, the hospital, and points in between. My grandparents live a 40 minute bus ride away, and from there the taxi-ride on to the hospital seems to take between 20 and 40 minutes depending on the traffic. This has offered both positives and negatives to my week; on the plus side I have had an unusual amount of enforced free-time for reading while taking the bus, on the other hand I have been subjected to a ridiculous amount of talk radio while in taxis.

But first, the positives. On September 15th 2008 José Saramago posted online a love letter to his beloved Lisbon. This was to be the first of a series of blog posts, three or four per week, that the then 85 year old Portuguese Nobel Laureate would write over the following year, a regularity of posting far in excess of my own recent efforts. This year of collected thoughts was released a few months ago in English as "The Notebook". I was drawn to it on hearing of his death in June of this year, but have only now on the occasion of a multitude of bus journeys found time to read it.

Ursula Le Guin in a recent review of his penultimate novel, "The Elephant's Journey", said of Saramago:

"His preoccupations and politics and passions might seem to belong to a past age: a diehard communist impatient of dictators, subversive of orthodoxies, disrespectful of international corporations, peasant-born in a marginal country and identifying himself always with the powerless, a radical who lived on into an age when even liberals are spoken of as leftist . . . But the still more intransigent radicalism of his art makes it impossible to dismiss him from the busy chatrooms of the present. He got ahead of us; he is ahead of us. His work belongs to our future. I take comfort in this."

Throughout the year he chronicled events both personal and external, interweaving reflections on the lives of his friends with polemical (yet rational) thoughts on the war in Iraq, the Bush Presidency, the rise of Obama and the global financial crash. I began reading it almost exactly two years to the day of the publishing of the original posts, and while there is a certain warmth that arrises from the discovery of parallel tracks that at the time occupied both his mind and my own, the true wonder lies in the direct relevance of his arguments to events that continue to unfold today.

In October 2008 Saramago, with a small group of colleagues from different countries and political backgrounds, published an open letter on the unfolding financial meltdown. In it he wrote:

"The laws of the market led to a state of chaos that brought about a rescue of thousands of millions of dollars - to the culprits, not the victims. In other words, "rescue" meant "privatize the profits, nationalise the losses." This is a unique opportunity to redefine the global system in favor of social justice. There was no money to fund the fight against AIDS, nor to support feeding the world... and finally, in a real financial whirlwind, it turns out that there were enough funds to save from ruin those very same people who, by overly favoring dotcom and property bubbles, have destroyed the world economic edifice of "globalisation"."
- José Saramago, "The Notebook", p55

It is impossible to read these words today in Ireland without hearing a striking condemnation of NAMA, the Anglo Irish bailout, and almost every action taken by the current government to protect the interests of their financial backers in the property and financial sectors. Ronan Lyons and Prof Brian Lucey recently published a jaw-dropping list of a 100 ways to spend the €25 billion of taxpayers' money that has been pumped into Anglo to keep it afloat; read it and try not to cry.

And now for the bad stuff.

Talk radio is the comments thread of old media. It is both the forum and the troll, the spam and the vitriol, the flame and the gasoline that fuels it. At times when advocating the internet as a medium for education and enlightenment, true conversation and discourse, I despair that the format of the medium itself, the anonymity and immediacy, engenders and facilitates the very basest of human actions. After being subjected to far too many hours of Mr Joseph Duffy and his cohorts in the back of dank and uncomfortable taxis this week I now absolve the internet of all its supposed sins, for I now know that it is humanity itself that is vile, small-minded and selfish, and the internet, like radio, is but an enabler.

When advising groups on the web I wax lyrical about its power to create a dialogue between them their organisation and their users or members, that it empowers a conversation and lets all voices be heard. After a week of Liveline and its equivalents I now believe that perhaps this is a bad thing, that those most motivated to take to the airwaves or forums are those least likely to welcome a genuine dialogue. There is a violence in their words, an aggression and desire to dominate, not communicate, and I am subsequently prompted to replay in my mind with horror any online infractions and lapses that I myself have succumbed to, such occurrences being regrettably all too numerous.

Talk radio is a commercial enterprise. Revenue is generated from advertising, advertising rates are determined by audience size, and like motorists slowing down to stare at a car crash, audience numbers are all too often driven by a perverse obsession with violence. My grandfather justifies his viewing of Fox News by rhetorically asking why would he want to listen to people who agree with him; he watches and his blood pressure rises, he gets angry and feels alive. As John Lydon said, "Anger is an energy", and talk radio feeds off this energy, selecting callers from the public to air on the basis of those whose views will outrage the most, stimulating more calls in response and larger audiences in turn.

Internet forums and comments threads function in a similar way, while larger sites may at times make a play of switching off their comments sections because "conversations" have become too heated, those sites' Sales Managers love aggressive commentators because they prompt more outraged responses - more responses being posted means more page views, more page views mean more ad revenues. As with talk radio it is in the commercial interests of many sites to cater to and encourage diatribes of the most reactionary kind.

Thus the market drives this faux-discourse; Commercially motivated populism has always dominated media, but what is now touted as the democratization of the airwaves is nothing of the sort, the invisible hand of the market maintains a tighter grip than ever and under the illusion of open discourse society itself suffers as base negativity is actively encouraged and the language of violence becomes the accepted norm.

Manufactured anger is the energy that powers our new 'Democratic' public sphere, the toxic waste left behind will poison our society for generations to come.

As I leave the last word on this to Saramago, my only regret whilst reading "The Notebook" is that I have come to his words only after his passing.

"We live in a society that seems to have made violence a way of social interaction. The aggression that is inherent in this species of ours, and which at times we think that we have managed to control through education, bursts brutally up from the depths in the past twenty years, manifesting itself right across the social sphere, prompted by modes of idleness that have stopped using simple hedonism to condition the consumer's mentality and instead use violence."
- José Saramago, "The Notebook", p23

Cellular Entropy

Sunday AM, my phone rings. It sits at the side of the bed as I sleep, never switched off, but never ringing. People know better than to phone me on Sunday AM. Schrodinger's Phone, neither off nor in use, existing in a permanent half-state, the embodiment of cellular entropy.

Sunday AM, my phone rings. Suddenly it is real, it exists, it is an object in use. The concept of a phone has become the reality of a phone, hard and tangible, intruding into my semi-consciousness, a digital anchor that drags along the seabed of my dream-state, fighting against the tides of slumber that seek to pull me further and further from the shores of wakefulness.

Sunday AM, my phone rings. Something is very wrong.

My phone remains on overnight for one reason and one reason alone.

At times I have been more distant from my family, rarely have I been closer than I am now. My relationship with my family is reciprocal and harmonic, they are as close or as distant as I encourage them to be. In times past, when travelling at the furthest most point of this familial orbit, news of events has taken days or weeks to reach me, if at all. Visits home have resulted in long lists of Events of Note that have transpired without me, hospitalisations, illnesses, births and occasional deaths, none of which were relayed to me at the time because no-one wanted to bother me.

I wanted to be bothered.

My phone remains on so that I can be bothered.

Sunday AM, my phone rings. After many months of regular interaction my family now know to call me. Something, therefore, is very wrong.

Late on Saturday night my Grandmother had a stroke. Another stroke. Thankfully mild this time, a good recovery is now expected. This was not the prognosis on Sunday AM.

The actions that we take, the activities we do in preparation for something that we never imagine will actually come to pass, the separation in our mind between the concept and reality, the Un-Imagined and the Real, is this what allows us to accept our inevitable mortality and still arise from bed each day? Empirically we know what one day will come to pass, but we deliberately choose to un-see the future. Is our continued ability to exist and function based on an ongoing Sin of Omission, a passive lie we tell ourselves to mask the horror of the finite?

Perhaps, but the active lie of an infinite afterlife holds less joy for me, a true Sin of Commission, as Aquinas would say (though perhaps not in this exact context).

Sunday AM, my phone rings. I know that the phone may ring, I leave it on for just such a purpose, but in the very moment that its purpose is fulfilled I curse it for ever existing.