This is the video I shot (with hand-held Flash camera, someone tweeted about how I managed to keep my hand up for an hour) of one of Twitter’s creators, Blaine Cooke, visiting Teacamp, a gathering of Whitehall webbies and hangers on.
Cooke kindly spent a hour answering questions about Twitter – where it came from, is now and where it’s heading to. In other words, lots of insider knowledge
I’ve seen a few media reports now on yesterday’s unprecedented new media revolt against the Daily Mail.
Of all of them the Huffington Post’s takes the biscuit for ‘worst take’. They reckon it’s about a fight between the Daily Mail and The Guardian. Seriously. I suspect a showbizzy intern selected their quote heavy, googled contribution.
Those, like Fry, who are “deeply dippy about all things digital”, argue that the internet is the ultimate tool of democracy. But it could just be that historians â€" if they are so permitted â€" might look back on this period as the moment when the techno-savvy few seized control of the minds of the many.
The blogger Guido Fawkes seems effectively to run British politics. Ashton Kutcher â€" actor and tweeter with over three million followers: “life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift” â€" is our spiritual leader. And Fry? Well, he’s bigger than both of them.
Where to start? Iain Dale has a lot more blog traffic than Guido. Not sure what Kutcher’s in there for save to keep the ‘celeb’s rule’ idea going (and his Twitter following like that of other Hollywood celebs doesn’t seem to translate to followers automatically watching their shows). And as for Fry?
I was actually dipping in-and-out of the #janmoir Twitter stream yesterday and very, very few of the tweets were Fry Retweets. Sure, his numbers are huge but the ‘Twitosphere’ is far, far, far huger. Presumably far too huge for most journalist’s to get their minds around.
Edited to add: Thanks to to commentator Ian Hopkinson for pointing to some evidence.
Here’s the trendastic tracking of #janmoir
Showing it peaking at 11am – @stephenfry first tweet on #janmoir was at 12:27pm.
What the ubiquitous Fry mentions in their reports are about is a journalistic laziness and the ever-present need for a celeb mention. A real piece of good work would be to actually track #janmoir all the way from where the first rock was thrown out to the furthest reach of the ripples.
Such as the excellent American analyst Evgeny Morozov’s tweet:
notes on the new public sphere: Twitter has shrunk the Atlantic and purely local UK scandals are now global news
That’s why HuffPost bothered putting Gately on the front page – #janmoir was number one or two trending topic when they woke up, and it had that celeb angle they love.
It’s notable that they’ve ignored what it by far the most game-changing event on Twitter this week, #trafigura – something which Gill Hornby in the Telegraph thinks is also down to Mr Fry.
From his palm-top device .. he struck a major blow for press freedom â€" when the Dutch company Trafigura won an order preventing the press from discussing the impact of its pollutants on the African coast, Fry tweeted the details to his vast audience and the gag was lifted.
Now anyone whose reads me knows I like video .. So watch this …
N’kay. All done?
Jan Moir is a Daily Mail columnist whose printed words have today caused her to reach for her boss’ PR agency (because of an Internet revolt that Twitter was at the heart of that blew up the Press Complaints Commission’s website) in order to say she’s not what you think she is.
But listen to what Richard Yates, from black experience, is telling you – focus on what they said, not who you think they are.
And this is very relevant to this situation. The Mail, and others, publish Moir’s sort of rant all the time. In the official ‘process’ it will be judged on what she said, not who she is accused of being.
If what we want is what she (and others) write banished from the mainstream, not to silence but to place them firmly on the fringes, then how is that achieved?
How do we define her words? I ask, is what she wrote heterosexist or is it homophobic?
Cue Wikipedia:
Heterosexism is a term that applies to negative attitudes, bias, and discrimination in favor of opposite-sex sexuality and relationships. It can include the presumption that everyone is heterosexual or that opposite-sex attractions and relationships are the norm and therefore superior.
Homophobia (from Greek homĂłs: one and the same; phĂłbos: fear, phobia) is defined as an “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals”, or individuals perceived to be homosexual; it is also defined as “unreasoning fear of or antipathy toward homosexuals and homosexuality”, “fear of or contempt for lesbians and gay men”, as well as “behavior based on such a feeling”.
I don’t think Jan Moir is about fear, she’s about superiority. I think this because that’s what she wrote.
Yates is laying out for us how, exactly, we undermine the sort of power which a Moir (there’s a type) wields, especially including their power in claims of ‘victim’ or ’silencing’. Here’s a template, from other minorities, which should be grasped in order to define her as ‘fringe’, ‘extreme’, someone who says she’s superior.
Drop ‘Moir is homophobic’ for ‘Moir is heterosexist’.
That’s my contribution to the aftermath of today: Learn from others and be precise in attacking power.
Make them go look ‘heterosexist’ up and in the process completely change the coming debate over ’silencing free speech’, the ‘power of the mob’ and the ubiquitous raising of that cop-out phrase ‘PC’.
If the famous media gaggers, the libel law firm Carter-Ruck, scourge of Private Eye, thought they’d scored another famous victory (these guys are big on bragging) suppressing news they hadn’t reckoned with social media.
In a few hours American bloggers will start picking up on the story enmasse. What’s Carter-Ruck going to do then? As @ElrikMerlin just pointed out to me ‘this is Streisand Effect in action’ – something which I have blogged about before.
When Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov tried the same trick, and created the same effect, it generated this quote from Boris Johnson (one of those inadvertently whacked by Usmanov’s ‘take-down’ action):
We live in a world where internet communication is increasingly vital, and this is a serious erosion of free speech.
This is a really excellent reminder of a web basic, which is unfortunately often forgotten as websites add and add and add and in the process become bloated.
“Think of your Web audience as lazy, selfish and ruthless,” said Michael Gold, West Gold Editorial principal quoting usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s apt description of today’s impatient, task-oriented Web audience during his remarks at a recent ONA panel. “Web audiences are on a missionâ€"they’re task-oriented.”
There’s no statement from either Channel Four or the show about this out-of-the-blue block but it appears from past Daily Show statements on their forum that they only do the blocking on the request of a country’s license holder. Incidentally, I was able to leave a comment on their website and I see that the show’s producers do respond to comment. Channel Four offers no such option, there is no comment space offered for the show and they have no forum or similar space for viewers to talk back to them.
What is particularly sad/appalling about Channel Four’s actions is that all online video from the extensive Daily Show online archive is now being blocked for UK – yet Channel Four is only showing the past week’s shows online! Do they even have rights to episodes from before they started showing the Daily Show, because I can’t watch clips from 2000.
What is so stupid about this (and it has multiple layers of stupid) is that I have been posting clips on my blog which promotes the show Channel Four have rights to! Now none of those embedded clips work and so the show gets no (free) promotion from me or the many others who embed clips.
When the Daily Show’s sister program The Colbert Report was being shown on a UK cable channel you couldn’t watch clips on their website – but you could watch clips embedded on other websites. This makes complete sense as if you liked what you saw it promoted the cable channel’s show and made it far more likely that you’d bother to subscribe to it. It also makes it appear that C4’s block request included blocking embedded clips.
At the same time that one bit of C4 takes this completely stupid action another makes clips from C4 news freely available, even ad free!
Here’s another stupidity. I have watched clips from US shows which have served up country specific ads. On sites like HuffPost I get UK ads. So if you can recognise I’m from the UK you can monetise it to the benefit of the UK license holder. Hardly rocket science.
What C4 are doing is tragic for the Daily Show itself as it is going to lose a significant chunk of its UK audience. All – one would assume – in the name of driving viewers back to watching the show on More4 ON TV!
I hope that the show’s resident Brit, the hugely popular John Oliver, learns about it and tells Channel Four to stop behaving like idiots.
Of course people can watch Daily Show clips if they know how to get around the block by hiding their computer’s ip address. This means C4 lose out on any hope of ad revenue. I won’t even bother linking to how because a simple Google (or a look on the Daily Show’s forums where they allow comments explaining how) will tell you what to do. So not only are C4 idiots but they think the rest of us UK fans of the show are too.
Twitter insights: Blaine Cooke @ teacamp
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