Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Choose a current or recent political event, and discuss it in terms of its relationship to relevant political theories.

In the wake of the furor created in response to Wikileaks,
I will discuss the developing role of Internet media in politics.



In this essay I will outline a few Internet sites that are changing the face of the media. The focus of this essay will be the political impact of the controversial website 'Wikileaks', however, I will also discuss social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook as they have become the favoured form in how information is dispersed. Also making the debate is the ubiquitous blog; the format that even China has found impossible to suppress despite their strict online controls.

An idealised view of the media would be that they report and represent the views of the people to those invested with decision-making powers; they inform society about the actions of government, educating voters on the issues of the day; and act as a public watchdog of the public interest, defending the ordinary citizen against a possibly over-mighty government through their powers of exposure, investigation and interrogation.

However, Marxist's view the media as integrated into the existing economic and political elites and therefore reflecting their interests. The liberal approach sees the media as facilitating social agreement through the dissemination of information and contrary opinion. The classical Marxist view sees one class as manipulating the media's content.

In the 1950s, television eclipsed newspapers and radio as the dominant source for information regarding politics for the British people. Since then politicians have worked hard to master this mode of communication. Thatcher led the way by being the first leading politician to go professional when it came to image for the cameras. An art that was mastered by chameleon like Blair and now Cameron with his note-less speeches appears to be a dab-hand.

Along with professional image gurus came the role of the spin doctor. To counteract slurs from the tabloid press, parties have built up strong press offices to match them. Over the years they have become more effective by being populated with former media high-flyers who have been embedded in the media for many years. However, what began as an asset capable of spinning media criticism soon became a catalyst for a widespread distrust of politicians and perception of them as professional liars.

With so much of the media in corporate hands and powerful government press offices many individuals noticed a void. A void that with the internet came a platform for them to fill in the blanks. Derived from its description web-log, the blog began the online journalist revolution by allowing ordinary people from all walks of life to write about anything they wanted and have a free platform from which anyone can follow what they were writing about. It wasn't long before these ordinary people started using this format politically; to report what was missing from the mainstream media or comment on what was in it. Nowadays, pretty much everyone and their cat has a blog. However, blogs can be quite wordy and with attention spans not what they used to be, the Internet 'newspaper' needed a format that reflected the headlines and captions that dominate majority of the mainstream media.

Enter the social networks of Facebook and Twitter, the format of these sites encourage short statements which other users can comment on. They have become phenomenal at the spreading of news and gossip; organising like-minded groups and showing support for causes. This has become especially the case when there is a lack of such a podium or exposure in the mainstream media.

Finally we come to the most important aspect of the news organisation, the source. For the ordinary person blogging away, passing on interesting stories using Facebook, they have only been able to report on information gleaned from their own experiences because unlike professional journalists, they don't usually develop confidential sources from which the derive their story. With the creation of the Wikipedia began the concept of a virtual evolving encyclopedia that is in the hands of anyone who is willing to create, edit, update or verify the information. This allows Wikipedia to have its finger on the pulse of the ever changing world of information. In 2006, the Wiki-format inspired something new, a whistle-blower site known as Wikileaks which upload any and all leaked documents within this format to allow users to verify the data themselves and for the first time individuals from around the world had a massive database of source data.

The latest major release has been accompanied by a chorus of disapproval from the establishment. Politician's instantly sprang to action. The mainstream media's response was less predictable, with many pointing out that the West will be a more dangerous place if politicians cannot communicate with each other secretly. However, it could be argued that the world becomes a far more dangerous place when they do.
As a result of being shunned by the mainstream media journalists' who are toeing the government/corporate line; coming under attack by computer viruses; and finding that support from companies such as Amazon and PayPal have been withdrawn. WikiLeaks recorded a huge growth in its social media following through Twitter and Facebook.
As calls grew from many political figures around the world for the WikiLeaks website to be closed and its founder Julian Assange to face legal charges, the Twitter and Facebook accounts have become the central hubs for supporters to remain informed of the latest revelations released, the plight of the founders and to donate money towards the cause.
Although the importance of social media has become a rather overused early 21st Century buzz phrase, with regard to a subversive organisation such as WikiLeaks, it is easy to see just what important tools Twitter and Facebook are.
And with much of the ‘truth’ cleverly put in the hands of mainstream media organisations and hundreds of thousands of active and engaged social network supporters ready to respond instantly to spread the word it’s very hard to see how any individual, government or army can stop the leaks from continuing (beehivecity.com).

The simple ability to leak this much information is a result of radical advances in data storage. On a purely physical level, it's very hard to leak hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper. These memos were simply put on a USB stick. By making it so easy to transfer information, the whims of individual whistle-blowers are more easily realised than they ever have been before.
The central attack is that Wikileaks puts lives at risk, by potentially revealing sources. It seems a fair concern, but so far the Government has been unable to show any repercussion from Wikileak's releases. It's certainly not an attack which can be utilised today, where embarrassment is the most likely outcome.
Politicians shouldn't be the only people with egg on their face. The media should be embarrassed as well. Large parts of it have mistaken their role of truth-seeker for that of the establishment's press office.
The condemnation from the mainstream media of course would not be a surprise to Marxists' who consider the media part of the 'state apparatus'. The reality may be a little more complex than this but the reaction to the Wikileaks dilemma reveals there is some substantial truth to it, or at least more truth than those working in the media would like to admit. The genuine role of the media, the role it must adopt if society is to function in a practically and morally coherent way, is to reveal power, to pester power, to hound it with questions. Because power cannot be trusted.
The only difference between Wikileaks and other news organisations is that Wikileaks is doing its job properly. Nowadays, news broadcasts are saturated with what are little more than transcripts of government briefings. Just this week, much of the content about the student protest outside parliament read like an internal memo from the Met police, complete with flat-out inaccuracies. Very occasionally the police inaccuracies are so glaring that it becomes impossible to maintain the pretence. This is what happened with Ian Tomlinson. But it doesn't always happen.
Wikileaks represents the latest development of the new online media, one that cuts out the middle man to reveal the documents in full. As corporations and governments strengthen their control over the mainstream media, the Internet has become the light in the darkness by giving individuals the power to do the job that our journalists' should be doing.





references



http://www.beehivecity.com/hightech/wikileaks-supporters-embrace-twitter-facebook-as-accounts-boom114012132/