John Humphrys asks: are the majority of communications pointless, or is there now an added richness to debate?
Every profession has its heretics and journalism is no exception – even though it’s a trade rather than a profession. But it is rare for a journalist to question the very essence of the thing he does. Yet that’s what the writer, Charlie Brooker, has done in what will be his last column for a while in the Guardian. He thinks there is just far too much talk and noise about. And far too much back-talk from readers, bloggers, tweeters, trolls and everyone else wanting to say their bit. Is he right, or should we be glad we live in an era where communication is so easy, so cheap and so open to anyone who wants to express an opinion?
Brooker wrote in his final column in Monday’s Guardian: “I’ve recently been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of jabber in the world: a vast cloud of blah I felt I was contributing to every seven days.” He went on: “Right now I don’t ‘get’ most forms of communication. There’s just so much of it. Everybody talking at once and all over each other; everyone on the planet typing words into their computers, for ever, like I’m doing now. I fail to see the point of roughly 98% of human communication at the moment, which indicates I need to stroll around somewhere quiet for a bit.”
It is certainly true that the internet has radically changed the way journalism now works. In the days when journalists could be read only within the paper pages of their journals, they could write in lofty isolation from the readers who paid them to write it. Of course there was always the letters page where readers could challenge what had been written, but generally the journalist made no more contribution to the discussion. By the time the awkward letters appeared, he or she would be contemplating the next issue on which to pontificate.
Brooker says he still believes in the separation of articles and letters pages but it is hardly possible any more. Now, newspapers are increasingly read online rather than in paper form and this allows readers immediately to post their responses, which appear directly beneath the hallowed prose of the journalist. Such responses are often none too complimentary. The notorious thin skin of journalists is stretched even thinner.
Private Eye ran a piece in its latest edition claiming that Brooker was quitting (at least temporarily) because his request that his readers’ responses should not be published online below his columns was turned down by his editor, Alan Rusbridger. Brooker denies that he ever made such a request but he makes no secret of his dislike for the public airing of each and every reader’s comments, whether in the form of unarticulated applause or, more usually, outright hostility. The Private Eye piece quoted one of his colleagues as saying: “Imagine working in an office where your bosses insisted on displaying the most horrible things that people had said about you on a big noticeboard. You’d have a good case for workplace bullying, wouldn’t you?”
The issue here, though, is not just the tender sensitivity of journalists. What troubles many people, and by no means only journalists themselves, is that the instant publication of instant thoughts which the internet makes possible militates against the very thing that journalistic commentary is supposed to be about. That purpose, historically, has been to allow someone with a mind and knowledge to stand back from the hurly-burly of events and controversy in order to think more deeply about an issue and so contribute to the public understanding of it. That requires time, because thinking requires time. But if the product of that thoughtfulness is to be exposed to the instant attack of the thoughtless, then it seems to undermine the whole exercise.
In particular it is the speed of response the internet makes possible that alarms believers in the old way of doing things. Because speed is possible it becomes obligatory and speed, it’s argued, is the enemy of serious thinking. All that can be communicated is thoughtless, knee-jerk prejudice.
From this point of view many believe the chief villain of modern communications is Twitter. Twitter exists to provide instant communication from one person to potentially millions, but by restricting any particular message to 140 characters the message is bound to be unthought-through and banal. This might not matter if tweeting were used only to communicate trivia but increasingly public figures feel obliged to respond instantly to anything that happens in the world by tweeting an opinion. How can such an immediate and circumscribed response be anything other than unconsidered and vacuous?
To others, however, this disdain for instant modern communications looks like special pleading on behalf of a threatened closed shop. Surely journalists and commentators, many of whom get lots of money to air their views, ought to be open to challenge, and if that is instant, so much the better. After all, although these journalist commentators are supposed in theory to spend much time researching and reflecting upon the issue they are addressing, in practice it may be rather different. They are up against deadlines, have just got back late from lunch and bash out whatever comes into their heads. So isn’t it a good idea that those who may know a great deal more about the issue in question should be able to rebut them at once and have their rebuttal available for everyone else to read?
Not all journalists take the Brooker line. Sarah Sands, the editor of London’s Evening Standard, told me on the Today programme on Tuesday that the energy spent in online controversy between journalists and readers reminded her of the vitality of eighteenth-century public life, the world of John Wilkes and Edmund Burke and the overnight pamphleteers. Theirs was a world of furious quarrelling and opinion-trading and they would be very at home in the world of Twitter, she claimed (though the idea of the very cerebral Edmund Burke, author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, tweeting, may stretch credulity a bit).
Defenders of social media argue that its importance goes way beyond its effect on journalism. This revolution in communications has been central to much bigger revolutions, including the social and political revolutions in the Arab world and beyond. Blogging and tweeting are vital to the growing opposition movements in Russia and China. The hurt feelings of journalists and the apprehension that, as Brooker claims, 98% of communications may be pointless are a small price to pay.
So what are we to make of it? What, indeed, are we to make of columns such as this one, written precisely in order to stimulate online debate? Does it add to the richness of the world that such debate should be publicly engaged? Or is it all, as Brooker claims, just a load of jabber?
Presumably, if you’re bothering to reply, by the very fact of doing so you’re taking the former view. But do you also think there is anything in the argument that in the world of online journalism, blogs and tweets we are allowing the opportunity to communicate to run far ahead of anything worth communicating?
