To understand
whether Britain’s political system represents the rights and interests of the
vast majority of people, it is necessary to analyse the technology available, how
pressure groups influence debate and how the media frame public opinion. Adam
Curtis’ documentary series The Power of Nightmares:
“Baby it’s Cold Outside” (2004) claims that in the past, politicians
offered us dreams of a better world. When this optimistic vision failed, people
lost faith in ideologies. Today’s politicians are seen as managers of public
life, instead of delivering dreams they promise to protect us from nightmares.
Threats like the war on terror, that Curtis claims is an imagined threat, an
illusion created and played out through the media. Such a view marks out a
decline in trust in democratic politics, which in the last decade have become
increasingly trivialised, with political consultants attempting to shape the
public attitude. The Big Society aims to provide a platform
to communicate, but pressure groups have emerged with similar intentions to
engage communities into public discussions. These assemblies allow people to
voice their ideas for a better future through collaborative production.
Declaring it’s time for citizens to represent themselves. The revolution might
not be televised but misrepresentation through the media seems inevitable.
In
the book The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere (1989), Jürgen Habermas argues that in the twentieth
century the critical concept of public opinion has been replaced by mass
public, manipulated by commercial and party political interest groups
(Outhwaite, 1996: 25). This decline of the public sphere thesis underplays the
potential for social movements and mediated publics. Especially when we consider that technological
advances are ‘ altering the way we are born, we live, we learn, we work, we
produce, we consume, we dream, we fight, or we die’ (Castells, 2000: 31). Providing
access to broader opinions, access to non-mainstream and localised political
material, and offering greater interactivity than other media. The rise of
communications media has overcome barriers and ‘made the boundaries of all
social spaces more permeable’ (Meyrowitz, 1994: 67). Rather than being
overwhelmed or distracted, ‘emergent publics’ (Angus, 2001: 55) have become
more focused on relevance and collaborative production. Wikipedia being the
most famous example, the non-profit organisation has thousands of volunteers contributing
to articles around the world with collective action and shared responsibility. The
‘people’s encyclopedia’ has become one of the largest and most popular websites
on the Internet (Alexa, 2011). Hans Magnus Enzensberger emphasises the capacity
of an individual to be an active contributor to his or her own condition,
unlike in ‘marches, columns, parades’ in which people are simply ‘pushed to and
fro’; the mobilised persons would be ‘as free as dancers, as aware as football
players, as surprising as guerrillas’ (Hands, 2011: 50). Enzensberger details
the capacity to create multidirectional communication, disseminating knowledge
and information on a scale and time-frame that was impossible before the
emergence of the Internet. In recent
years digital activism has come to widespread attention, the power of
communications, networks and mobile technology, demonstrates the sheer power of
cumulative connections (Hands, 2011: 3). The Internet has become a key resource for
activism, allowing groups to raise awareness in issues that might oppose the
mainstream. WikiLeaks are an organisation that takes this further by publishing
and commenting on leaked documents. Designed
to protect whistle-blowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive
materials to communicate to the public (WikiLeaks, 2011). The organisation has
been applauded and condemned for its approach to releasing information to the
public, but despite the mixed reaction, there’s no denying that people coming
together can make a difference. Since the publications of CableGate, WikiLeaks
has faced an unprecedented global financial blockade by major finance companies
including Mastercard, Visa and PayPal (Wikipedia).
People should not be afraid of their
governments. Governments should be afraid of their people – V for Vendetta (2006).
The
first step is admitting there’s a problem, and then collectively, people can
work towards finding a solution. Fight
Club (1999) could be interpreted as an example of how activist groups mobilise
to challenge the mainstream. The narrator attends support groups, becomes
increasingly disillusioned with consumer culture and through collaborative participation
leads to the collapse of several financial buildings. The Anonymous Group parallel
Fight Club, they are a large,
decentralized group of individuals who share common interests. Members don’t
talk about their involvement and they conceal their identities. The imagery of
the "suit without a head" represents leaderless organization and
anonymity. When appearing in public the Internet-based group use the Guy Fawkes
mask popularised by V for Vendetta
(2006) for ‘collective identification and simultaneous anonymity’ (The BBC, 2011). The group became well
known in 2008, launching an online campaign against the Church of Scientology.
Through a denial of service attack, they caused the website to crash and then
manipulated Google search results to ensure that the Church of Scientology are the
first hit whenever anyone enters the search string "dangerous cult" (The Telegraph, 2008). They have been
responsible for similar attacks and highlight the collective potential for Internet
‘hacktivism’ (Sharp, 2010). Coordinating and organising through communications
media for political purposes.
Another
people-powered movement that utilises the Internet are Occupy Wall Street and the
other occupations around the world (occupywallst.org). Organized through a
non-binding consensus based collective decision making tool known as a
"people's assembly". They are fighting back against major banks and
multinational corporations, who they believe are responsible for the ‘economic
collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations’. The movement
is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to fight back
against ‘the richest 1% of people that are writing the rules of an unfair
global economy that is foreclosing on our future’. The concept behind the ‘We
Are the 99 Percent’ slogan began on Tumblr (Weinstein, 2011), a microblogging
platform that allows users to share various media. Its creator had no clue that
it would go viral and become a touchstone for a protest movement soon to spread
across the world (motherjones.com). Facebook was used to launch the Occupy
London campaign on 15th October, the objective to reclaim space close
to the London Stock Exchange. The movement use communications media to raise
awareness, thus bypassing authorities, with Twitter being used effectively to
group conversation and promote ideas. The
mainstream media have been inconsistent with their coverage and increasingly
people have turned to photography and video-sharing services to obtain
information. YouTube and Flickr have been particularly popular, providing
images of heavy handed police tactics and the solidarity between protesters. This
method of documentary is a media output where the technology, the aesthetic,
the social and the political intersect. The visual text has played an important
role in shaping the story and asserting factuality. Walter Benjamin believes ‘that ideas are
structured as images, and that what is at stake is therefore a praxis that can
operate with images – a politics of images, not a figurative or metaphorical
politics’ (Weigel, 1996, p. 10).
The media are actively involved in
constituting the social world. By making images and information available to
individuals located in distant locales, the media shape and influence the
course of events and, indeed, create events that would not have existed in
their absence (Thompson, 1995: 117).
The
Internet offers many ways of connecting cultural-political content in a variety
of forms and styles to audiences (Collins, 2006: 353). The problem is
misrepresentation and the role the media play in shaping the public opinion. In
Stuart Hall’s (1980) theory, the assumption is that any society’s dominant
ideas will be encoded into its media messages. Let’s consider youth audiences,
as unemployment continues to rise, university fees have trebled and there’s the
perception that young people lack interest in politics. Such influence becomes
particularly problematic for young people when certain media accounts,
especially newspapers contain a bias towards negative content. The findings
from this paper claim that it’s a long known criminological fact that a small
number of young people tend to commit a disproportionately high number of
offences, and that positive contributions to society by young people tend to be
both overlooked and overshadowed. In Stan Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2002) emergent groups are referred to
as a ‘threat to societal values and interests’, which are ‘presented in a
stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media’. In response to the UK
riots in 2011, The Guardian report
that David Cameron blamed absent fathers and poor school discipline, whilst on
the other hand Ed Miliband blamed MPs & bankers for culture of
irresponsibility. Irresponsibility acknowledged by pressure groups and the
opposition leader but ignored by the Prime Minister. Youth is a problematic
category but the media defining them as the ‘broken society’ is also problematic.
The Conservative Party’s white knight, the Big Society needs to replicate the
grass roots revolution that was influential for Barack Obama. Without the
Internet, Barack Obama wouldn’t have won the Democratic Primary, and would not
have been elected President (Hands, 2011). Obama opened up a dialogue with
people through new technology. This needs to happen in Britain otherwise the
Big Society will be seen as just an imagined community. The government needs to
do more to engage with wider communities, create opportunities and educate
disillusioned groups. The media have an important role because they have the
potential to influence the public but issues of trust, party allegiance and
alternative sources have led to the fragmentation of collective values.
The
Internet has become an important political platform, national borders have
become much less important and there’s growing organisational complexity in
contemporary life. Global economic problems dictate the news and pressure
groups have raised even more questions about trust and accountability. People are
engaging with different, rather than shared, forms of media output (Washbourne,
2010) and the concern is that they ‘will engage with such different ideas that
they will no longer desire to say anything to each other’. People spend an
increased amount of time consuming mass media, but with so much information
available it’s difficult to find accurate representation. This fragmentation
has led to declining television audiences, and forced programme makers to
redesign political broadcasts into entertainment packages. Rather than
sustained and serious analysis, news and current affairs programmes are
shorter, there’s an enhanced role for the reporter who often becomes part of
the story, stories are provided with a good-versus-evil orientation and
celebrities are used as key ingredients of the programmes. This model has been
criticised, and rightly so, because although there’s potential for the content
to reach a greater audience the content seems to be in the best interests of
the media in much the same way as globalisation. To increase profit through
commercialisation, benefiting from larger markets and generating the highest
possible return in a ‘competitive climate’. The decline of the public sphere is
evident, primarily because the media have too much control and powerful
organisation control the information broadcast.
It
appears that the political system is outdated; globalisation and
commercialisation have made it more difficult to be represented properly
through the current model. The mainstream media manipulate the news and are
able to shape the public opinion to ensure profit maximisation and market
control. The Internet provides a gateway to access and distribute information, and
through collaborative production each person can participate, make a proposal,
raise questions, express their opinion and have a consensus regarding the
outcome. This empowers individuals and collectively groups can challenge
dominant views. Pressure groups have emerged and shown that it’s possible to
use various forms of media to show the world that people can make a difference.
Unfortunately we have also seen that the Internet can be used to censor
material and makes it harder not easier for people to be interested. To resolve
the problem, the government need to engage audiences and fulfil promises, the
blame culture needs to change before we’re able to move forward. This won’t
happen overnight but rather through evolution than revolution.
Word count: 2025
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