Don’t shoot the messenger for the means of communication

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” – Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963)

A grim piece of video footage appeared online recently. It was grim for a number of reasons. These reasons have been bashed out at length both online and, to certain extent, in the mainstream media. I, along with many people, will have found much to recommend both sides of the argument. A young woman has been vilified and subjected to sometimes startling abuse.
This is difficult to condone, given her age. Those who argue that the ugly sentiments she expressed were symptomatic of a destructive mindset cannot be ignored either. As the father of a daughter, the video chills me because it is among the many hundreds online, which signpost the fact that growing up, youthful indiscretion and mistakes cannot be considered in any way private or forgettable.
In theory at least, someone expressing the kind of sentiments this young woman did would have the spots knocked off them fairly quickly by life experience. When you’re 16 or 17, you perhaps don’t realise that you cannot treat people in a certain way because of what they earn. That’s the theory at least.
There is no justification for some of the comments posted online about this young woman of privilege. I urge anyone with the time to go online and read the vast threads on this topic. The range of opinion is interesting.
I want to follow a slightly different line from support or criticism, however. While I can see that in some ways childhood is no longer a bounded, enclosed space where we are free to make our mistakes before moving on to adulthood and sense, I can also see that people frustrated by inequality, privilege and derision want a vent for their anger. We have all met people like this girl and her tormentors in the course of our lives. On both sides they are not uncommon, however we feel about them.
What is dubious in the furore is what has been inherently flawed about arguments of this kind before. The internet does not create these people or the societal manifestations they represent, it merely gives people access to them. A fear of change and the technology that facilitates it is nothing new and, in fact, has a long history.
Reactionary newspaper articles that criticise Twitter as a medium because of what sentient human beings, products of their society, choose to say on it are hopelessly off the mark. If you have a problem with the things people say or why they say them, then blame whichever opposite you oppose in the nature v nurture debate.
If you prefer, you can do as I do and scratch your head and wonder what on earth is going on, hoping, perhaps in vain, that maybe equality and social justice might start to be recognised as a good starting point where incidents of this kind don’t happen in private or online.
In contrast to this unseemly incident, I want to present another case study where the internet and public exposure have been used to shed light on something that would have remained in the shadows if the medium had not existed.
The Huffington Post reported a rape case this week. It describes the charging of two 16-year-old defendants in Ohio, both of whom are members of the local American football team. The victim was allegedly drugged and carried between parties by the perpetrators while unconscious. The reason this information has come to light is thanks to ‘Knight Sec’, a part of the hacktivist group ‘Anonymous’, famous for their attacks on well-known corporations in the aftermath of the Julian Assange case.
The group has released documents and images taken from the computer of a private individual that shed troubling light on the case which, up until now, had been swept under the carpet. In recent days, it has been announced that a former student at Ohio State University is no longer attending the institution following the release online of a video in which he glorified the rape. The Huffington Post reports that the university’s official Twitter account tweeted the following on December 7, “Michael Nodianos is no longer a student at The Ohio State University.”
Whether his departure was voluntary or imposed remains to be seen but what does not is a video in which he jokes about the rape in question. When asked what he would do if his daughter was the victim he says, “If that was my daughter, I wouldn’t care. I would just let her be dead.” He goes on, “And is it really rape if you don’t know if she wanted to or not? She might have wanted it. That might have been her final wish.” In the background as he makes his statements, people laugh and at times seem to goad and encourage him into greater extremity.
Laws governing libel and slander have existed for a long time. Free speech has existed for a long time and has been enshrined in law and hearts of various populations for a roughly similar length of time. However, technology changes access. What is said ‘in private’ might not remain so. Innocence in using the internet is not confined to innocent victims who didn’t realise the consequences of their actions.
I drive a car but, shamefully, I cannot deal with anything more than the most basic problems with it. I use a potential killing machine in public and I don’t really know how it works. Technology is a facilitator and to say it is positive or negative is facile.
Communication technology is a tool used by the population and ­reflects those who use it and using it to highlight issues and be a touchstone.
The message exists and has, unfortunately, done so for quite some time. To criticise the method with which it is delivered is to miss the point.