Perhaps this subject has been done to death by now, perhaps it is better left well enough alone, perhaps the entire field of blogging about the transformative effect of blogging, or tweeting about he power of Twitter, has indeed – much like the practice of quoting Monty Python to enforce any point – run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. We certainly seem to go through the same basic arguments every time new media flexes its muscles and does something that feels new or exciting.

But hey, if we put a dead horse on eBay, someone will buy it, won’t they?

So, lets ask: what really happened yesterday after The Guardian reported on an injunction taken out against it by Carter-Ruck? Was it something new and different, or just the same old world with a new spin?

The Story So Far; Or: Are You Listening At The Back?

If you’ve already read Alix Mortimer’s excellent timeline of an outrage, you might as will skip this section and go on to the next bit. If you haven’t read Alix’s post anyway, ermm, do so! It’s brilliant, and she makes some very good points I’ll be referring to later.

Anyway.

One of the more interesting threads of discussion to come out from the past few days is the role of social media in changing the direction of the ‘gag-gate’ story. Readers of this blog, or pretty much any blog for that matter, will know that The Guardian published a front-page story on Monday explaining that they had been prevented from reporting on a Parliamentary question by a court injunction granted to law firm Carter-Ruck. Within an hour of the article appearing on the internet, the first blog posts appeared speculating (correctly, as it turned out) that the question involved a commodities company called Trafigura and an ongoing story concerning their illegal dumping of toxic waste on the ivory coast.

By the morning, the subject had ‘gone viral’, as the cool kids say, and ‘#trafigura’, a seemingly random collection of characters if ever I have seen one, rapidly became the most used word on Twitter. Within hours, Nick Clegg and a few other MPs had stated their interest and suggested that the Liberal Democrats would be following up on the matter, and two further parliamentary questions had been tabled concerning Trafigura.

By lunch time, Carter-Ruck dropped the court case, the injunction was lifted, and The Guardian declared victory. Pats on the back all round.

So Whose Victory Is It?

A few Twitterers, myself included, pointed out that this could be something of a pyrrhic victory for the Guardian. Their ‘victory’ appears to be largely born of ‘citizen journalists’, rather than their own efforts. Bloggers independently gathered and shared the information that the news media was entirely unable to report due to legal concerns. The Guardian may have won the battle against Carter-Ruck, but could it have been at the expense of losing the battle for their survival in the face of the new ‘social media’ revolution?

Intent on spoiling the party, though, came the Hon. Representative of the People’s Republic of Mortimer. Verily, she is the voice of wisdom (read: ‘spoilsport’), and pointed out that if you look at the timeline of events, it seems that the real change actually started when news of the situation reached Parliament, and questions concerning the gagging of the media began to be raised in the House of Commons. Thus, Alix reasons, the transformative change wasn’t the ability to share the information across the internet to a particularly large number of people. The ‘Twitterverse’ is a remarkably small slice of the population, after all, which doesn’t seem to be getting much bigger at the moment. Instead, the important thing is that the people we can share the information with are fairly influential – right up to leading political figures and Westminster insiders.

As if that wasn’t enough to depress the most excitable Twevangelist1, in walked Phil BC, the Very Public Socialist, to throw another spanner in the works:

But does this mean the mainstream media is dying on its feet, as some bloggers like Tory Bear claim? Not really. No blog or alliance of bloggers would have been able to uncover the Trafigura/Ivory Coast story in the first place. A rare few might make a pretty penny from Google AdSense but it’s hardly enough to finance the necessary field work and follow up. It still remains that with very few exceptions, when it comes to news reporting blogging is parasitical on the mainstream media

At this point, the argument for ‘new media’ seems as dead as this horrendously mixed metaphor – there aren’t very many of us online, we’re not as powerful as we think we are, and we still just feed off what the mainstream media deign to give to us. The ever-reasonable and thoughtful Heresy Corner didn’t want the humiliation of the blogosphere to stop there, though. He approached social media’s coffin with a large hammer, a scary-looking nail and a definite menacing look on his face,, pointing out that the tabling of that question by that MP (a former Observer journalist), and the trail of breadcrumbs left by The Guardian’s not-so-cryptic article on the injunction suggest a certain amount of collusion between newspaper and parliamentarian. Heresiarch sniffed a conspiracy (and has now updated his post with evidence confirming his suspicions), and wondered whether this may even amount to an abuse of parliamentary privilege.

This alters the whole dynamic of the discussion – the implication is that rather than being bailed out by their internet enemies, The Guardian shrewdly realised that the best way to have their injunction lifted would be to ‘inadvertently’ leak the information in a sufficiently public manner, and leverage the internet to fight their battle for them. Perhaps this wasn’t an own goal for the Guardian, but instead a highly effective strategy of using the Twitterverse to do their legal dirty work for them.

I don’t know about you, but I feel dirty. Used. How very dare they, hey? And we trusted them.

We might as well give up and go home, you know. If we weren’t already at home, that is.

Sticking Up For Twitter

I think those three, between them, make an excellent case against the role of Twitter in this episode. At best it has been but the poking of an elbow in the side of the people who hold the power – expediting The Guardian’s victory but not winning it for them. At worst it is merely a new plaything in the hands of the old media bosses, and a parasite which feds on the research and professional journalism of those who did the real research and investigation into Trafigura.

So what can we salvage from this? What hope is there in these new technologies we are building?

Well, first off, we may only have created a system by which we can call to attention specific issues so that those higher than us in the food-chain can act on them, but it’s a system we didn’t have before. The case of Trafigura dumping lethal toxic waste on the Ivory Coast case may have sailed by largely unnoticed by the public and the perpetrators gone on without any further action taken against them (they’re still in the process of suing the BBC over a Newsnight expose into their waste disposal practices, incidentally). Even with The Guardian’s trickery and power-games, we don’t know they could have got all that coverage without the ‘viral’ spreading of the story on the internet.

“The best way to keep something secret”, goes the old joke, “is to announce it in Parliament.”

But what’s really exciting, to me, at least, is the potential of the thing. Right now we may not have enough resources to do the investigations and the digging without professional journalists. In the case of the Trafigura waste dumping, the actual incident happened some time ago, and so a media-led investigation into what had happened was bound to be expensive and involved, and far more than the blogs could handle.

But what about if we try skipping forward ten years? Imagine: a company starts dumping toxic waste near an African town in ten years time, but this time round at least a few of the residents have mobile phones and internet connections (we will get there one day). Imagine if the world could see raw footage and photography of the waste dumping as it was happening, and receive frontline reports from the people affected of the illnesses and deaths it is causing. Imagine a world where the investigation doesn’t need to happen at all, even in remote corners of the world.

We can imagine that, because that’s where we’re heading. And when we get there, what use will we have for ‘the symbiotic relationship between the citizens and the media’? The media won’t be investigative sources any more, they will become passive aggregators of news; filters through which we discover things which interest us. And why should we need the media to do the job of news aggregation, when we have our friends, and people we respect, to do it for us?

Some would argue that this has already happened for current events in the Western world.

So, yes, the scope of this social media is currently limited, and it hasn’t had the impact that many people try and credit it with. The utter lack of clout the blogosphere carries was shown ably by the way it was utterly ignored by the powers that be during the Iranian elections. ‘Gag-gate’2 has managed to make a difference, but still feels limited. But the real point, the exciting thing, the nugget of useful information amid the acres of hyperbole this story has and will generate, is that this new technology is still both hugely transformative, and only in its infancy.

Everything we create will have flaws. Nothing ever goes far enough, or is quite integrated enough, or fits our expectations, or fully replaces what came before. But all the little pieces do add up, and it won’t be many more years before we wake up one morning and realise that we are still, actually, living in the sci-fi dreamworld of the generation that came before us.

Just without the funny hats.

  1. In Twitter-land, everything begins with ‘tw’. Get over it. [↩]
  2. Cheers for that, Blue Eyes [↩]