28th July 2022
From time to time there are fundamental shifts in human communication.
One was the invention of writing – where no longer would things have to rely on memory and oral transmission.
Information could be stored and it could travel distances.
Another was the invention of the printing press.
This meant that – in principle – it was now open to any person to publish and circulate information far more widely than before.
And this was why “the freedom of the press” was such an important principle – long before the advent of Fleet Street and modern newspapers.
Each of these two shifts meant that the ripples expanded of what was capable of being communicated and circulated.
Without writing a person is limited on how much information they can absorb and impart – and you are practically limited to what you remember and who you see face-to-face.
And without printing a person is limited to how much information they can personally publish – by hand copying or otherwise – and how widely that information can be distributed.
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When I was young, it was still practically impossible to circulate information without going through a gatekeeper.
If you wanted to publish or broadcast something to the world, you normally had to go through an established publisher or broadcaster.
Yes, in theory, one could self-publish a “vanity” book, or print a pamphlet, or take a boat in to the English Channel as a “pirate” radio station.
But unless you did one of these eccentric things, you pretty much had to rely on established publishers or broadcasters if you wanted to publish or broadcast your thoughts to the world.
And then came along the internet and the World Wide Web – or at least general access to the internet and the WWW.
At a stroke any person with an internet connection could publish and broadcast to the world.
The old technological boundaries dissolved.
The gatekeepers were still there – and established publishers or broadcasters are not gone (yet) – but they were no longer essential.
On either side of the gates there are now holes in the fences.
This is, I think, a revolution quite as profound as the invention of writing or the development of the press.
And I do not think we are yet fully aware of the consequences of this shift.
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For example, in my own area – law – the old certainties of legal liability were based on there being a moment where a thing was “published”.
Once a thing was “published” then there was potential exposure for liability in defamation or copyright which a person would not have a moment before.
And so publishers took the moment of publication seriously – and things were not published lightly.
Where the law of defamation most visibly broke down in pre-internet days was when you had a leaflet or a small-circulation pamphlet outside of established publishing practices – as in the McLibel or Tolstoy cases – and then there was a mismatch between the scale of the legal process and the scale of the publication.
Now, the McLibel or Tolstoy situation is the norm, and not the exception.
And it was ten years ago yesterday that the appeal was won in the once-famous Twitterjoketrial case, where communications legislation that predated social media was misused to prosecute a non-serious tweet.
(I was the appeal solicitor in that case.)
Now, new legislation needs to be premised on the existence of social media, rather than being strained to make it apply.
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The old channels of information transmission and exchange – be they newspaper titles or political parties – are having less and less purchase.
The political consequences of these declines are becoming apparent, but they are not fully worked through.
Some of the effects are unwelcome – as this blog set out this week with reference to the “3 Ps” – populism, polarisation, and post-truth.
And the sheer, unrelenting nastiness of “culture wars” shows what people can publish to the world when they no inhibitions.
Human beings – as primates – can be said to be bound by Dunbar’s Number – the number of meaningful social relationships one can have at one time.
In pre-internet days, even the greatest celebrities could control their contacts with more than a small group of people.
And now, there is the possibility of constant interactions with limitless people – and not just for celebrities.
Can we, as a species, cope?
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This fundamental shift has to be be accommodated by our constitutional and legal structures.
Otherwise, there will be constitutional and legal dislocations.
And – in the context of the “3 Ps” – populism, polarisation, and post-truth – it is difficult to see how our current constitutional and legal structures, derived primarily from the past, can easily survive.
They were not built for this – and neither, as a species, are we.
Even without the knavery and foolishness of the likes of Trump and Johnson, there are serious issues to be addressed about how we govern ourselves in this internet age.
Or even whether we can still govern ourselves effectively at all.
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The internet, the way that technology companies feed conflict and its relationship with the 3 P s strategy to gain and retain power and if they can be effectively regulated to reverse the trend towards post truth is one of the most interesting parts of Naim’s book
Naim writes: “By amplifying the most extreme and dissatisfied voices, the tech giants have contributed to spreading an ardent and wholesale rejection of politics”
One of the most alarming facets of internet mass communication has been the targeted disinformation to a large number of people, selected through opinion profiling.
An example being Facebook users who were pro ‘leave’ in the referendum and aftermath being sent bogus copies of EU treaties containing all manner of alarming things about to happen in years that were in fact beyond the scope or timeline of any genuine EU treaty.
I still, today, see these treaties (e.g. ‘Maastricht’) being misquoted in arguments, but by chance I was sent a copy of a widely circulated fake, so I know the origins of this highly successful fraud.
It’s not just the publication.
Algorithms that promote the most controversial and click bait comments.
“Artificial intelligence” ‘s that are trained on biased datasets and give biased results.
Articles published by said artificial intelligences…
Talk about chaos.
You finish by saying that ‘there are serious issues to be addressed about how we govern ourselves in this internet age’, which is undoubtedly true.
What is not so clear to me is whether anyone, anywhere (as this is a global concern) is willing or able to address these issues. Nor indeed who or where that ‘anyone’ should be whilst the internet remains largely borderless and the issue is as you put it one for our species, not our country.
Behind the phenomenon that David discusses is a broader challenge for the law: velocity.
It is said that although the wheels of justice turn exceedingly slowly, the grind exceedingly fine. Meaning: it might take the law a while to catch up, but when it does, it generally does a pretty good job.
The problem the world faces (witness what is happening in the United States today) is that even though technology has given the world “social media” and “personal publishing power”, this was done without the ability to give our society sensible guidelines as to the consumption of that content.
When you read an article in a reputable newspaper, you know that the journalist will have been required by her editor to verify each claimed fact through out least two independent and respectable sources. When you watch a news update on broadcast television, you know that the news departments of the channel you are watching is subject to laws and has a broadcast license on condition of compliance with them.
Meanwhile *anyone* can publish to any of a number of different very widely frequented public forums accessible via the internet: Twitter, Farcebook (sic), Reddit and YouTube to name just a few.
Those publishers can be legitimate, knowledgeable individuals who are presenting a balanced view. They could be “influencers”, people who give the impression of being independent individuals but whom often earn significant sums of money as surrogate advertising agencies. They could be political adversaries, trying to undercut the arguments of their opponents through misinformation or specious mis-representation. Or they could be agents of a hostile foreign nation.
Perhaps most dangerous of all, they could be a company like Cambridge Analytica, who went further than any other to reveal to the world that Facebook isn’t just good at understanding your thoughts and beliefs, but at ***actually influencing you to change your mind***. One of the most impactful examples came about in 2016, when CA ran a campaign to discourage black and therefore traditionally Democratic voters from turning out for the US Presidential Election.
The difference between the internet and a printed newspaper, then is that the latter has to abide by legal minimum standards, while the former has no rules and no limits.
The problem this leaves society is that (at a wild guess) 80% of internet users aren’t aware of this distinction, and 80% of those could not care less even if you told them.
And if you want an illustration of just how dangerous that can be: I present to you the attack on the US Capitol building on January 6th 2020. A mob went to D.C. and attacked law enforcement, all based on a lie.
Excellent analogy.
CA went further than any other……that we know of yet.
“They were not built for this – and neither, as a species, are we.”
In that case if any remedy is to be found, it looks like a job for neurological research.
I think it’s the ‘populism’ of the three ‘p’s you mention that’s the key thing. More than ever before, it’s the clicks, the views, the engagement that matter so the content that appeals to populist viewpoints dominates and then becomes what comes next in the suggested content or the YouTube autoplay. It selects for people who ‘react’. People who like or share or retweet. And the more reasonable people tend not to overdo that stuff.
It’s basically what put me off the whole of social media. There was a time when it was people sharing what they had for breakfast or talking about a lovely new top they’d bought. Then it became overwhelmingly sharing stuff from other ‘people’. It was suddenly all your friends advocating for weird suspect agents rather than doing their own thing.
It does indeed select “for people who ‘react'”. I joined Twitter to publicise my creative writing but then got into Remainer/Leaver discussions, mainly Remainer. Because I had reacted to the discussions, my writing was speedily lost and I was directed to the topic of Brexit. This was overwhelming and exhausting and I let it lure me away from my creative writing. At which point, I left Twitter. I appreciate that there are those who know to make the system work for them. I found the plethora of opinions, knowledge and fake knowledge too much to deal with.
Though I must add that that’s where I discovered Jack of Kent!
Not only is there so much information out there but also with the wonders of search engines we lose ourselves down rabbit holes.
Is the information valuable? How often does one know what one is seeking only to find something even more interesting?
This blog being a prime example – you never know where it will lead.
There is one way of thinking about this: in the pre-Internet age, information was scarce and expensive. Producing, disseminating and acquiring it was difficult. One had to get into a newspaper or a broadcaster to send, and to bookstores, public libraries etc. to receive. And if your local library didn’t have a book, that was it. All of our legal and political concepts on speech and publication are predicated on this notion of scarcity. Hence: copyright incentivises creation by requiring payment decades after the original author has passed. And the answer to bad speech is more speech.
Now, the amount of information available to us is functionally infinite. We have moved from scarcity to abundance as an organising principle. And under conditions of abundance, regulation must work differently. I think it is emblematic of the poverty and lack of imagination in political thinking that no single democratic state has started thinking through the consequences of this shift, particularly when there’s easy low-hanging fruit available. We already have, for instance, requirements concerning balance in public service broadcasting which could be adapted for content recommendation algorithms on social media. These would not run counter to the freedom of speech (they don’t prohibit or limit any speech) and are suited to democratic life as they exist within it already.
Isn’t one of the main problems anonymity on social media, which means that people don’t need to take responsibility for what they say? I feel that the argument advanced for anonymity, that in some places people would be in danger if they had to be named, could be dealt with by allowing users in defined circumstance to remain anonymous.
A fantastic post, overall. As other commenters have noted, the threat of misinformation has manifested in terrifying fashion in recent years with severe political implications.
One minor nitpick is on the reference to Dunbar’s number. The methodology Dunbar used to arrive at 150 has been heavily criticised for various reasons, and the data itself has an extraordinarily large 95% confidence range. Not to detract from your overall point, as there are certainly limits (far smaller than population sizes online) to our capability as a species to maintain cohesive, meaningful networks.
The American computer scientist/author/musician Jaron Lanier is an interesting voice regarding these matters, especially on how we are giving away our personal data and how these data are subsequently monetized. Recommended reading.