Experts

Twisted tales of spinning and blogging

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Elephantdentistry’s main themes might seem a strange mix. They include (1) what’s going on with internet and social media industries, politics and practices,  (2) experts, (3) living metaphors and catching them in the wild (fun with language), (4) feminism, (5) music and (6) Mosul. Here I’m getting most of these twisted together so let’s see how that works.

I caught three new living metaphors in the wild when I was in Wales recently, visiting the National Wool Museum. I tried a hands-on exhibit, picking up a handful of wool and following the instructions to pull and twist simultaneously until eventually I’d spun a yarn. Nearby was a painting of wool gatherers, women who would follow the drovers taking sheep to market and dart from hedge to hedge to collect scraps of wool. They would then sell their bags of wool to eke out their desperately poor livings. You could see how the scattering of wool and movement of the gatherers made sense of the metaphor, as it’s not a task that involves following a straight line. You would need to keep constantly turning, moving and switching your focus of attention. Hard work, and once you realise the point of all that apparent distraction it’s obvious that wool gatherers have had a bad press. Raw wool is indeed very woolly: it’s fuzzy, breaks apart easily and has no fixed shape.

The name overstated what the museum really was and did. It’s in an old textile mill, formerly Cambrian Mills, near Newcastle Emlyn not far from the mid-west coast, and most of the exhibits were about the mill itself, its owners, the machinery and the weaving industry, so there was almost nothing on knitting. (I make up for that later.) The mill used to produce blankets, shawls and woven wool cloth used for miners’ shirts and soldiers’ uniforms. Most of the textile exhibits were of shawls and blankets. When they were taken off the looms, large pieces of cloth had to be washed and then stretched out on tenterhooks, on tenters, in tenter fields. There the cloth would be left hanging, waiting until it was ready. We saw a tenter, with hooks, in a park displaying information about the area’s traditional crafts.Tenterhooks2

Before  machinery and mills, spinning used the older technologies of spindles and wheels and was largely women’s work carried out at home as  ‘cottage industry’. It took tedious, long hours to earn much of a living and so telling stories was intricately associated with the work of busy hands that didn’t require much mental engagement. Weaving was another cottage industry.

Now being able to work virtually and from home, according to some optimistic commentators, has brought in satisfying new cottage industries, once again involving women fitting in somewhat creative, but low paid work (even if paid at all) alongside domestic and family commitments. It’s also handy when there’s no other work available.

That’s the positive story being spun. Some experts disagree and have a bleaker but more informed analysis.

When I started researching women’s online practices years ago I remember being struck by the growth of knitblogs – blogs about knitting. It happened long before blogs were as common as they are now, and back then few of those blogs seemed to be commercial. Now I would guess most of them are a means to try and make money, one way or another.

I’ll get on to what Stephanie Taylor has to say about creativity, home working and precarity, but first I’m not dissing woolly creativity although I do still wonder about knitted cupcakes. I know they can be used as pincushions or given away but that doesn’t explain their ubiquity. The museum had a three-tier knitted cake, which is fair enough as they are the Wool Museum, but the cafe also had knitted cupcakes and they apparently sold well. Their very pointlessness seems to be the point – you can neither eat them nor wear them, so knitters can express a creative impulse without anyone giving or taking offence because nobody wants to eat cakes or wear handknits. This, on the other hand, is extraordinary and needs no excuse. It is the giant cardigan on display in Cardigan Castle marking 900 years of the town’s history.  Cardigan4

The cardigan for Cardigan was created by around 200 knitters, including  schoolchildren and other volunteers alongside the two artists behind the project. It’s amazing. My photos can’t give you the sheer scale of it.

Even more impressive and with another woolly play  on words are the wool churches created as part of the Wolly Spires project. These are models of the beautiful Lincolnshire churches built out of the wealth of the medieval wool trade, intricately knitted to represent all the details of their stone decorations and graceful architecture. Community groups worked on these too. It took 8 years for the  teams to knit 6 churches.

They’re currently on display until mid January at the 20-21 Visual Arts Gallery in Scunthorpe so if you’ve ever wanted to visit Scunny, there’s a good reason.

These geographically-based communities of knitters are not anything like the virtual community I came across. I first found knitblogs around 15 years ago when I was researching  internet ‘beginners’ and specifically the various online literacy practices (what they read,  what they wrote and how) that women were developing for themselves. That was a time before the big social media corporations, so for most people there were websites, email and not much else . Internet access was still fairly limited and there was already a significant gender gap in the UK. But I was struck by the fact that a lot of web designers were women. There seemed to be a connection between that and a sudden flourishing of knitblogs, i.e. blogs about knitting. Pixels and stitches made up colour patterns on screen or in wool. Designers needed to understand and create sets of instructions written in a specialised language. Both web design and knitting could involve home-based creativity, whether for pleasure or money. Back then, knitblogs were more about personal creativity and sharing stories about life as well as creations or wips (works in progress). They needed more technical online skills than blogging requires now.  Those very personal blogs still exist, but knitblogs are now mostly about selling patterns or getting income through ads, which brings me back to Stephanie Taylor.

Taylor is one of the authors of an article on gender and creative labour, along with Bridget Conor and Rosalind Gill. Their research into the cultural and creative industries showed  there were vast inequalities and pretty terrible conditions of work, hidden behind myths about the wonders of creativity. Work was often informal and precarious. People, women especially, coped with a ‘bulimic’ pattern of alternatively long hours and super-intense periods of work  or nothing at all coming in. Stephanie Taylor has also analysed a more general phenomenon she calls the ‘new mystique’ of working for oneself, and how it traps women seeking to combine work and childcare into long hours and low pay. She discusses the language used to describe this type of home-based self-employment, including the term ‘cottage industry’ being revived by journalists, and picks up on the parallels between what’s going on in the fields of creative work and what’s happening with the growth of self-employment. They have precariousness, long hours and low pay in common as the price of apparent flexibility. Boundaries between work and home life disappear. We’re back in the world of the poor spinners.

Amidst a burgeoning social media economy, genres of self-enterprise have emerged that enable women to profit from creative activities located within the domestic sphere, including mommy blogging, lifestyle blogging, and craft micro-economies.

That link between working on websites such as blogs and creative crafts reappears in research by Brooke Erin Duffy & Urszula Pruchniewska. Catch Duffy (quoted above) being interviewed here. She has some sharp things to say about women working as social media editors. The title of her new book, out this year, nails the issue: (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, subtitled Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work.

Drawing on interviews and fieldwork, Duffy offers fascinating insights into the work and lives of fashion bloggers, beauty vloggers, and designers. She connects the activities of these women to larger shifts in unpaid and gendered labor…

A tiny handful have lucrative careers but there’s a vast gap between them and the rest who make little or nothing.

Alongside these aspirational bloggers, there’s a secondary industry offering training and support. This blog makes nothing and luckily doesn’t have to try to earn anything, but I’ve participated in three training courses so far to get to know more about the blogging subculture. Most of the other participants were women, and even if they’d been sent by an employer in order to start up and run a company blog, they had ambitions to do with promoting their own creative outputs. The aspirations of some bloggers reminded me of a woman learning to use the internet for the first time in a class I ran in Peckham Library who told me hopefully back in about 2000  ‘You can make money out of this, you know’. I met some realistic and genuinely helpful trainers, but also one who suggested that any blog potentially had a substantial worldwide audience and could bring in regular income through adverts. Content, or a reason to blog apart from providing ad space, was irrelevant. Learn the techniques of the clickbaiters. Ten top tips for rescuing knitting disasters. The seven things you need to know about improving your blog.

Here’s some more from the hardworking knitters of Cardigan, Cardigan2and finally a link to Mosul. The Welsh weavers had their own traditional textile patterns and the mechanical looms in the mill could produce more complex patterns or more cheaply, cloth with a simple stripe. Wool used to be vital to Mosul’s economy, although cotton was more important to the textile industry. According to Sarah Shields, writing about the nineteenth century,

Mosul’s fabrics were mostly cottons woven in traditional patterns to appeal to the regional populations. The coarse cotton calicos (ham, cit) used for garments were bleached or dyed red or blue. One of the city’s specialties was alaca, a striped fabric used for zibun, the robes men wore. Weavers prepared women’s cloaks (izar) in assorted qualities, and special looms were employed for the wool and cotton blend abaya over garments. These textiles, as well as towels and headgear, were exported into the mountains, to Persia, Baghdad, Bitlis, Siirt, and as far away as Trabzon.

Did you know that the English word muslin for a lightly woven delicate cotton fabric derives from ‘Mosul linen’? It was thought to have been invented there first.

 

 

 

Twisted tales of spinning and blogging

Statues, memorials and dead poets

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I’m dedicating this post and an image that I’ve named The Absurdity of Totalitarian Repression of Art and Thought at the Elephant Dentist to Irina and Anna, who are both dead.  Frank Monaghan’s article on statues and symbolism, When pulling down statues isn’t pulling down history, is worth reading for a serious take. I’d also recommend Anne Applebaum’s on political statues and upheavals in relation to Trump, Lenin, Charlotteville and the Ukraine. It’s headed Ukraine has finally removed all 1,320 Lenin statues. Our turn.

Poetry has its own memorial politics.

AbsurdStatues1

Irina Ratushinskaya died last month. Until recently I’d never read her work. One of her anthologies was named No, I’m not afraid, and it doesn’t deal with the cancer that killed her at 63 but with her experience in a prison camp where she was frozen, starved, beaten and subjected to solitary confinement. The Soviet regime gave her a seven year sentence for ‘agitation’ – basically for the crime of writing poetry. Applebaum named the final chapter in Gulag, her history of the prison camps, The 1980s: Smashing Statues, and quotes Ratushinskaya’s memoirs among her examples. Repression inside the Soviet Union actually became worse in the 1980s under Andropov, but prisoners continued to resist. Ratushinskaya was freed once Gorbachev took over and after an international campaign. Her health had been badly affected but she continued to write, and had twin sons in 1992. Here she is, at a younger age.

Irina Ratushinskaya

The poems she wrote and smuggled out from the KGB prison in Kiev and from a labour camp are memorials to prisoners’ suffering and defiance generally, not only to her own experience. I can only read them in translation so I’m missing the music of the words, but I get her mockery of the torturers, the way she holds out some kind of comfort to all the prisoners alongside her, and turns the smallest glimpses of nature into moments of freedom. In one poem from the KGB prison in Kiev, in freezing conditions  she compares snow to angels absurdly sprinkling white breadcrumbs, ‘enough for all the prisoners in the world’, a fluffy layer like ‘sweet cotton-wool’ or down ‘for all the murdered ones’. Yet the snow also signifies spring. It’s chilling and hopeful all at once.

Anne Applebaum describes how Ukrainians saw the statues of Lenin as symbols of Russian domination (previous posts on this blog explain why Applebaum is such a useful expert) and it seems ironic that Ratushinskaya is now considered a Russian poet. She was born in Odessa, and in her autobiographical writing she refers to her first language as a local version of Ukrainian that was officially unrecognised, and to how impossible it was to accept an identity as a citizen of the Soviet empire. I went to an event recently at the British Library that accompanied the Revolution exhibition (just ended – I didn’t blog about it as there’s far too much to say). It was on ‘modern Russian writers’ but the first point to be made was that writers in Russian are often not Russian. Because of decades of Soviet domination and censorship it’s been hard or impossible for them to write or get published in other Eastern European and Asian languages.

Like an earlier poet Anna Akhmatova  (died 1966), Irina Ratushinskaya wrote a commemoration of Osip Mandelstam who died in prison in 1941.  The younger poet didn’t have access to Akhmatova’s poetry of resistance for years but both writers situated their experience within the wider persecution of artists and the whole country’s tragedy.

Akhmatova_by_Altman

Akhmatova’s first husband Nikolai Gumilev was one of the first poets to be murdered by the regime, shot without trial on Lenin’s orders in 1921. Her son was imprisoned for eighteen years and many of her poems describe the ordeal of prisoners’ relatives, waiting for hours, day after day and year after year, to hear who was still alive and try to deliver parcels. Akhmtova’s work could not be published for decades, but eventually her requiems and memorials were recognised as great testimonies to the endurance and resistance of so many victims. She wrote that once, during the time when she was spending seventeen months standing in line in front of various prisons in Leningrad, she was asked by another woman ‘with blue lips’ , ‘Can you describe this?’ She said she could.

And then something like a fleeting smile passed over what had once been her face.

In Requiem Akhmatova wrote that if there was ever a monument to her, she didn’t want one in her birthplace or the Tsar’s park, but only

here where for three hundred hours I had to wait

And any statue, she insists here, should commemorate the tears of others too as she visualises snow melting into tears flowing from unseeing bronze eyes.

The most ridiculous statue I’ve ever seen is this one, in Cordoba, of Moses Maimonides, the medieval Jewish philosopher and physician. Nobody knows what he looked like (although we do have his autograph) and it is pretty certain he would not have approved. But then Spanish tourism was never his business.

Maimonides01

Personally if I could get any statue torn down it would be the gigantic kitsch one in St Pancras station of two people meeting. I’m not going to show it but for a wonderful, relevant, silly but not ridiculous monument to a poet, this can’t be beat. It’s Betjeman, looking up at the building he helped to preserve, and probably about to miss his train.

betjeman2

 

 

Statues, memorials and dead poets

The shadow works of Raphael and Hella

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Apologies, firstly, to any artists reading this who know what I’m talking about more than I do. This August I saw two exhibitions, three days and five hundred years apart, that made me feel I have finally learned something quite profound about visual art. On Tuesday I went to see Breathing Colour at the Design Museum in London, featuring  Hella Jongerius. It got me noticing and thinking in a whole new way. I saw a great Raphael exhibition once (not to be confused with any more recent artistic namesake) so on Friday I went to see Drawings by Raphael at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Colour and Line

You’d think these works by Hella of Holland and Raphael of Urbino might have little in common. One is all about colour and experiments with colour, the other about experiments with line and features only pen and ink,  brown or red chalk or charcoal drawings, but I found them deeply connected. Hella Jongerius creates ‘colour catchers’ , like this:

ColourCatcher2

They are objects with intricate folds made of paper or card, in a single colour, but the shaping, folding and positioning next to other coloured objects gives rise to many subtly different shades. Like this:

ColourCatcher

She calls them her canvases, and explains that while we’ve got used to the ‘flat’ industrial palette of colours, in life colour isn’t like that as it is always being affected by changing light according to the time of day, proximity to other colours (metamerism), by shadows, and by our own vision.  I came out gazing at objects on the street and seeing how everything was, in its own way, full of shadows changing flat colours into rich three dimensional objects. This is surely obvious to any trained artist now, but centuries ago there were plenty of artistic styles that didn’t use shadow. In Peckham Rye Park I noticed the grass wasn’t just green, and the earth wasn’t just brown. They were greens plus light and shadow, or browns plus light and shadow, like this (the industrial palette of pixels of course gives only an approximation).

At the Ashmolean, I found I was looking at the Raphael drawings with shadows in mind – shadows on bodies, and shadows in faces. Here’s one of the earliest works in the show. It’s possibly a self portrait, and possibly from 1500 when he would have been 17.

SelfPortrait2

There’s some shadow, but not a lot. Here’s a much later drawing from his final years, in 1519 or 1520.

RaphaelDrawings

Raphael uses light and shadow as much as Hella Jongerius, and while her work experiments with colour and perception,  Raphael’s explores light and shadow as they reveal human emotion through bodily expression. It was extraordinary going round the exhibition to see how he developed his techniques, repositioning faces and people to get different effects. Each drawing got me looking to see what direction the light was coming from. Like a musician who always knows where the beat is, Raphael always knows where the light is, and he knows how faces and bodies cast their own intimate shadows, like any object with intricate folds. Hella of Holland’s light is northern European, and that’s most obvious in her sequence of textile hangings that take you through from dawn to night. Raphael’s was a stronger Mediterranean light and his scenes usually outdoors. I liked the twisty, wriggly babies too. His sketches for Madonna and Child paintings experiment with positions – babies who look at their mothers and ones who don’t, relaxed babies, escaping babies, babies more interested in other children. One drawing, ‘Charity’, shows three infants grabbing at the same woman. If any of these were life drawings his studio must have been a riot.

Oak gall ink and Mosul

I found a surprising link with Mosul at the Raphael exhibition. The ink he used was made from oak galls. Iron gall ink was in common use throughout Europe for writing and drawing from the 5th to the 20th centuries. Sarah Shield’s study of Mosul’s trade before the creation of Iraq as a nation state, Mosul Before Iraq: Like Bees Making Five-Sided Cells, describes how gall nuts were collected from the mountainous Kurdish regions around the city to supply the tanning industry, because leather working and tanning were Mosul’s most important commercial activities. Oak galls, sometimes called oak apples (formed by parasites on oak trees) were used for dyes and inks.

Oak galls

Most of the leather was used for making shoes. The most traditional and cheapest style was a backless slipper, in red, yellow or black. When I remember my grandmother from Mosul, I can recall her backless black slippers. They stuck in my mind as a child because they were unlike any other shoes I’d seen.

There were between 30 and 40 dye houses in Mosul at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Shields, synthetic chemical dyes were brought to Mosul by German merchants in 1909. My grandfather’s chemist shop must have traded in dyestuffs. At his suggestion my father started to import and export dye from London after WW2 when everything was scarce. Magenta was my favourite word when I was very young as it was so unusual, and I still think it’s an amazing colour. Schooled by Hella Jongerius, who called her book ‘I don’t have a favourite colour‘, I won’t say it’s still my favourite colour though I’ve used it for the heading above.

Both exhibitions are on until September if you get a chance to see them. Highly recommended, and amazingly for London in August, the Design Museum had no queues or crowds.

The shadow works of Raphael and Hella

Mosul, music and citizens in an age of terror

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The final liberation of Mosul from IS is being regularly announced now and one of these days it will actually be true.  Three years ago IS used the ancient and highly symbolic al-Nuri mosque to declare its  so-called caliphate. A few days ago they blew up the mosque, before it could be recaptured, and have taken to sending out teenage girls as suicide bombers from their last few hold-outs in the old city. Around a million people from the Mosul area have been forced to flee for their lives. It’s unimaginable. It’s as if a city the size of Birmingham had been occupied by a death cult that destroyed its concert halls and libraries, murdered, raped and tortured entire communities and banned everything human, all artistic endeavours, everything that didn’t conform to their own ultra ‘pure’ version of religious conformity.

I’ve posted about Mosul’s history before in this blog, and here I want to commemorate three things: Mosul’s one time diversity from the days when culturally and religiously plural societies were a normal feature of the entire area, music from Mosul, and ordinary citizens choosing to keep track of events in Mosul and communicate to the rest of the world. Those citizen experts are anything but ordinary.

Joel Wing

You might have caught Joel Wing being interviewed on BBC radio news recently. He is an expert on what’s happening in Iraq but his background is extraordinary. He runs the Musings on Iraq blog and updates it constantly with news about what’s happening in Iraq, currently mostly the battle to retake Mosul. Joel Wing’s blog has become fairly well known and his expertise is trusted by a lot of journalists and analysts.  It turns out he’s a history teacher from Oakland, California who decided back in 2008 that since the US was involved in Iraq people ought to know what was happening, and became an expert through sheer continuous dedication and hard work. He collates news from English and Arabic language sources and presents clear summaries, along with reminders via Twitter of what happened on the same date in past years going back to at least 1991 (the war following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait). His latest post, as I’m writing this, tells us that Iraqi officials are going to announce final victory today over IS in Mosul, but they’ve made similar impatient announcements before and it’s unlikely that IS will be totally defeated today. Plenty of commentators including Wing are pointing out that ridding Mosul of IS presence won’t mean that IS is finished. Controlling cities or large stretches of territory is  only one of their strategies and they’ll continue to spread their ideology, hatred and violence – predominantly towards other Muslims – by other means.

Also today, there are estimates that it will cost a billion dollars to rebuild Mosul but as for repairing the harm done to the people of the city, especially children who have lived through three years of terror, there are no estimates. It will take a long time. UNHCR and UNICEF, Save the Children and no doubt lots of other NGOs are launching appeals.

The Mosul Eye and Mosul music

The Mosul Eye blog is heartbreakingly optimistic. It was set up by an Iraqi historian based in Mosul who has planned reconciliation events, a bring-a-book festival to help restore Mosul’s libraries, and an astonishing violin recital among the ruins to make the point that music can now return to the city in the face of terror. Like the Taliban and the jihadists who took over in Mali, IS banned music and threatened the lives of musicians. The Mosul Eye blogger arranged for a few Mosuli musicians to return and play in one of the ancient Nineveh sites IS tried to destroy. You can hear Ameen Mukdad, the violinist, here with explosions and gunfire in the background.

I played on a track on the Rivers of Babylon Treasures CD, Eliyyahu Eliyahu,  which is in the Mosul tradition of Iraqi Jewish music going back at least eighty years but probably much further. It’s the only existing recording as far as I know. It took me a long while to work out that some of the notes don’t exist in Western musical scales because they’re the notes in between those other notes. I recorded my father singing it when he was in his 80s and that’s when I realised I had transposed some of the tune into a more familiar sounding key in my memory, and had to flatten the notes back to where they should go. I always thought of the song as wistful, and about hoping for a better future when the prophet Elijah eventually shows up.

Next week I’m going to see Songhoy Blues again, a band formed by Malian musicians in exile. They played in London in 2015 alongside the showing of a film, They will have to kill us first,  about musicians daring to return to Timbuktu to give a free concert and inspire local people to hope for a return to normality. Their new album is called Resistance.

Old Mosul communities

This photo is of a Christian monastery near Mosul, St Elijah’s or Mar Elias

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)

512px-Saint_Elijah's_Monastery_1_Mosul

It was the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq, dating back to around 600 CE. It was destroyed by IS probably in 2014. Mosul used to have the highest proportion of churches of anywhere in Iraq – Catholic, Chaldean, Assyrian, Syrian Orthodox, and probably others I don’t know about. My father remembered going inside churches as a child and seeing what he described as ‘big dolls’ (statues presumably). At one time there were at least twenty churches, not to mention the five synagogues and nearby Yezidi shrines. It’s an understatement to say that communities didn’t always live amicably together in the past but even so, Mosul’s long history is one of many diverse groups living side by side, including many Kurds. From the 1970s the Ba’athists started a Stalinist-style deportation campaign, removing Kurds from northern Iraq and dumping them in southern deserts. It’s estimated that 300,000 may have been killed. This transfer policy also involved settling Ba’athist supporters in the north.

This news story describes Muslims in a liberated area of Mosul helping to rebuild a destroyed Chaldaean church as a gesture of solidarity, but it’s not certain that Christians will feel safe enough to return.  Kurdistan is now seeking a referendum on independence. Relations with the government in Baghdad are pretty tense and although Kurds have taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees, and have lost many of their own fighters. it’s been without much help from Baghdad. There’s an all-party parliamentary group on Kurdistan with a  website here  and there was a Commons debate on Tuesday which discussed the medical and psychological help needed following Mosul’s liberation and what the UK can do –  the proceedings are now available. The Kurdish referendum issue is going to be fraught.

I’ve been recommending experts in this blog (see here and here ) as well as occasionally writing about Mosul. If you’re interested in following news from Iraq, I’d recommend Joel Wing as a real expert, of the responsible citizen type.

[Blog housekeeping note: the menu in the top righthand corner shows up OK on some devices and platforms but not others. If you can’t see a menu of links to previous posts try expanding the set of lines at the top and they should turn into a menu. I’ve been trying to find out how to fix that and make them more visible but it seems a general WordPress design problem.]

 

Mosul, music and citizens in an age of terror

Are we nodes or are we noodles?

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The new Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute, Philip Howard, gave his inaugural lecture last week. It’s now available online but to save your time, I watched it and summarised what I thought were the most interesting bits, for the fourth of these posts on fake news (previous posts here, here and here). There was a certain amount of flummery at the start – not the soft pudding type – that you can skip if you decide to watch it.

flummery Flummery pudding, also known as mahalabia

Also of course, some daft clothes. But despite the Oxfordy business the OII is a useful place to know about and has done good research ever since it started. I went to the launch conference back in 2002 when I was researching internet related stuff for a doctorate. I liked their ethnographic style, thought it looked promising then and think it’s delivered since, for instance with regular surveys of British users and non-users of the internet, critical studies of Wikipedia, and a strong focus on ethical issues. The launch was at the Said Business School, the building with the ziggurats near the railway station, as the Institute itself is housed in a small building on St Giles near Balliol with no space for large events.

oii logo

Fifteen years ago at the OII launch the conference ran a session on ‘Participation and Voice’, asking whether the technology would improve or worsen the democratic process. This month Phil Howard asked something similar: Is social media killing our democracy?

He began by arguing that ‘the Internet’ is misnamed as there are now multiple internets. There’s a Snapchatty Yik-yakky one for under-17s that people like him don’t use. Far right conspiracy theorists get together on another one.  China has its own internet, built from the ground up as an instrument for social control and surveillance. Some argue that Russia and Iran have the same thing – a distinct internet. The cultures of use are so different it’s tough for researchers to study them all. The Prof then briefly narrated the development of his research by showcasing some of his publications, as he’d been coached that was the right thing to do in an inaugural lecture.

His first book, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen (2005) was an ethnography of  the Gore and Bush US election campaigns. The people he studied and got to know were the first of a new breed of e-politics consultants.  He discovered that ‘a small group of people – 24 or 25 – make very significant design decisions that have an impact on how all of you experience democracy’. These people formed a small community, socialised together and worked   ‘across the aisles’ for Republicans or Democrats as needed.  At the end of the campaign several of them went off to work in the UK, Canada, Australia and various other countries,  to take the tricks they had developed in public opinion manipulation, funded by big money, to apply them in democracies around the world. His conclusion was that this is how innovation in political manipulation now circulates, i.e. via these kinds of roaming consultants with expertise for hire.

Next up, he turned to investigating the consequences of internet access in 75 mainly Muslim countries in a book that, amazingly, you can download for free . His idea was to see how things worked out in societies where censorship and surveillance are permitted and encouraged as a means of cultural protection; countries that liked to participate in the global economy but in constrained ways. He observed significant changes in gender politics, in where people went to learn about religious texts, and above all young people using information technologies to figure out that they shared grievances. He found a clear arc from the mid-2000s to the ‘Arab Spring’.  So while his first book was about political elites and the manipulation of democracy, the second was about catching the elites off guard.

His work on ‘the internet of things’ , Pax Technica, was more predictive and although the book wasn’t well received he was insistent that it’s necessary to pay attention, look back at what has already happened to online privacy and look forward to guard against what could happen next.  He reckons the privacy fight is already lost as far as the current internet(s) are concerned so we need to think ahead. To quote:

The internet of things is the next internet, the one you will not experience through a browser. It will track you in almost everything you do. For a variety of reasons it will generate almost perfect behavioural data that will be useful to social scientists but also governments and security services. In the next few years we have to wrestle with who gets this data, and why, and when…

By 2020 50 billion wireless sensors will be distributed around the world – there will be many more devices than people, to say nothing of satellites, drones and smartphones that people carry. There will be vast amounts of behavioural data on consumption habits, and in democracies any lobbyists who can will try to play with this data…

The average smartphone has 23 apps. The average app generates one location point per minute – little bits of evidence of where we are in physical space…few organisations have the analytical capacity to play with this data – Facebook does. Few do much with it – advertising firms do. Some apps read each other’s data. It’s fodder for an immense surveillance industry that’s about providing you with better consumer goods, identifying your location in space, providing data brokers [with info on us]…

His new programme of research at the OII is looking at social media, fake news, and computational propaganda, or in other words, algorithms and lies. Here are a couple of tasters. How to identify a bot: there are some giveaways. Bots tend to do negative campaigning. They don’t report positive policy ideas or initiatives.

Anger, moral judgments, pictures of politicians taken at a ridiculous angle ‘saying’ things they probably never said. Bots migrate from another topic to another e.g. latching on to Brexit after years tweeting about something else. A small handful of accounts after working on Brexit then became interested in the US election and were pro-Trump. A small number then became interested in the Italian referendum and the French elections and now back to the UK. Just a s there was a cycle of expertise from human subjects in the US who took the craft of political manipulation across multiple domains, multiple  regime types, there are now users who have humans behind them, social media accounts which have humans behind them, user accounts that craft political messages, moving from target to target, meddling in particular domains, as needed and one of the great research questions that faces us now is who are these people and to some degree how do we inoculate our democracies against their ill effects? 

Howard prefers to call them highly automated accounts because there is always a human behind them. They do not look like this.

computerBot

These automated accounts are not up and running all the time. They get turned off after an election. They have noticeable changes of strategy in response to events, for instance spikes in activity at particular moments to coincide with debates.  Howard thinks all this presents us with real problems and that social media has made democracy weak. ‘It has a compromised immune system. We’ve gone through that learning curve from social media as exciting opportunity for activists to tools for dictators.’ To make matters worse, people are selectively exposing themselves to secondhand sources of information that intensify what they already believe in a process that might be called elective affinity, so any bias doesn’t meet with much challenge.

We need to figure out what the opposite of selective exposure is.  Diversified exposure? We don’t even have a phrase. Randomised encounters? Empathic affinity? Process that allows people to encounter a few new pieces of information, candidates that they haven’t met before or faces they don’t recognise. Whatever those processes are we have to find them and identify them and encourage them.

Before reporting any more of what Howard thinks I should allow for some diversified exposure here and point out that there are other academics who might disagree. Here’s Daniel Kreiss,  who has studied political campaigning, taking a markedly different view. He says basically it’s more important to look at the history of how conservatism has been growing in the US than at social media. As for the UK, other academics agree that ‘whether done by bots or human influencers, that people may be surreptitiously emotionally engaged in online debates is deeply worrying’ and there’s plenty more rather tentative comment here.

Going back to the lecture, Howard ends with proposals for how this abundance of data on all of us might be regulated. He has a list.

  1. Report the ultimate beneficiary. You should have the right to find out who is benefiting from data being collected by an item you buy.
  2. It should be possible to add civic beneficiaries to benefit from the data.
  3. Tithes of data. 10% of the bandwidth, processing power and data should be made available to civil society organisations as a way of restoring some balance. Facebook has a monopoly platform position on public life in most countries. That should stop.
  4. A non profit rule of data mining. The range of variables that are exempt from profit should grow.

It’s not surprising to see Facebook’s data monopoly appearing here. He’s said elsewhere that researchers can only use a small percentatge of Twitter data, because that’s what is made accessible, and can’t properly research Facebook even though that’s where a lot of the political conversation – and manipulation – is happening. Facebook doesn’t share.

The Computational Propaganda project at the OII has just released its first case study series, covering nine countries, available here. It’s been covered in a few news articles (Wired, the BBC, Guardian and so forth). A brief snippet to give you the idea what’s in it:

The team involved 12 researchers across nine countries who, altogether, interviewed 65 experts, analyzed tens of millions posts on seven different social media platforms during scores of elections, political crises, and national security incidents. Each case study analyzes qualitative, quantitative, and computational evidence collected between 2015 and 2017 from Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Poland, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.

Computational propaganda is the use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks.

That’s enough lecturing. I called this post Are you a node or a noodle? for a reason. Clearly, we’re all noodles as we’re all likely to be suckered at some point by fragments of the fakery that’s all over whichever internet we’re using. In one of Howard’s books that I’ve actually read or at least skimmed, he surveys the work of one of my favourite experts Manuel Castells. Castells and the media is really an introductory reader for students who haven’t yet read Castells, which is fair enough as reading Castell’s own work is a real undertaking. (I’m aiming to add him to my experts series on this blog soon.) Howard summarises one of Castell’s key theories about the network society as ‘People may think they are individuals who join, but actually they are nodes in networks‘.

We’re all nodes as well as noodles. My takeaway message is to be careful about what we’re circulating. Every large scale tragedy or atrocity now seems to attract lies, myths and propaganda that get wide circulation through deliberate manipulation but also via unwitting noodle-nodes (us, or some of us). Howard suggests (it is a textbook after all) that readers undertake an exercise in visualising their own digital networks. I’m not going to bother with the exercise but some of the other recommendations were good ones, such as:

  • be aware of your data shadow (yes it is following you)
  • use diverse networks
  • be critical of sources and try to have several
  • be aware of your own position in digital networks
  • remember that people in other cultures have different technology habits, and that networks can perpetuate social inequality
  • understand that you are an information broker for other people.

Thanks Phil. Enjoy your new job.

 

 

Are we nodes or are we noodles?