This extremely timely book shows how social media is outpacing our ability to keep what flows through it in perspective.
Throughout history, human inventive and creative capacity has continually changed how lives are lived. Even if the fundamental nature of humanity itself has remained the same, the world in which each generation lives is different to the one that has gone before. This is never more so than now, because the technological change that drove an industrial revolution which began in Britain (and is still spreading around the world) is, in the twenty-first century, driving change at such a rate that it is now outpacing human ability to absorb and process it. Where technological revolution once replaced people with machines, now it is facilitating the substitution of fact with fiction, reality with myth, or as James Ball would have it truth with bullshit.
Information, disinformation, propaganda are all familiar. Truth and facts can be argued over. Every person has a perspective through which they process the world around them. There is a difference between this and the blatant pedalling of untruth, especially when it is done in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. If a person gives an interview and what they say is recorded, and then shortly thereafter simply denies that they have said it, even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, then what we are witnessing is something new.
Social media facilitates the spreading of what people say in seconds, globally, at the touch of a button, with instant and immediate effect. Unlike television and radio there is no regulation or control. It is communication without moderation or mediation. Social media is clearly outpacing our ability to keep what flows through it in proportion and perspective.
The danger to public debate and private deliberation comes when areas of general common agreement on information and norms break down and trust in the professional media to report news and political debate is deliberately undermined. Bullying and thuggery in the public square is as old as public debate itself, and social media has given it a huge new platform on which to perform. We see a variation in our own public debate, when didacticism is confused with eloquence.
Coming in the wake of the Brexit vote and the US and French elections, and straight into the middle of the UK general election, James Ball’s analysis of all this is careful, methodical and thoughtful. He looks at all the participants, why this works, why it pays, and what it says about us. He then tackles how we might stop the rot. It’s a compelling look at what we like to think of as a modern phenomenon. Julius Caesar and his friends practised something similar so they could seize control of the state. Throughout history others have done the same. It’s why Chapter 13 (“Stopping The Spread”) is the most interesting of the book. That public discourse is being damaged and degraded is clear. Is it an entirely new phenomenon? No. Does it require a really energetic and persistent response? Yes.
Ball writes fluently and with great energy. His is a timely and interesting book.