Journalism is no longer a specialist pursuit

Another blogger was arrested in Egypt for being critical of the government;

Rami Siyam, who blogs under the name of Ayyoub, was detained along with three friends after leaving the house of a fellow blogger late at night. … No reasons have been given for Mr Siyam’s detention. The other friends were released after being questioned. … The most recently detained blogger, Abdel Kareem Nabil, was detained in Alexandria on 6 November and was charged with disrupting public order, inciting religious hatred and defaming the president.

Nothing says tyrant quite like being imprisoned for defaming a political leader. This is why I believe George Brandis’ speech on the sedition laws in Australia was important and hopefully he follows through on it with his voting habits.

The Industrial Revolution meant that media moved to capital intensive mass-production. The rise of the internet has meant media has become commoditised mass-authorship. The commoditisation of the production and distribution process has mean there has been an explosion of authorship. As the quality and popular authors gather audiences to them, they increase in influence, and in non-liberal regimes become a threat to the authority of those in power – which is what is happening in Egypt.

A good example of mass-production vs mass-authorship is Andrew Bolt and Tim Dunlop – now posting side by side. Andrew got an audience in typical mass-production manner by getting a job with a mass-media outlet and working from journalist to columnist. Tim by contrast had to compete in the highly cut-throat and competitive market of the internet blog community and build an audience through quality output. Both are legitimate forms of reaching an audience but mass-media has often traded quality in return for a larger audience. This is a compromise that mass-authorship does not have to make due to less economic pressure to sustain or grow an audience.

News Corp is in the business of mass-audience and trolling is a successful technique to widen an author’s audience. Adequacy is probably the internet’s best archive of that literary form. The mass-production form of trolling is just as sophisticated. It is a combative literary form that aims to echo-chamber one group of the audience while trolling the other. It is designed to double the audience by making extreme comments that will get one part of the audience writing letters to the editor in complete agreement while the other group will write letters to the editor in complete disagreement.

Akerman’s entry on Warzone Whingers is a good mass-production example of this technique. It was a successful enough troll that it brought down News Corp’s blog servers who couldn’t handle the number of people viewing and commenting on it. The comments are either full agreeance or full disagreeance – no half-ways – which is the failure of echo-chambering and trolling as it only raises extreme passions. Trolling is intended to provoke a rabid response so that the poster or commenter discredits themselves by their irrational actions.

Personally I consider trolling and echo-chambering negative passions as well as examples of lazy authorship or ‘op-ed by numbers’. That the Egyptian government is throwing bloggers in jail suggests those authors aren’t doing ‘blogging by numbers’. It is good that their government considers them a threat – as they should do – however locking them up shows how impoverished political equality in Egypt is.

Mass-authorship is an improvement over mass-production as the authors that would have been denied a mass-production seat in the past no longer have to deal with the structures of capital intensive media in order to be published or build an audience. This has definitely improved the quality of media. Journalism is no longer a specialist pursuit. The internet has made it a generalist occupation which has led to more and more authors indulging in journalism by being nothing more than citizens prepared to record and comment on the world around them.