The Blind Giant (27 page)

Where in all this does the ebook come in? At the same time as
the hardback, cutting into paperback sales? If so, should it be at a hardback price or a more superficially rational level? Or later, forcing the market to wait and increasing the chances that people will pick up an unsanctioned copy from a file-sharing site?

At the same time, of course, not only are other companies getting in on the act, but the whole wide world now has access to the ability to put material on the Net and even get it printed and call itself a publisher. And it’s true: being able to put together a document for public consumption and make it available does make you a publisher – in exactly the same way that owning an aeroplane makes you an aviator. All the same, the publishing skies are much more crowded, and the traditional top-down, broadcast pattern of publishing is being replaced – in some cases slowly and very much against the will of the main characters – by a more blurred distinction between publisher, commentator and consumer, and between publisher, wholesaler and retailer. What was once a clear set of relationships is now crosshatched with connections and interactions, as society at large knocks on the door of publishing’s cultural village and demands to be let in, or worse, builds houses right outside without asking.

With this in mind, consider the broader history of the UK: until quite late in the twentieth century, we had a politics essentially amateur in nature. Aristocrats and middle-class intellectuals and working men (and, more rarely, women) campaigned and were sent to parliament to do what they could. They did not take a brief on each individual issue from their constituents, but went with an understanding of the ethos they were to represent – the ethos on which they had been elected. This was a genuine ‘representative’ process. Democracy was served by uniting electorate and MP in a mutually understood shared identity, though inevitably interpretations differed on specifics, and of course the current flowed in two directions: politicians imprinted their own identities on their parties and on the nation. The most extreme example must be Winston Churchill, whose diaries of his life are
not merely a day-to-day account, but a self-portrait written with an eye to the creation of a historical narrative which still heavily influences our understanding of the events of his life. ‘I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion’s roar,’ Churchill said in a speech in 1954. Well, perhaps; but looking at the sequence of events surrounding Britain’s entry into the Second World War one might also say that he roared the lion rather than vice versa.

At a certain point, however, the same transition that affected the publishing world touched our political class: they became professionalized. It was no longer enough that a politician compose their own speeches, make their own off-the-cuff remarks;
Tony Blair’s Labour Party was controlled centrally so that everyone was ‘on-message’ and everyone was reading from the same page. The party was to function in a unified fashion, and going off-piste was robustly discouraged. In government, the apparat continued to function in this way, and became so famously exacting in its use of ‘spin’ and publicity management techniques that it spawned the popular television show
The Thick of It
, whose dominant personality was a vituperative spin doctor cum political executioner rumoured to resemble Blair’s Communications Director
Alastair Campbell. The glossy, sound-bite politics of the spin era have been disparaged by almost everyone, but the style of superficial engagement works with conventional media and has not greatly altered.

More recently, digital technology has begun to make a mark on the political arena as well, as people realize they can reach out to their MPs and to government in general and make their voices heard. Websites allow those who might not under other circumstances have access to Hansard or their representative’s voting record to see not only what positions an MP is taking but also how often they attend debates, and offer basic guidance on how to approach MPs. The web-based organization 38 Degrees has become a sort of clearing house for crowd-driven collective
action. A system of electronic petitioning has been created as part of the government’s digital presence, which carefully pledges that a petition with 100,000 signatures ‘could’ be debated by the House of Commons.
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Meanwhile, aside from the
Occupy movement, which expresses the frustrations of many at the shortcomings of government, the perceived lack of responsiveness in our leadership has created numerous local and single-issue campaigns, rejectionist movements and new parties: during the 1990s the professional political class lamented the inertia and apathy of the electorate as evidenced by low turnouts at elections, and launched consultation exercises whose principal purpose always appeared to be to explain to objectors to any given policy why they were wrong, rather than actually holding out any genuine possibility of change. Now, though, the electorate increasingly expects participation, not just on election day but constantly. (And, interestingly, it is ‘expects’ rather than ‘demands’; you demand what you don’t have, but expect what you consider to be natural.) The ubiquity of communications media means that political information and participation can take place anywhere, at any time. Inevitably, there are suggestions that voting should be made possible online. If it is, at what point does parliament become superfluous?

We’re nowhere near that moment yet, but consider: if you can poll the electorate electronically, and get a higher turnout than you would at a polling station, and if you can do so rapidly and easily and know that the culture of your country is such that people are actually paying attention to the issues, why would you bother to persist with representative democracy? (The tempting answer is: because people can’t be trusted to balance the budget and respect international treaties or human rights law, and there is undeniably some truth in that. But at that point you have to acknowledge that you’re living in a paternalistic republic, not a democracy.)

The participant culture can be difficult for those with a more conventional understanding of the flow of power and prestige to appreciate. Bloggers, Twitter power-users and the others who stand at the intersection of a large number of online lives can have a reach and heft that is hard to see until it materializes (in the words of author and blogger
John Scalzi: ‘The Internet is looking for an excuse to drop on your head’).
Stephen Fry’s access to this kind of power is more easily understood; he was a celebrity before Twitter existed, and because he is also a lover of all things technological and adept at communication and pithy commentary, that status has translated into a significant and engaged online following. Fry has to be careful what websites he recommends, lest the immediate response from around the world when he mentions something overwhelm smaller servers. And not just smaller ones: his appeal on behalf of a death row inmate in China briefly caused the Foreign Office web presence to go offline.

But traditional media, politicians and companies can be surprisingly rash when it comes to dealing with the indigenous powerhouses of the Internet. Sometimes, they just don’t seem to recognize the magnitude of what they’re dealing with. Recently, for example, a PR company contrived to offend the
Bloggess, writer of the eponymous website, blogger on several sites apart from her own, and someone with a Twitter following of around 170,000. It’s also worth noting that she follows around 15,000, which to my eye implies someone who communicates avidly and will therefore have generated influence and loyalty among those followers. Earlier, I touched on the semiotics of email addresses and the hidden information they provide if you know how to read them. This is much the same; if you had shown me the Bloggess’s Twitter page and her website, I would have taken about eight seconds to respond that this was someone with the approximate reach on specific issues of a minor national newspaper in the UK, and probably a somewhat higher level of personal trust.

Having managed an initial misfire which went from waspish to profane in a single exchange, the PR company went right ahead into the minefield and told her she should be grateful for their attention. Whatever it was supposed to be, it sounded like the priesthood of the old media and cultural Church reprimanding a lowly acolyte of an insignificant splinter sect. That’s not something anyone would be rash enough to do to the editor of a national newspaper, but for some reason it seemed like a good idea in this context. The result was – to anyone who knows how the digital world works – massively predictable. The Bloggess put the exchange online. She tweeted about it. And it became news. What looked like soft, disconnected power lined up behind her until she was the tip of a spear a few hundred thousand irritated people long. The PR company found its own brand and the names of its senior executives in the midst of a PR nightmare.

The incredible thing about this is not that it happens, but that it happens a lot. In another instance, author
Neil Gaiman found himself embroiled in a battle of words with
Matt Dean, a Republican in the Minnesota House of Representatives. The spat was covered internationally, and Dean was made to apologize – by his mother
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– but not before he’d managed to be offensive about Gaiman’s massive fan base and garner the kind of bad publicity his political opponents would have paid millions of dollars to arrange if only they could have. Looking at either of these sequences is like watching a cheap banana skin gag in slow motion – one of those where the clown picks himself up off the floor, congratulates himself on his stylish recovery, and walks through a sheet of plate glass into a vat of paint.

The stars of participant media are not like the stars of television shows. The love-hate, predatory aspect of the visual media celebrity culture is absent. The relationship is more friendly, more even-handed and more loyal than obsessive. Figures like the Bloggess are not just characters on the screen; the level of
engagement is much higher. They are real people with whom their correspondents and readers strongly identify, whom they admire and whom they consider part of their social circle. They have extended their own hearths until they touch directly on the hearths of others, creating one enormous temporary psychological living room space. Or perhaps it’s more than that, and they are perceived unconsciously as autonomous parts of an extended, digitally mediated self.

The political and cultural clash of these three styles is with us all the time. The unevenly distributed future is matched by an unerased past that continues to play out, occasionally breaking through the patina of recent history. Despite the political fondness – in my mind linked inextricably with John Major but adopted wholeheartedly by
Tony Blair and now alas from time to time even by US President
Barack Obama – for ‘drawing a line’ under uncomfortable issues, speaking the words does not make it so.

Broadly, it seems to me that the professional culture’s fondness for systems was derived from a mistrust of the foregoing style of individual decision-making, whether that was ideological – an attempt to move away from the tendency to patronage, feather-bedding and ‘jobs for the boys’ – or a practical perception that gathering the expertise of an institution and bringing it to bear was a vital step in dealing with a world that increasingly required sophisticated competences. Michael Kuhn’s book
100 Films and a Funeral
describes part of the method that allowed
Polygram Filmed Entertainment to achieve such a remarkable string of successes between 1991 and 1999: no project was given final approval until every department was in sync and Kuhn could see that there were no misunderstandings about what a film was supposed to be, to whom it would appeal or how it was going to be sold. The entire journey was mapped out in advance – at least in
broad brush – avoiding the classic disaster moment in movie production where the marketing team sees a film for the first time and knows that however perfect a statement of art or identity it may be, the audience is not large enough to support the money spent on it. The system collated the opinions and capabilities of Kuhn’s team and the product speaks for itself.

In a social and administrative setting, creating a system that can be applied universally looks initially like justice. Making everything about a simple set of rules lets people know what to expect and ensures that everyone is treated equally (or perhaps not ‘equally’ but ‘exactly the same’).

Sadly, it also means that cases that don’t fit the structures envisaged by those creating the system are shoehorned into spaces that aren’t right. The notorious response of the uncaring bureaucrat in British comedy and drama – ‘sorry, computer says no’ – speaks to the reality that human life is inevitably messier than attempts to codify it can allow for. We knew that already; it’s why Britain retains its system of precedent in legal matters rather than creating a written constitution. The map must be able to grow to become more and more detailed as the territory is revealed. All the same, the professional era – the modern era – was and is filled with expert systems: abstracted and codified sets of rules intended to be applicable everywhere. Governments, bureaucracies and corporations are all systems on this model; people working for them function within strictly set boundaries. The point of them, indeed, is that while you may use your judgement, you are not there to create a policy, but to implement a set of rules. Decisions have already been taken, were taken when the structure was designed. A person’s whole responsibility within a system of this kind is to fill a role. To go beyond that – to attempt to influence outcomes – is frowned upon. And in a sense, this was in the twentieth century the only way to do it if individual and possibly biased judgement – and a resulting uneven implementation of the rules – were to be avoided.