But what do you do if someone breaks it, and your means of staying in touch with people without becoming a communications burden on them disappears under a deluge of bots’n’spam? Also, what does it mean for democratic accountability?
Especially when changing circumstances (in my case, collapsing health) means your ability to adapt or even move on is diminished considerably?
The two blogposts this relates to are:
- So long Twitter… by Dr Catherine Howe
- The platform I loved no longer exists… by Dr Helene von Bismarck
The title of this post is a quotation from Dr Howe’s blogpost – and is one I can relate to because anyone who knew me in the civil service in my final two years (2009-11) will recognise that description. But what no one really knew at the time was that this enthusiasm came from a place of deep personal insecurity. Most of my enthusiasm for anything in my lifetime has come from that looking back on it all as I do in my generally house-bound state in my forty-fifth year.
In my case it was moving back to Cambridge after having failed to settle in Central London and on the in-service Fast Stream back in 2009. The stress of work and the failure to connect with anyone (a similar challenge that others I met at the time spoke much about) – made worse by both the high turnover of population and the very high costs of living with few solid institutional connections made emotional living all but impossible.
Then comes along social media – or more specifically Twitter, which had the feature of being able to curate personalised feeds base on people that you selected. As a result, a wonderful phenomenon arose where you could start following and/or interacting with someone online, then a few months later someone would organise an event or meetup, and you’d all meet face-to-face for the first time – only the conversations that took place were as if we had all known each other for years.
So how did we end up losing all of this?
I wrote a blogpost a few weeks ago on Big Tech’s anti-social Xmas here. To summarise, I basically said it was the attempt by big tech to monetise the massive (and ‘free’) social benefits that us users were enjoying, and then capture the monetary benefits – which they did spectacularly. The longer term results were to make social media micro-blogging sites (such as Twitter) much less usable and much more spam’n’h8-filled to the extent that people were getting hurt – and badly, while others simply stopped using them. Furthermore, advertising budgets that might have been spent on local print media were being spent on social media advertising with foreign-based multinationals – extracting huge sums from local economies. The social and economic losses were far greater than perhaps politicians appreaciate.
Therefore we have a public policy issue – one that cuts across national boundaries – and one that the EU quite understandably has decided it has policy competency over. The cruel irony for those that voted for the UK to leave the EU having been persuaded by the pro-leave politicians and misinformation campaigns (which is by no means all of them – there are those that took principled decisions irrespective of what the official campaigns threw at them) is that instead of making the UK stronger on its own, it has found itself more vulnerable in the global economy. The contrasting approaches towards the firm that was Twitter by the EU vs the UK Prime Minister speaks volumes.
“If your firms are multinational, their regulators need to be – and those regulators need to be democratically accountable to the people”
One of the things that most people in the UK would not have been aware of is the internal policy-making processes of EU law and policy because hardly anyone learns about civics, citizenship, the rule of law, and democracy education at school in England. In one sense this suits the ruling class where nominally the choice in more recent decades has become which group within them is the more competent choice: The Tory Democrats, or the Fabian Paternalists. The messages David Cameron was sending out in the late 2000s, or Tony Blair was sending out in the mid-late 1990s. The point being that actual real choice for the people is very limited – but they/we collectively know so little about politics and democracy that we cannot have informed debates on anything. So we are reduced to a binary.
Case study: University Tuition Fees.
This was in part revealed with the policy of university tuition fees very recently by George Osborne and Ed Balls where the former Chancellor for the Conservatives, and the Former Economic Secretary to the Treasury (and special adviser to Gordon Brown before then) in their podcast:
“I remember Peter Mandelson coming to me before the 2010 general election, he was the [Labour] deputy prime minister, and saying “we want to put up student fees, tuition fees, but we can’t do that before an election, its too difficult for Labour, why don’t we set up a report, and while you as Conservatives hopefully want to see the tuition fees go up so that the universities are better funded, why don’t you sign up to this commission and it can report after the election?”“
Prof Danny Dorling Quoting the two in The Conversation, 03 Oct 2023
Note something very similar happened in the late 1990s over the bringing in of Tuition Fees as the exchanges between MPs at the Second Reading of the Teaching and Higher Education Bill reflected – noting the intervention of Jeremy Corbyn MP. Note further that the Dearing Review into Higher Education was established by the Conservatives (note Stephen Dorrell MP Col. 973 referring to Gillian Shepherd, the former Tory Education Secretary) – which was also non-committal on tuition fees in their 1997 manifesto.
The place we find ourselves in now is a big mess – not least because university posts have become much more insecure and have had the unforeseen knock on social impact in university cities of where academics end up having to move on much more frequently than they might otherwise. That thing I mentioned about London’s high turnover of population? That applies to Cambridge too. Along with the negative externalities that go with it.
Social media as a means to easing the loneliness and keeping connections
Twitter was one such method – as was Facebook back in the early days some 10-15 years ago. But the hotwiring of the algorithms means that people seldom see the updates from people that they have chosen to see. Furthermore, the darker side of social media stalking and so on inevitably puts people off. In the later years of daytime TV ‘talk shows’ (lampooned by Jon Culshaw here) the amount of times people with arguments mentioned social media platforms rose as time went on. Not surprisingly, people ended up shutting their accounts for those reasons too.
What do you do when changes by social media platforms cut off your means of conversations?
No one can be the same person they are after the passage of such a long time – over a decade. Given the nature of the technology and the sums sunk into it, there was no reason to expect social media to remain static any more than the change in UK TV from 1990 to 2000, moving from most of the country having four channels to the rise of digital TV.
In my case in the space of a decade I’ve had two mental health crises and two heart attacks, the impact of which have left me unable to leave Cambridge (my home town) without someone to support me. In that time, one of the hardest things to do – something that looking back also affected my behaviour, was to accept that situation and ‘let go’ of people, connections, objects/things, and also hopes and dreams. Staring the grim reaper in the face and avoiding his deathly swipe does something to you. It forces you to reprioritise in a way that’s hard to describe. And it forced me to come to terms with a host of things that had been burdening me for decades. Amongst other things, it made me realise how insecure and ‘clingy’ I had been for decades. What I didn’t know until other people pulled me up on it in the early 2020s, was that this might be related to a set of acronyms becoming more familiar – ADHD and RSD.
‘If only I had known’ – but we couldn’t have known because back then the conditions had not been conceptualised let alone acknowledged
This reminded me of what Anna Marsden, LGBTQ+ Awareness Trainer and Coach at
@FirstAscentGrp told me at the Form The Future Conference in 2023.
“You need to forgive yourself – you were not to blame for being educated within a broken system”
CTO 01 Dec 2023
The same goes for the failings by social media firms and of governments and regulators in their public policy and regulatory failings that are resulting in so much harm. Part of me dreads to think what the environmental footprint of all of those junk messages is, the economist Frances Coppola having written extensively about the environmental footprint of e-dosh. A public policy issue I have neither the knowledge or competence to even begin to take on.
Retreating back into a hyper-local world
I quote Dr Howe again:
“I believe there is still so much potential in how we could use digital and networked technologies if we can recapture some of the qualities that drew so many of us there in the first place.”
Dr Catherine How, 07 Jan 2024
I agree – but sadly such is my situation over a decade later that this isn’t a conversation that I’m well enough to be part of. And this comes back to having to adjust to what life throws at us. Just before Parliament went into recess last year, I noted that a couple of people who I was acquainted with in my civil service days were now very senior civil servants and coming under detailed cross-examination in front of Commons select committees. Part of me wondered why I wasn’t part of the same generation even though we were part of the same Fast Stream era.
But then I reminded myself about a couple of local residents who I was at school with, and the struggles they had and the challenges that they had overcome. And also at how although they never had the chance to experience higher education, let alone working in Whitehall, how quickly they grasped a whole host of otherwise complex issues – just that no one in 1990s Cambridge had given them the chance. Which reminded me of the short story about privilege in the On a plate series.
‘Stop comparing yourself to other people’
I think that’s the other thing I remember writing about recently – this strange habit of ours comparing who we are / what we’ve got / what we’ve achieved with others. Even though back in 1999 the Sunscreen Song.
“Sometimes you’re behind / Sometimes you’re ahead. / The race is long / even then it’s only with yourself”
The Sunscreen Song, 1999
Cambridge’s culture of comparison and judgement – having a job title within an institution
In one sense it was easier being the dragon on Twitter – people didn’t come at you with expectations. Perhaps it’s a result of being in a city dominated by a very ancient, hierarchical and patriarchal institution combined with a high population turnover – people’s sense of where they fit in being aided by having clear descriptors that come with being employed by an institution. As a city home to an institution that ‘examines the world’ it can hardly be surprising that a sense of being continually judged (or assessed) is hard to avoid!
Above – I’m with Baroness Natalie Bennett, former leader of the Green Party re exams!
Me? No titles, no institutions – not that I seek either.
I come with a lot of baggage that comes from growing up in a city where many of the people I knew from childhood have chosen to leave or have been priced out, living in surrounding towns. I come with the baggage of having boomeranged back after graduating, and having boomeranged back after having experienced that ‘middle class is magic corporate career’ before burning out. In that time, Cambridge’s population has increased by 50% and for all the old college buildings, is a very different place (for both better and worse) as a result.
One of the hardest things to cope with is not having had a close group of people to share that journey with – especially since the Millennium. Hence the strong emotional disconnection I have with a city whose town history people tell me I know so much about. As James Norbury’s Big Panda asked the Tiny Dragon:
“Which is more important? The journey or the destination?” *The company*
James Norbury: Big Panda, and Tiny Dragon
Above – from James Norbury’s Instagram
As we head into 2024 and a general election year, let’s remind ourselves of what the tiny dragon said – because given the state of politics (and social media) we may need the support of each other a lot more than we appreaciate.
Especially with all those newly-marginal seats around Cambridge.
Food for thought?
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