Gavan Titley
by Gavan Titley
In a week in which Irish newspapers attracted global incredulity for attempting to copyright links to their articles, Irish politicians have trumped this attempt to restructure the internet by simply declaring it to be evil. Recent reporting of suicides, a corrosive debate on abortion rights and transparent attempts to stifle political criticism have been fused into a full-throated moral panic over social media. Coming from a political class still convinced that LOL promises them lots of love, the wheels are likely to fall off this bandwagon long before it trundles from tawdry to totalitarian. But as deliberate exercises in displacement, moral panics illustrate something of the dominant political culture, and this opportunistic trolling is no exception.
The current focus on the dangers of social media stems from late December 2012, when the Fine Gael TD and junior agriculture minister Shane McEntee took his own life. Party colleagues were quick to suggest that online abuse was a factor in his death, and the Oireachtas Committee on Communications announced that it would instigate an investigation into cyberbullying. The chairman, Tom Hayes, warned that “this thing can’t be left to go unchecked, where people can put up vile comments and get away with it”. If threats were made to McEntee, then Hayes is correct that they should be investigated. However, the amplification of these specific concerns into concerted condemnation of social media displays a distaste for interactive media’s partial re-ordering of communicative power relations, and the limited forms of political criticism they have enabled in Troika-era Ireland.
Historically, fear of new media forms is inseparable from modern fear of the unruly potential of the “mob”, and this fear was worn with patrician pride in several breathless broadsides. On Wednesday, in the Irish Independent, the former Progressive Democrat TD Liz O’Donnell wondered “what is to be gained from such a scrappy, ill-considered dialogue?” In The Irish Times, in an article devoid of a single reference or fact, David Adams argued that something called “internet journalism” was “at a level equivalent to the stone age”. Fresh from his appearance in an anti-abortion rights YouTube video, where he notes that “literally a tsunami of the culture of death is washing over Ireland”, columnist John Waters said “a venomous and toxic social media is out of control”.
Subsequently, the minister for communications, Pat Rabbitte, singled out Jim Sheridan, who works on RTÉ’s Late Late Show, for what he termed “deplorable and offensive” tweets that circulated satirical images of the rightwing Catholic Senator Rónán Mullen.
Sheridan clearly tweets in a personal capacity, but the implication of the criticism from Rabbitte and Mullen is that Sheridan’s humour should be a matter of concern for his employer. This may strike some readers as a novel way to advance the critique of cyberbullying, and part of the problem with this manufactured outrage is that it is so replete with hypocrisy.
This ad-hoc Un-Irish Satirical Activities Committee singled out an RTÉ employee for criticising political figures in a personal capacity, but had nothing to say about RTÉ’s satirical Irish Pictorial Weekly, which regularly features the political class as pliant “pixie heads” manipulated by a cat-stroking Angela Merkel. On the basis of the possibility that vicious communications led to the death of a colleague, there have been widespread political calls to regulate and restrict social media.
The Guardian
by Gavan Titley
In a week in which Irish newspapers attracted global incredulity for attempting to copyright links to their articles, Irish politicians have trumped this attempt to restructure the internet by simply declaring it to be evil. Recent reporting of suicides, a corrosive debate on abortion rights and transparent attempts to stifle political criticism have been fused into a full-throated moral panic over social media. Coming from a political class still convinced that LOL promises them lots of love, the wheels are likely to fall off this bandwagon long before it trundles from tawdry to totalitarian. But as deliberate exercises in displacement, moral panics illustrate something of the dominant political culture, and this opportunistic trolling is no exception.
The current focus on the dangers of social media stems from late December 2012, when the Fine Gael TD and junior agriculture minister Shane McEntee took his own life. Party colleagues were quick to suggest that online abuse was a factor in his death, and the Oireachtas Committee on Communications announced that it would instigate an investigation into cyberbullying. The chairman, Tom Hayes, warned that “this thing can’t be left to go unchecked, where people can put up vile comments and get away with it”. If threats were made to McEntee, then Hayes is correct that they should be investigated. However, the amplification of these specific concerns into concerted condemnation of social media displays a distaste for interactive media’s partial re-ordering of communicative power relations, and the limited forms of political criticism they have enabled in Troika-era Ireland.
Historically, fear of new media forms is inseparable from modern fear of the unruly potential of the “mob”, and this fear was worn with patrician pride in several breathless broadsides. On Wednesday, in the Irish Independent, the former Progressive Democrat TD Liz O’Donnell wondered “what is to be gained from such a scrappy, ill-considered dialogue?” In The Irish Times, in an article devoid of a single reference or fact, David Adams argued that something called “internet journalism” was “at a level equivalent to the stone age”. Fresh from his appearance in an anti-abortion rights YouTube video, where he notes that “literally a tsunami of the culture of death is washing over Ireland”, columnist John Waters said “a venomous and toxic social media is out of control”.
Subsequently, the minister for communications, Pat Rabbitte, singled out Jim Sheridan, who works on RTÉ’s Late Late Show, for what he termed “deplorable and offensive” tweets that circulated satirical images of the rightwing Catholic Senator Rónán Mullen.
Sheridan clearly tweets in a personal capacity, but the implication of the criticism from Rabbitte and Mullen is that Sheridan’s humour should be a matter of concern for his employer. This may strike some readers as a novel way to advance the critique of cyberbullying, and part of the problem with this manufactured outrage is that it is so replete with hypocrisy.
This ad-hoc Un-Irish Satirical Activities Committee singled out an RTÉ employee for criticising political figures in a personal capacity, but had nothing to say about RTÉ’s satirical Irish Pictorial Weekly, which regularly features the political class as pliant “pixie heads” manipulated by a cat-stroking Angela Merkel. On the basis of the possibility that vicious communications led to the death of a colleague, there have been widespread political calls to regulate and restrict social media.
The Guardian
