While the federal parliament tries to head for a "kinder, gentler" way of doing things, social media is getting a bit nasty.
Which leads to the question - how many outings of an anonymous political blogger does it take to make Twitter explode with rage?
Just the one it seems.
Advertisement: Story continues below On Monday, The Australian's online reporter, James Massola, outed anonymous political blogger, Grogs Gamut, as federal public servant, Greg Jericho. A bridge too far for many in the blogosphere and social media world who struck back to defend one of their own, and heavily criticise the mainstream media outlet's actions.
There's already been quite a bit of back and forth and I'm sure the debate about journalistic ethics and whether bloggers have an inalienable right to anonymity, with valid positions on both sides, will continue for some time. But what is even more remarkable is how loud and angry social media can get when it wants to be, especially when it's critical of institutional media.
Cue epic social vs mainstream media battle scene - avatars bloodied, editors armed to the teeth - this could get messy.
Gamut/Jerricho himself became famous (well, as far as a political blogger can) for criticising the big media institutions coverage of the 2010 election campaign. And he got his name out there when ABC head Mark Scott responded to the criticism, referring to it in a speech at the Melbourne Writers festival.
Criticism is one thing, but Twitter has turned into an all-day word stab-fest against The Australian and Massola. And likewise, lots of tweeps have gone all out to support the named blogger Gamut. Many even changing their avatars with banners like "I am @GrogsGamut." There was even the inevitable hashtag "GrogGate" created and a facebook group "If 100,000 people like this page I'll name my firstborn Grogs Gamut."
Twitterer and pot-stirrer extraordinaire, Catherine Deveny, put out a few comments that would fall into the abuse category, tweeting "#groggate is NOT about public interest, it's about envy and relevance deprivation. @grogsgamut? Good work. @jamesmassola? You f***wit."
And then later adding her own further two cents "@James Massola. You d***head."
More abuse followed from others in the Twitterverse much along the same lines. One of the top tweets of the day was from JeremysEar who said "@JamesMassola is quite right; only journalists may discuss politics. Everyone else needs to have their job threatened." And from another tweep "@JamesMassola You must be so proud of yourself, you petty and insecure little man".
Woah . . . harsh. So much for kinder, gentler.
Then the twitterverse tried to co-ordinate some strategies. Some suggested a mass boycott of the journo, while others reflected on the storm-in-a-teacup nature of it all. SMinney wrote; "Newsflash: Intelligent person with own opinions living in Canberra turns out to have a day-job unconnected with opinions."
Or just straight satire, mocking The Australian's position on the matter. MichaelByrnes tweeted "When is the satirist who writes columns under the name "Piers Akerman" going to be revealed?"
After all this bile and venom from the social media world, there is something that may comfort The Australian and James Massola. In the end, to bastardise a Wildian phrase, there is only one thing that is worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Definitely none of that at the moment. At least not on Twitter.
Bella Counihan works in the Press Gallery at Parliament House and writes for the National Times.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Julia's Frankenstein Parliament
The new parliament is to start next week and as we venture into unfamiliar territory, one can't help but feel we might be going against the natural order of things. Some worrying questions pop up, not unlike those themes in the popular story of Frankenstein. Have we created a great new invention by chucking adversarial politics and embracing consensus? Or are we inevitably going to be chased out of the village by the angry pitch fork-wielding mob (read Australian public) for a monster that no one really understands or can really control?
Prime Minister Julia Gillard must have been ecstatic to see the beast of her government's hand twitch, alive from a bolt of electric legitimacy delivered by independent MPs Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott. But the experiment undoubtedly remains a strange one, forced by unnatural circumstances. The PM said recently that expectations of the new parliament are going to have to be adjusted for this new polity. The government can no longer directly prosecute its agenda or do things the old-fashioned "here's the fully-formed policy, push the bugger through" way. She said people (perhaps directing her comments towards the old guard of the media) would just "have to get used to it".
The Westminster system has always had a natural inclination towards adversarial politics - every turn the government makes the opposition shadows and criticises, political point-scoring 101. But the people have spoken, they don't want this any more, sick to the teeth. So the game tries to rearrange itself.
Of course, there has always been the Senate, the house of review that is sometimes seen as the great saviour of Australian politics and then alternately as the greatest obstacle. But here's the worry for the government — when the Senate blocks bills, the Senate doesn't get blamed by the public. The ETS was seen as a failure on the government's part, not those that voted against the bill during it's travel down the log river of parliamentary process. And even then, the Senate was never as problematic as this new parliament is likely to be, with so many extra players and actors to consider.
Ideas of election promises, therefore, are not as they were. It would require a new engagement with the public for people to really follow the process of parliament and understand how legislation came about, which parties and actors own which part of the legislation. But if the Australian public has to actually pay attention to politics things might get tricky. Especially after this election, where there has been one of the largest turn-offs from politics ever seen, expressed in an unprecedented level of informal and non-voting. Mark Latham may have actually been relevant to that campaign after all, as much as we all wanted him to go get a different day job.
So the government is going to cop it for breaking promises, backflips and the like. Even if it actually improves the outcome and quality of the legislation, it probably won't be seen as such. The opposition will easily frame Labor's government as untrustworthy, particularly because of Labor's perceived history of broken promises.
Julia's Frankenstein parliament could be a great advance for democracy, where legislation is improved by consensus and reviewed by different parties in the process on its merits. But this strange new beast may well scare the villagers, media and public alike, who might not understand the new creature and its ways. Gillard herself said those used to the old ways may well respond to the new circumstances with "shock horror".
You might be right Julia, you can almost hear those pitch forks sharpening now.
http://www.nationaltimes.com.au/opinion/politics/julias-frankenstein-parliament-20100923-15na4.html
Prime Minister Julia Gillard must have been ecstatic to see the beast of her government's hand twitch, alive from a bolt of electric legitimacy delivered by independent MPs Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott. But the experiment undoubtedly remains a strange one, forced by unnatural circumstances. The PM said recently that expectations of the new parliament are going to have to be adjusted for this new polity. The government can no longer directly prosecute its agenda or do things the old-fashioned "here's the fully-formed policy, push the bugger through" way. She said people (perhaps directing her comments towards the old guard of the media) would just "have to get used to it".
The Westminster system has always had a natural inclination towards adversarial politics - every turn the government makes the opposition shadows and criticises, political point-scoring 101. But the people have spoken, they don't want this any more, sick to the teeth. So the game tries to rearrange itself.
Of course, there has always been the Senate, the house of review that is sometimes seen as the great saviour of Australian politics and then alternately as the greatest obstacle. But here's the worry for the government — when the Senate blocks bills, the Senate doesn't get blamed by the public. The ETS was seen as a failure on the government's part, not those that voted against the bill during it's travel down the log river of parliamentary process. And even then, the Senate was never as problematic as this new parliament is likely to be, with so many extra players and actors to consider.
Ideas of election promises, therefore, are not as they were. It would require a new engagement with the public for people to really follow the process of parliament and understand how legislation came about, which parties and actors own which part of the legislation. But if the Australian public has to actually pay attention to politics things might get tricky. Especially after this election, where there has been one of the largest turn-offs from politics ever seen, expressed in an unprecedented level of informal and non-voting. Mark Latham may have actually been relevant to that campaign after all, as much as we all wanted him to go get a different day job.
So the government is going to cop it for breaking promises, backflips and the like. Even if it actually improves the outcome and quality of the legislation, it probably won't be seen as such. The opposition will easily frame Labor's government as untrustworthy, particularly because of Labor's perceived history of broken promises.
Julia's Frankenstein parliament could be a great advance for democracy, where legislation is improved by consensus and reviewed by different parties in the process on its merits. But this strange new beast may well scare the villagers, media and public alike, who might not understand the new creature and its ways. Gillard herself said those used to the old ways may well respond to the new circumstances with "shock horror".
You might be right Julia, you can almost hear those pitch forks sharpening now.
http://www.nationaltimes.com.au/opinion/politics/julias-frankenstein-parliament-20100923-15na4.html
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Political Swear Jar
Undoubtedly things in Australian politics are going to be different and so with it political language will be reformed and written anew. So let’s start this whole process on the right foot. Rob Oakeshott says there’s going to be a new swear jar in politics, so let’s begin by reaching some consensus (ironically enough) on which words are swear jar worthy.
Political language undoubtedly has its fads, like the section in the back of women’s magazines telling you ‘who’s hot’ and ‘who’s not’. Of course, the Rudd era was one of political jargon; “revolutions”, “working families”, “complementarities” and other such nominalizations in Bureaucratese. But they weren’t winners with the majority.
So drum roll while we have the nominations please.
When he mentioned the political swear jar idea Oakeshott said that the first word to go had to be “mandate”. He told a press conference before eventually revealing his decision on which team he was backing “this is not a mandate for any government. We should have a great big swear jar for the next three years and if anyone uses that word ‘mandate’ they should have to chip in some money.’’ Mandate was probably never really going to feature, I’d say, given the delicate nature of things, but what Oakeshott wants, Oakeshott can have. ‘Mandate’ is out.
I’ll hazard a guess, the parliamentary press gallery is certainly going to nominate “paradigm”. New, old, blue team, red team — doesn’t really matter what type of paradigm, when Bob Katter uses the word 10 times each press conference you know it has to be a word on its way out. Maybe it’s the cynicism of the “old paradigm” but from the look of most journos, the word is billed as a one hit wonder. In recent weeks we’ve seen headlines like “New Paradigm looks like old-fashioned politics”, “The new paradigm will die in parliament” and “new paradigm politics may not change a thing” ... but it would be a miracle if we were still hearing about paradigms this time next year.
Bob Brown has nominated “pushing” as his forbidden word. In a press conference he reprimanded many journos for asking about his party “pushing” its policies. He said that “pushing” has always been a misleading term, I suppose because it suggests forcing and pressuring instead of other nicer, less sexy words like “legislating” or “lobbying”. Unfortunately it appears the media remains unaware of its swear jar status.
Crikey readers have spoken out against words like “backflip” and “cracks” in the new world order after a headline ran “Cracks emerge in Labor-Green alliance”. One reader said “the media are now on hyper-vigilant ‘crack’ alert”, while another complained “Are you going to report this every time? How brain-numbing that will be. Oh look, the government has to appease someone to pass something.”
Well, brain-numbing is what we’re trying to avoid and one way to do that is remove the brain-numbing language that has long dominated the political landscape. We’ve hopefully gotten rid of “real action” and “moving forward” post campaign. But if we’re going to have a new way of doing things, let’s inject some new vocab into the old dog. So now is your turn reader, any suggestions? What are the words you want to ban?
Political language undoubtedly has its fads, like the section in the back of women’s magazines telling you ‘who’s hot’ and ‘who’s not’. Of course, the Rudd era was one of political jargon; “revolutions”, “working families”, “complementarities” and other such nominalizations in Bureaucratese. But they weren’t winners with the majority.
So drum roll while we have the nominations please.
When he mentioned the political swear jar idea Oakeshott said that the first word to go had to be “mandate”. He told a press conference before eventually revealing his decision on which team he was backing “this is not a mandate for any government. We should have a great big swear jar for the next three years and if anyone uses that word ‘mandate’ they should have to chip in some money.’’ Mandate was probably never really going to feature, I’d say, given the delicate nature of things, but what Oakeshott wants, Oakeshott can have. ‘Mandate’ is out.
I’ll hazard a guess, the parliamentary press gallery is certainly going to nominate “paradigm”. New, old, blue team, red team — doesn’t really matter what type of paradigm, when Bob Katter uses the word 10 times each press conference you know it has to be a word on its way out. Maybe it’s the cynicism of the “old paradigm” but from the look of most journos, the word is billed as a one hit wonder. In recent weeks we’ve seen headlines like “New Paradigm looks like old-fashioned politics”, “The new paradigm will die in parliament” and “new paradigm politics may not change a thing” ... but it would be a miracle if we were still hearing about paradigms this time next year.
Bob Brown has nominated “pushing” as his forbidden word. In a press conference he reprimanded many journos for asking about his party “pushing” its policies. He said that “pushing” has always been a misleading term, I suppose because it suggests forcing and pressuring instead of other nicer, less sexy words like “legislating” or “lobbying”. Unfortunately it appears the media remains unaware of its swear jar status.
Crikey readers have spoken out against words like “backflip” and “cracks” in the new world order after a headline ran “Cracks emerge in Labor-Green alliance”. One reader said “the media are now on hyper-vigilant ‘crack’ alert”, while another complained “Are you going to report this every time? How brain-numbing that will be. Oh look, the government has to appease someone to pass something.”
Well, brain-numbing is what we’re trying to avoid and one way to do that is remove the brain-numbing language that has long dominated the political landscape. We’ve hopefully gotten rid of “real action” and “moving forward” post campaign. But if we’re going to have a new way of doing things, let’s inject some new vocab into the old dog. So now is your turn reader, any suggestions? What are the words you want to ban?
Monday, September 13, 2010
Online voting - or the horse-and-cart option?
Finally, after much breath-holding, palm-sweating and teeth-grinding. We got there. Through the three amigos — or not so much anymore with Katter tossing his own sombrero in the ring separately — a decision was finally made and we have a government.
Weirdly enough, the votes that we’ve all been frantic for the Electoral Commission to count have been kind of sidelined; the independents and Greens MP Adam Bandt have ultimately made a final decision out of all the indecision. Who knows? Maybe in the months to come we’ll see both sides calling in the ref with recounts a real possibility.
But it could be different. Having just gone through an election where it has taken two weeks to get to only 85 odd per cent of the vote counted, the idea of an online ballot is looking pretty attractive for a public put through the electoral wringer. Certainty and speed would be the main benefits - those things pesky humans don’t always provide. Reports of ballot counters taking lengthy lunch breaks and clocking off at the primary school finish bell are a case in point.
But before you jump up and down demanding that the electoral commission go digital so you don’t have to leave your laptop to go exercise your democratic right, there might be some issues you want to consider.
Electronic voting in Australia was trialled just once and included remote voting. At the 2007 election it was introduced for the blind and for those in our Defence Forces overseas. The government then dumped the idea in 2009, saying that the trials had been too expensive when compared with ordinary push-paper-into-a-box voting. And we’re not just talking a dollar or two more, but for every dollar spent on a ordinary vote you’d have to spend more than $120 on an electronic ballot.
But hey, why put a price on democracy right? Well, there’s another red flag that the average voter might not be aware of. Online polls can be incredibly easy to manipulate. And I’m not talking some futuristic matrix thing here, I’m talking your Grandma could do it. It’s simply a matter of voting, clicking a button that is easily available in your web browser to clear the history of that vote and voting again. There are of course automated versions of this and then once an online community or two is involved, you can seriously manipulate the count.
There surely aren’t too many Rick Astley fans, but in 2008 he won the MTV best act ever. How? A simple yet effective program written by someone with the handy Vote4Rick. If you downloaded the RickVoter program, it would go to the MTV website and automatically vote for Astley over and over again. Rick ended up with more than 90 per cent of the vote.
Back in 2009, Time magazine had an online poll for the top 100 most influential people. Usually the top spots would go to your Barack Obamas or your Hu Jintaos but this time the number one spot went to the relatively unknown founder of an online billboard site, 4Chan. “Moot” or Christopher Poole as he’s known, was propelled to the top by his devoted followers who manipulated the numbers using bots and other hacking devices. Not only that but they actually managed to make a pattern in the list where the first letter of each name spelled out “marblecake also the game”.
The problem for online voting is a difficult and possibly unresolvable one. It all boils down to the problem of how do you prove who you are online? Histories can be deleted, IP addresses could be used by different people, and multiple email addresses easily created. There are options, using passport numbers or some such, but it’s a tricky one. Electronic voting with specially designed machines can also have their problems - they would be more secure but umpteen times more expensive. SMS voting might be a real idea that would solve some of these issues.
If we look back, the trend towards digital has been changing the way we live our everyday life - Music? MP3. Books? e-Readers. Photos, money, games, video, TV, mail, the list goes on and on. Going from analogue to digital seems the natural inclination of recent history and is (mostly) seen as an improvement. This Victorian government has already flagged its intention to use electronic voting kiosks next election. But until the technology gets better and cheaper, as much as it pains my Gen Y heart to say it, in this case it might be just better to stick with the horse and cart and learn to be patient.
Weirdly enough, the votes that we’ve all been frantic for the Electoral Commission to count have been kind of sidelined; the independents and Greens MP Adam Bandt have ultimately made a final decision out of all the indecision. Who knows? Maybe in the months to come we’ll see both sides calling in the ref with recounts a real possibility.
But it could be different. Having just gone through an election where it has taken two weeks to get to only 85 odd per cent of the vote counted, the idea of an online ballot is looking pretty attractive for a public put through the electoral wringer. Certainty and speed would be the main benefits - those things pesky humans don’t always provide. Reports of ballot counters taking lengthy lunch breaks and clocking off at the primary school finish bell are a case in point.
But before you jump up and down demanding that the electoral commission go digital so you don’t have to leave your laptop to go exercise your democratic right, there might be some issues you want to consider.
Electronic voting in Australia was trialled just once and included remote voting. At the 2007 election it was introduced for the blind and for those in our Defence Forces overseas. The government then dumped the idea in 2009, saying that the trials had been too expensive when compared with ordinary push-paper-into-a-box voting. And we’re not just talking a dollar or two more, but for every dollar spent on a ordinary vote you’d have to spend more than $120 on an electronic ballot.
But hey, why put a price on democracy right? Well, there’s another red flag that the average voter might not be aware of. Online polls can be incredibly easy to manipulate. And I’m not talking some futuristic matrix thing here, I’m talking your Grandma could do it. It’s simply a matter of voting, clicking a button that is easily available in your web browser to clear the history of that vote and voting again. There are of course automated versions of this and then once an online community or two is involved, you can seriously manipulate the count.
There surely aren’t too many Rick Astley fans, but in 2008 he won the MTV best act ever. How? A simple yet effective program written by someone with the handy Vote4Rick. If you downloaded the RickVoter program, it would go to the MTV website and automatically vote for Astley over and over again. Rick ended up with more than 90 per cent of the vote.
Back in 2009, Time magazine had an online poll for the top 100 most influential people. Usually the top spots would go to your Barack Obamas or your Hu Jintaos but this time the number one spot went to the relatively unknown founder of an online billboard site, 4Chan. “Moot” or Christopher Poole as he’s known, was propelled to the top by his devoted followers who manipulated the numbers using bots and other hacking devices. Not only that but they actually managed to make a pattern in the list where the first letter of each name spelled out “marblecake also the game”.
The problem for online voting is a difficult and possibly unresolvable one. It all boils down to the problem of how do you prove who you are online? Histories can be deleted, IP addresses could be used by different people, and multiple email addresses easily created. There are options, using passport numbers or some such, but it’s a tricky one. Electronic voting with specially designed machines can also have their problems - they would be more secure but umpteen times more expensive. SMS voting might be a real idea that would solve some of these issues.
If we look back, the trend towards digital has been changing the way we live our everyday life - Music? MP3. Books? e-Readers. Photos, money, games, video, TV, mail, the list goes on and on. Going from analogue to digital seems the natural inclination of recent history and is (mostly) seen as an improvement. This Victorian government has already flagged its intention to use electronic voting kiosks next election. But until the technology gets better and cheaper, as much as it pains my Gen Y heart to say it, in this case it might be just better to stick with the horse and cart and learn to be patient.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)