Of Straw Men and Hollow Men

Its not often you get to start a blog post with a spot of classic poetry, but here is TS Eliot's The Hollow Men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass

But I was reminded of it after reading the furore following Paul Carr's post on the dark side of Social Media:

To summarise, Paul Carr is becoming Neo-Keensian* in his posts about the Dark Side of Social Meedja and specifically, in this case, Citizen Journalism. This is of course deeply upsetting to those who follow the Church of Eternal Whuffie, which in essence believes that Social Media is Always A Good Thing. Specifically in this post Carr takes aim at a number of Social Sacred Cows, such as:

- Tweetmaim - Twittering your thoughts to the world as the dead and dying mount up in the Fort Hood shooting, all in the name of "getting the truth out" is A Good Thing.

- Carnage Camera - pointing out that these days people are more likely to photograph a terrible event for their friends, or Twitter it than actually do something useful like help. To compound it, he notes that the final seconds of the young Iranian girl shot in the protests were spent with a camera shoved in her face rather than a cameraman trying to help her.

Now this is strong linkbait to the Social Mediarati (and no doubt intended as such...). The basic arguments against his view (summarising the Social Media pushback) is that:

(i) Yes, Citizen Journalism - and by extension Social Media - has its problems, but it is better that these problems exist than the alternative of Social Media not existing. This is the gist of Matthew Ingram's post (Brave man Matthew, admitting that Citizen Journalism has some flaws - thats Virtual Treason in some quarters

(ii) Its not the Citizen Journalism gun thats dangerous, its the user, and they are not dangerous anyhows and just doing what they have to do, and some eggs get broken ftw - this is the gist of Suw Charman-Anderson's argument. She then goes on to lambast Mr Carr for setting up simple straw men that are hollow when examined, but sets up her own straw men with which to do it, which negates the effect somewhat (the title of my post echoes Suw's title on Straw Men).

(iii) This is nothing new - people are people (ie contradicting Ms Charman above to an extent) and Social media is merely another tool to be used for good or ill. Indeed, its another opportunity to bring Kitty Genovese up (is there a Genovese Law in Social Meedja akin to Godwin's Law?) and point out that Twitter would may have made a difference - presumably Someone Else not twittering would have read the twts and called the Cops? (Genovese was raped and murdered in full view of a block residents in 1964, no one helped her in a fairly protracted ordeal carried out in public)

(iv) And then, there were of course some in the veins of "How dare a person defend the Mainstream Media approach and castigate the New Meedja. In the interests of freedom of speech, this sort of speech should be stopped and its authors publically vilified".

(v) This is linkbait and should therefore be discarded as a contribution to the discussion (the Dave Winer view)

So there you have it - equal but opposite polemicists, poles apart, whose dried voices, when added up, sum to zero. Twittering together, it all becomes meaningless, like wind in dry grass. Why, one wonders, is it not possible for people to take the rational middle ground? Is it too radical to be able to look at the Pros, admit the Cons, weigh up the evidence and take a balanced view rather than try and fit the circumstances into one's pre-formed ideologies. It was another TechCrunch writer, MG Siegler who came closest to a balanced view here:

Paul makes solid and interesting points about citizen journalism’s lack of effectiveness in some high profile examples, but I tend to side with the idea that the free flow of information — yes, even when some of it is false information — is a good thing. That’s just my opinion.

But when Paul’s post shifts to be more of a point about the degradation of our society as a whole, I’m 100% with him. That’s why his post is great. I don’t necessarily agree with his set-up, but I absolutely agree with his conclusion.

The other big irony, of course, is that Paul's piece appeared not in a Mainstream Media journal, but in the tech-geeky TechCrunch blog, but somehow this is seen as an MSM attack on Citizen Journalism.

Its my overall view that these Social Media tools are a Good Thing but - like all early inventions - people have yet to learn how to use them in a mediated and responsible way, and they have yet to have the facilities developed (lie early cars with brakes and clutches) to be acceptably user-safe. I also think - personally - that a lot of people are very uncomfortable about the rise of the "I'll twitter rather than help" culture in Citizen Journalism, which looks suspiciously like "look at meeeee looking at thiiiiis", and would rather have a bit more Citizen Practical Assistancerism. I also think that privacy, decency and dignity are aspects of life that the early "live my life on the line" Social Mediarati don't fully grok, but will need to for it to really be accepted as a tool for something more than social gadflies. The chanting of the "All Things Bright an Beautiful" liturgy of the Social Media Faithful won't wash, but nor does the "Its all Doom'nGloom" school.

But this is the View from the Middle ground, and seems quite hard to stand on sometimes. (Update: I'm extremely heartened to see that 2 people I respect, Euan Semple and Antony Mayfield - seem to be taking a radical, rational line too)


Anyway, you may recall how Eliot's poem ended:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

And the thought that Social Media's main contribution to this is that at least we can Twitter about that whimper, and shove a camera up its dying nostrils to get it on Flickr, seems a bit of a hollow victory, no?

*Keensians see him as a prophet, Neo-Keensians just attempt to profit from taking the extreme anti SocMed view