Naked Royals, New Media, Old Mores

Last month a naked Prince, this month a topless Duchess, where will we be by October at this rate

The really interesting thing has been watching the Meedja arbitrage and the angst going on because of it. In both cases, foreign media was quite happy to post pictures of bare Royal flesh, and anyone with a bit of nous and a browser can view the Royal bum, bollocks and boobs. But the British print media, still awaiting a spanking from the Leveson inquiry, is largely keeping its head down. Some, like the New Statesmen, are trying the "disgraceful, disrespectful" or "how childish" harrumphing play (good try, but no cigar). One paper, the Sun, broke ranks and published pictures of a body double in the Harry & Friend pose after they had gone viral overnet. (I wonder if they will put a Duchess double on page 3 now?)

But why should the Great British Public not see their Royal nekkidnesses? After all, everyone else can. Don't we have an even bigger right- as one wag on Twitter put it, as we the British taxpapers pay for the Royals, their assets are by rights ours. The real issue exercisng the great and good is not this particular boob, but the general case. Lord Mandelsohn pretty much summed up the overall issue, writing in the Financial Times:

"The bigger question is how the domestic media market can be made economic and subject to any form of regulation in an era when, a click away, there is access to information that respects no national boundaries and the laws of no single national parliament or the basic standards of conventional journalism," he wrote in a letter to today's Financial Times. He said it is difficult to see a future for newspapers when the internet has "ransacked" their business. "It is hard to see how some of the best-known sources of quality English-language journalism – the Times, New York Times, the Guardian spring to mind – will ever make money again," he added.

But lets just look at the end to end media value chain operating here to unpick where exactly the problem is.

- Firstly, content capture is not really an Internet problem, its an awareness of cameras problem. There were paparazzi and zoom lenses long before there were PCs and browsers. The lesson of several decades has been that people of public interest who get their bits out are going to have them captured, thats a given. And you'd have thought the lesson had been learned by the Royals of all people after the Harry episode. To misquote Oscar Wilde, one naked Royal photoset is an accident, two looks like carelessness.

- Secondly, content aggregation and distribution is not an internet problem per se, the Royal bitz were published in Olde Fashioned Print Media PDQ, just not (except for The Sun, eventually) in Britain. So its not as if no-one gets to keep abreast of the naked reality, its just the British who can now see what everyone else can

So in reality, the "internet issue" that is occurring is that of User Access by The Wrong Sort Of User. There has been a loss of limitation of access by those with power, to content that already exists, via the web. Getting around these authorities is not a new thing, by the way - in 1759 Voltaire published Candide in 3 European capitals at the same time so he could get enough copies sold before both the pirate media copied it and the various authorities banned it. But today, once its on a server somewhere, the authorities can't pull it down. (Plus ca Change, as they say in France).

And that, as Mandelsohn notes, has put the "Old Media" in an impossible position, as if they keep the old wary symbiotic dance with authority going they lose reader credibility and lose money, but if they also show their readers what many have seen already, then they will get taken to task and lose money. But his solution, unfortunately, seems to be more Old School. He feels that there is a problem with Free Speech:

"we come to grips with the fact that the internet is giving public access to uncorroborated, undigested and unmediated news, all in the name of free speech, is becoming one of the defining issues of the 21st century".

This is a Canutian view of the world unfortunately, unless one believes it is possible to censor the whole Internet. (Actually, Canute was trying to point out to his staff that even he had limitations to his power - now there was a wise British monarch). But it is worrying that the blame is being laid on the perils of free speech, and the huge risk that the general public should know things that previously only their betters (and sundry foreigners) did. That this is an absurd proposition in the first place seems not to occur.

So, as we await the Leveson enquiry outcome, two emerging New Media principles are - in my view - becoming clearer:

(i) Media that hacks into the public's privacy is going to increasingly be seen as a Bad Thing, unless the public wants it*, but....

(ii) Media that hacks into people who are paid for by the public in one way or another will be seen differently (and virally).

And once its all hanging out there, it is senseless to stop the media in the UK reporting on it. Any new laws, regulations, modes of operation etc that don't admit this reality will just be seen as an ass and a load of bollocks.

*Whether they know the risks they are taking is moot, so hopefully these sort of episodes are instructive.