Terrorism on Twitter, the new reality TV?

The world news media has become the best propaganda machine for terrorism, of all stripes. What these people crave most is big coverage of their outrages. It adds a fear factor fallout which spreads far beyond the original shootings or bombings. And now social media both feeds and increases that reach enormously.

Two things used to work against the news multiplier of terrorism — distance and time. When it took days for news of an anarchy to make it to the front pages of newspapers back in the 1800s, for those reading it eventually there was the sense that it was over, and also not in their space. Then telegraph and radio came along and shortened time. The later advent of global TV and soon afterwards Ted Turner's CNN invention of the non-stop news cycle gave us always-on access to anything happening around the globe where a camera and microphone might be sent. Now, the reach of the internet has brought to us everywhere instant global news.

Budget-cost travel also means that if there's a terrorist incident anywhere now, it's likely that we, or someone perhaps only two degrees of separation from us, will be there. Probably filming the event live to social media on smartphones.

Terrorism outrages are the new reality TV. It's almost a full circle from when citizens gathered at the Coliseum in Rome to watch gladiators and animals savage each other as a spectator sport. Now though, we don't have to leave our sitting rooms, or the bars or cafes where we happen to be, to have a front seat view of slaughter of our kind by our kind. To even be shaping that view.

I'm both a working journalist and a longtime student of journalism. I happened to be watching BBC TV News when they broke word of a shooting in Munich, and as an exercise I hit #Munich on Twitter on my iPad. For the next several hours I watched in tandem the various TV news channels and the Twitter feed. It was an education in how professional news coverage is struggling under the deluging waves of social media. It's not pretty. And for all the hype about 'citizen journalism', it doesn't serve us well.

Journalism has never had a pristine record. From Victorian 'penny dreadfuls' right up through the newspaper career of Britain's newest Foreign Secretary, the craft has been riddled with misinformation, propaganda, plagiarism, and downright lying. But most serious practitioners do try to be truthful, accurate, and to tell a story as completely as possible. Doing that takes gathering facts, checking them, and checking again, and then filing copy.

There isn't time for that anymore. Pressures of getting the story out first on 24-hour news TV is playing hell with a fundamental of good journalism — checking the facts. On a running story now, there's a new person around the TV news desk: the one monitoring the social media feeds. When the news anchor runs out of questions to correspondents and 'experts', who are often as much in the dark as he or she is, it becomes time to turn to that 'extra leg' of modern news analysis.

As Munich developed, elements that came from the social media coverage were relevant, though very disturbing. The smartphone video of the shooter calmly levelling his Glock pistol at the people outside the McDonalds restaurant and then firing deliberately at them as they turned and ran. The one of the conversation with the shooter on the roof on the shopping centre, as he paced around the area, clearly more disturbed than coherent. Both were horrible. But they were grist to the mill of addictive television news watching, especially in the constant TV news loops.

At least the TV stations mostly blurred out the terrified people as they tried to flee from the gunman. Many posts of the same video on Twitter did not. The police said afterwards that many of the casualties happened at this point, so it may be that we were watching the last seconds of life for some of those people. And we kept watching over and over, with a prurience analogous to that of the citizens in the Coliseum. That's how we are now.

Watching Twitter unfold the story was essentially reading constant repetition of morsels of information bouncing off each other like atoms in a large particle collider, each impact creating multiple versions of the original pair and fragmenting, changing and adding to the content. So the next time one of the by–products came along it seemed new, but wasn't.

There were also interjections of untruths. Sometimes inadvertent, sometimes through ignorance, sometimes deliberate. These too were caught on the rip–tide of twit and swept wider and further, then rolled back in to us multiplied even more.

Reports of more shooting in a central Munich station went back and forth for hours before being discredited. But not before the city was put in lockdown, public transport was stopped, and people fled or cowered in their homes or wherever places they had been enjoying a normal evening’s activities.

A photograph circulated widely of bodies on a floor, purporting to be from inside the restaurant in Munich. Eventually somebody pointed out it was from an attack on a shopping centre in Nairobi in 2013.

Mug shots popped up captioned as having been released by police as a 'suspect'. Except that they weren't. I deliberately didn't record anything specific or screen grab any of the tweets. I wanted to see how the stream affected my later recollection and perception. But one of a number of ugly ones that sticks in my mind said 'Hey, Deutschland, how do ya like them apples?'

There was also the inevitable input from those who immediately associate such events with Muslims and Islamic terrorism. Incorrectly, as it turned out. The shooter’s inspiration was rooted in right-wing European hate and a crazed wish to be famous.

The police were attempting to clear the scene while not knowing if there were other shooters around, and trying to get a proper handle on casualties. Correctly, they tried not to say anything more than they knew as they carried out their work. News crews were kept at the distance necessary both for safety and for investigation management. But today’s news has to be fed incessantly, with regurgitations of whatever visuals are available, and of talking heads, and the Twitter stream contributed widely to uncertainty, wild inaccuracy, and fear.

I'm no Canute. I know the craft which I started into more than four decades ago has changed, and continues to change even faster, from when I was tapping out my early local stories on a mechanical typewriter. I'm not against change. Indeed, I'm an adopter of it and have in my own small way led with the new technology in local news. I use social media for elements of my current work. But I don't get involved on it, I don’t talk on it. Because it's too quick, too public, and too easy to rant without responsibility, carp without consequence. More seriously, it’s too easy to whip up individuals, and mobs, to extremism and evil acts.

Social media’s success is based on having provided to all of us gossiping at the corner shop, or sitting on bar stools, or commenting at our televisions, an instant and wider actual audience. To feel we’re ‘in’ rather than observing the minute and the major happenings in our neighbourhood and in the wide world. It has also allowed us as individuals, families, groups and whole populations to be targeted for manipulation in a way that even George Orwell didn’t anticipate. We carry the means of that manipulation voluntarily, in our pockets, in our bags. Mostly in our hands, constantly interacting with our Big Brother small screens in case we miss an amusement, or a scandal. Or more and more killings.

I’m well aware of the many good sides of social media, the many positive ways it can and does enrich our lives, and the lives of those we hold close and dear. It has shortened time and distance for globally scattered families. It can and does help bring communities together for good projects. It can and does allow the populace to make its wishes known in national debate. It can aid the election of good local leaders and national presidents. And it can and does help us to learn more about ourselves and our world.

When Gothenburg’s printing press provided opportunity for religious, social and political manipulators to propagate their themes and memes, it also began the process of taking education from the privileged few and offering it to all of us. On balance, it’s fairly safe to say that the benefits begun by his technology still outweigh the downsides. Social media is the latest extension of that process, and we can reasonably hope that the good will outbalance the bad in the long run.

In the meantime though, it would help if we all paused before we hit the ‘Tweet’ and ‘Retweet’ buttons, and asked ourselves are we adding to the truth or the good of the subject of the moment? Because, while our own individual contribution to the stream might be infinitesimal in the babel of the twittering cosmos, it’s like the butterfly flapping its wings in Chaos Theory, we could be helping to build a hurricane somewhere else.

It you’ve got this far, you’ll probably know what I mean. If you gave up after 140 characters, well maybe you are the future come to now.

The prison books ban

I've just read about a most horrendous thing perpetrated on our next door island, which throws a country that can often claim to be the most civilised nation in the world back into the Dark Ages.

Last November, Britain's Justice Secretary Chris Grayling stopped the sending of books and other necessities in parcels from families and friends to prisoners.

Writers, journalists and representatives of many human rights organisations are now, justifiably, incensed at what is clearly a very mean attempt to gain credibility with the hard liners who want prisons to be deeply punishing instead of places where rehabilitation might be possible.

Grayling is now at the receiving end of a massive backlash, including an online petition that has already received more than 3,000 signatories.

The UK's Prisons Minister Jeremy Wright has tried to defend the move, saying there are libraries in all prisons, and prisoners can have up to 12 books in their cells at any given time.

Protestors counter by noting that prison libraries are suffering the same cutbacks as any other such facility, and that anyhow the prisoners might have special interests that aren't catered for by the limited prison library services, and depend on family and friends to provide what they need.

The issue has raised discussion on whether the UK government is at all interested in rehabilitation and education in its prisons, especially against a background of prisoners often being confined to their cells for an much as 20 hours a day.

It's just basically bad. But it prompts me to wonder — and I will make it my business to find out — if similar restrictions apply here?

The Seanad Debates, an Introduction

Well, the campaign to decide the future of Seanad Eireann has got under way. But at least we're going to be asked to make the decision. I know that if Enda Kenny had his preferences, he'd just lock the doors and cut off the money stream.

We're going to hear a lot of spin in the coming months, About how anachronistic the Seanad is, and how much money will be saved by giving it and its seanadoiri the republic's boot. That it's a hot-air talking shop with no real teeth, a creche for 'resting' TDs, and completely without a mandate from the people who pay for it.

Most, or even all of that might be true. But I'm uncomfortable about a zealotic push to dump it altogether. If for no other reason than we're losing an opportunity to keep manners on the other lot in the lower house. God knows, they need something to keep them in line.

When the first Free State Seanad Eireann was established in 1922, its members were by appointment. The idea was that eventually all of the members would be directly elected by the public. And they were for its first election in 1925, but the system was then changed to indirect elections, similar to today but less complex. The lack of power that Senate had was demonstrated by its dissolution in 1936 because it delayed some Government legislation.

The revived Seanad in 1937 brought in the Vocational Panels for 43 of its membership, based on a theme promulgated by Pope Pius XI. It's complicated, with nominations controlled by the political parties, and voting by TDs, sitting senators and councillors. Just two third-level educational institutions, the National University of Ireland (UCD, UCG, UCC and Maynooth) and the University of Dublin (TCD) have the right to elect members, six of the 60 seanadoiri. The Taoiseach can nominate 11 members.

That's a potted statement of the current position, which shows that the major control is political, and that primarily held by the Government of the day.

The Seanad doesn't have much power over legislation produced by the lower house. It has the right to review it, suggest amendments which need not be accepted by the Government, and delay it to a finite length of time beyond which it can be 'deemed' to have accepted it even if it hasn't.

Lots of proposals for reform have been produced, going all the way back to the 1920s. The most recent, and most relevant one to today, was by a sub-committee of the Seanad's own in 2004. The Vocational Panels system would be abolished, with 21 members being directly elected by the public. All third level colleges should have a vote for the educational membership, and the Taoiseach's nominees should all represent Northern Ireland, the Irish abroad, and marginalised groups in the country. It also suggested that the Seanad should have a greater role scrutinising the Government and EU legislation.

Formally introduced in 2007, these concepts were never implemented. Not surprising, as the political control would be seriously undermined. In 2009, Enda Kenny said that a Fine Gael Government would abolish the upper house. It was to be part of a package of overall Oireachtas reform, including cutting the number of TDs by 20. That last hasn't happened yet, either.

No more than the Dail, the upper house of our national parliament hasn't always covered itself in glory. But there have been really good debates, some passionate interjections into our national conversation, and quite a number of seriously committed senators with no personal or political agendas who have helped make Seanad Eireann relevant for the rest of us ordinary Joes.

I'm not going to try and argue the case for the Seanad's retention, albeit in modified form, all in one go here. This is by way of placing the summer and autumnal conversation on the issue in some form of backstory. Bottom line, I'm uncomfortable about our Taoiseach's single-minded approach to abolishing the Seanad. That the Socialist Party and Sinn Fein have the same idea doesn't help. Labour is also for its abolition. We're kind of lucky that it is a Constitutional matter, and we, the people, get to decide on whether or not that'll happen.

I'd prefer, though, that we were being asked first to vote on that quite reasonable Report on Seanad Reform of 2004-2007. So, unless I'm convinced otherwise, I'm currently of a mind to vote 'no' in the referendum we're being offered.

Because, really, I don't trust your motives, guys. Convince me wrong.