LAUGH ABOUT IT, SHOUT ABOUT IT [328]

Social media has become as much of a bête noire for myself this website as the 45^th President of the United States came to be, so I must now also write it out of my system until further notice.

Social media is just another form of traditional media, and should be understood as such. Marshall McLuhan, the philosopher whose work created the field of media studies, was forty-one years old when regular television broadcasts started in his native Canada in 1952, making him well-placed in commenting on television’s impact on communication and our world. The focus of his book “Understanding Media” was how we should study media more than the content it carries, and the impact of a new medium will be more than that of the content. For social media, which became part of everyday life during my twenties, content is fuel for the algorithm of the site, and providing content to the site is both amplification of your message and the price of admission. The “social” side is an impression created by the content.

If everyone uses social media, we are essentially all in the media business and, therefore, we all should receive media training to fully understand the uses and effects of media, so that we can use it most effectively and mindfully. I think this would press home the importance of acting professionally in the public space created by a media that requires us to act intimately in order to receive the content required to run it. Organisations specialising in media training offer communication skills, interview technique, provide experience in dealing with PR and media relations, and provide “key message development” for the messages you want to get across. 

It sounds not far away from preparing for a job interview, as you prepare to create the greatest possible impression of yourself, until I saw that one company, PA Mediapoint, also offers “crisis media training” in how to deal with intense media scrutiny – their website states that “the focus is on equipping comms teams and spokespeople with the essential techniques and strategies to limit reputational damage.” 

For all that you can hate about what Piers Morgan says on Twitter, his account can be viewed as the same collection of safe press release announcements and off-the-cuff pronouncements that define a brand-building social media account that keeps on the right side of the site’s terms of service, because Morgan knows how to play the social media engagement game. Whenever Twitter has been used in a controversial fashion, mostly by people since banned from using the platform, the “social” side of social media is not applicable. 

Something that is slanderous if spoken between two people is counted as libel on social media because it is media, it is recorded, it is written down. Putting yourself on public view carries an element of risk for anyone, celebrity or not, at any point, and whether it is worth putting on that off-hand comment, to be deleted later, or to target someone or something anonymously, carries its own risks.

I therefore use Twitter and Instagram primarily to link to my website, and to share things I like, because that is as much as I want to use it. I could decide to play the game, building social capital through likes and followers, but I think I prefer it more when that happens as a coincidence of one thing I posted about what I write elsewhere.

As everyone now has access to the media, we must not just get used to having a separate private and public face, but the management of that is now a life skill. That essentially makes it impossible to get it out of my system.

IT AIN’T NOTHING BUT A HEART-BREAKER [315]

I think I am writing this one more for my benefit than for anyone else.

 

The term “culture war” was coined by the German physicist, biologist and politician Rudolf Virchow to describe the campaign of the pre-German kingdom of Prussia, under Otto von Bismarck to reduce the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in educational matter. Translated from the German “Kulturkampf,” the term was repeated in American newspapers, later applied to opposing values, whether they be conservative or liberal, progressive or traditionalist, or urban or rural. The increasing polarisation in American politics along these lines was described in sociologist James Davison Hunter’s book “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America” (1991), which returned the term to widespread use.

 

When “kampf” means “struggle”, a less charged word than “war”, the choice of one word over the other implies an intent to win outright. Concord is never an option, let alone an objective. If one side is described as a deranged, totalitarian illiberal mob, then the other side must be too. Does it ultimately matter? Not if either side think they are having a good war.

 

I don’t believe “culture war” was a term ever needed in the UK until its own politics and culture experienced polarisation through the Brexit referendum - “cancel culture” and “woke” have similarly only entered common use in the media in the last five years since then. However, all the terms are snappy, emotionally charged and easy to apply to a headline, alongside “feud”, “blast”, “hits out at”, “shame”, “mob”, “cult”, “shock”, “ban”, “axe” and “row”. Any issue can be heated like a microwave dinner if the right words are chosen.

 

My preoccupation on “culture war” as a term comes from being, as a transgender person, the subject of a culture war. I am not on either side of the argument, I am what is being fought over – my rights are under question. This culture war appears to have begun in the summer of 2017, when the UK government announced a consultation on whether people can self-identify as their correct gender, instead of going through the court-based system to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate. 

 

It does not matter that this issue has apparently been resolved: the existing system is to remain in place, but applying will become online-based and substantially cheaper. It does not matter what my opinion of the issue is: if living your life authentically means you need to use whatever system exists, rather than waiting for enough minds to be changed so it can be replaced with one more dignified, you would do it – I know I did.

 

However, the opening of a government consultation on one specific issue became a wider argument on how a group of people should continue to fit into society – again, the Equality Act 2004 was not in question. The culture war that now exists seems to be more predicated on the use of words, from those that each side have for each other like “TERF”, “transphobe” and “gender critical”, to the checklist of what allows someone to be called a “woman” or a “man”, and whether you can change your sex at all. Framing this as a “culture war” implies that both sides are as strong as each other, but when the much of the reporting on the issue is on protecting the rights of celebrities like J.K. Rowling, Dave Chapelle and Piers Morgan to speak, it feels like the objective is to protect the most powerful people in the room - people who appear to be having a good war. Meanwhile, I need to be careful about how I speak in case it jeopardises any part of my life, from my job to friendships. 

 

The target of legislation is no longer the Equality Act, which already had regulations on access to single-sex spaces, to freedom of expression in academic institutions. My theory is this is more a symptom of tuition fees in universities, now over £9,000 a year, making students more into customers and stakeholders that demand more of their academic journey than I would have done when I started my degree twenty years ago.

 

I am not willing to engage in an argument over my own rights. There are enough books being published on the subject right now, such as “The Transgender Issue” by Shon Faye, and “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality” by Helen Joyce. Both books were reviewed in the Culture magazine of “The Sunday Times” in August 2021 under the headline “Which side are you on?” With that headline, not mine.

 

Once again, I am writing here more for my benefit this time around.

AND NOW THE WORDS JUST SLIP AWAY [305]

Is it still possible to ignore something until it goes away? The expectation these days is to react, fight, stand your ground, voice disapproval, and close the other side down.

As someone whose school years were not the best of their life, I believe the bullies did win after all, or at least everyone chose to adopt their tactics. But the bullies receded eventually, perhaps bored or no longer fulfilled, because I ignored them as much as I could. It takes as much effort to say nothing as saying anything at all.

 

But bullying makes news, hectoring makes news, provocation makes news. Anything written on Twitter by Piers Morgan is routinely written up by newspapers, including the one he used to edit, the “Daily Mirror”, legitimising the way he uses it, if not condoning it.

 

This playbook appears to have been used by the television channel GB News, which has generated an immense amount of heat, but very little light, since it launched on Sunday 13^th June. GB News courted pre-launch comparisons with the rabid Fox News Channel, touting items on Andrew Neil’s flagship 8pm show with titles like “Wokewatch” and “Mediawatch.” These were initially addressed by Neil’s programme on the channel’s launch night, talking about how the channel would “lend an ear to some of Britain’s marginalised and overlooked voices” and speak up for “their voice has not been heard in the mainstream media.”

 

Online traffic about the channel, which includes boycotts of advertisers and poking fun at numerous technical errors suffered, is led by controversial statements made by presenters, particularly former talk radio “shock jocks” Nigel Farage and Dan Wootton about the England football team “taking the knee,” the Royal National Lifeboat Institution rescuing refugees at sea, “doomsday scientists” running a “Covid scare campaign” that “terrified the public into supporting lockdowns,” and anything else that speaks to how a culture war is being waged by “woke” people. Eschewing traditional news bulletins for leading with conversation, the subjects discussed are few and repetitive.

 

In itself, GB News is rather boring to talk about, for the extent to which its tumultuous launch and continued existence has been taken apart in numerous news articles and opinion pieces, there is really nothing left to say about it that hasn’t already been said, because everyone has said everything about it from the moment the channel was first announced. The broad narrative of overambition and hubris – its viewing figures are currently in the tens of thousands, below what it needs to prove its viability – also invites comparisons with the launch, collapse and overhaul of TV-am when that launched in 1983, suggesting not only that the crisis at GB News, whose director of programmes at launch has already left, suggests not only that the current problems experienced by the channel were not only expected, but forseen. TV-am eventually became more popular, but only by changing itself almost entirely.

 

Since Sunday 13^th June, I have watched a total of three hours of GB News – one was the opening launch programme, followed by bits of other shows, including a Sunday morning with the deliberately provocative title of “The Political Correction.” The repetition of talking points became boring, and seeing a parade of mid-shots of people talking is visually uninteresting, not helped by having a studio set with black walls and no windows. 

 

So, I ignore the channel, and ignore the discourse surrounding the channel. Its viewing figures confirm I cannot be the only one. I am not interested in what the presenters have to say on the same few topics, especially as its competition, as a politically right-leaning channel, is most national newspapers, talk radio stations, and vast sections of the internet. It can only make noise to attract attention, and can only provoke a reaction by creating heat. I already learned to avoid things like that.

EVERYONE YOU SEE IS FULL OF LIFE [292]

The words “breakfast television” conjure a picture of two people, one man and one woman, sitting on a sofa in front of a coffee table, in what looks like the viewers’ own living room, talking about the news, introducing topical items and interviewing celebrities, with no item lasting long enough to distract people from starting their day.

This is not so much drawing up a stereotype as taking an average: all breakfast shows on British television since 1983, when the BBC’s “Breakfast Time” became Europe’s first TV breakfast show, include these elements in some way, and despite experimentation with these elements, like Channel 4’s anarchic “The Big Breakfast,” this average is pretty much the only format that has worked.

 

The show most representing this format was the first to be named “Good Morning Britain,” airing on ITV from 1983 to 1992, and was produced by TV-am, which had won the licence created to provide breakfast television on the network. It is best remembered as a lightweight and breezy mix of celebrity interviews and topical features presented by more celebrities, presided over by the likeable presenting duo of Anne Diamond and Nick Owen, later joined by Richard Keys, Mike Morris, Kay Burley and Lorraine Kelly, the latter of which has presented at this time of day ever since, with the occasional interjection on school holidays by the puppet Roland Rat, and later Timmy Mallett with “Wacaday”. 

 

“Good Morning Britain” had begun as a diet of hard news and heavyweight interviews, presented by big-name presenters like David Frost, Michael Parkinson, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford and Robert Kee, but viewers deserted once the novelty of breakfast television wore off. TV-am had misjudged the BBC which, having been expected to present a similar news-based show, instead went with a lighter, folksier mix of news and current affairs presented by former “Grandstand” presenter Frank Bough, alongside the newsreader Selina Scott. On the week it began, “Breakfast Time” editor Ron Neil told the “Radio Times” it had learned from the US TV networks to relax the viewer into the day: “If we pummel people with facts and analysis at that time of the morning, they just won’t want to know.” Similar emphasis was placed on conversation, even when talking to news reporters, while relying less on visual displays of information to prevent rooting the audience to their chairs.

 

The response at TV-am was panic, as audiences for “Good Morning Britain” sank to only 100,000 within its first few weeks. Once presenters and management were fired or, in the case of David Frost, shunted to Sundays to carry on the political interviews, the response was to copy the BBC’s formula, bringing in similar exercise and cookery spots, TV reviews, an “on this day” feature, an agony aunt slot, and even reading out the bingo numbers from that day’s newspapers… and bring in Roland Rat. With TV-am engaged in a battle of survival both to meet viewers’ expectations and attract advertisers, they rose to become the more natural place for bright and breezy morning TV than the BBC, which eventually relaunched “Breakfast Time” in 1986 as the hard news programme, presented from a desk, that TV-am had originally expected from them. By the 1990s, “Good Morning Britain” had an audience of 2.7 million people, seventy per cent of the available audience, and nearly three times that of the BBC’s renamed “Breakfast News.”

 

“Good Morning Britain” only stopped broadcasting in 1992 because TV-am lost their licence to broadcast, but replacements GMTV (1993-2010), “Daybreak” (2010-14) and the neo-“Good Morning Britain” from 2014 all had problems when they initially began, from sets being too dark for 6am, to their features not being distinctive enough, or having too many presenters on screen at once. In all cases, some element of the TV-am formula returned, from the sofa and coffee table, to simply having brighter colours on the set – the first “Good Morning Britain” began with an brick-walled set emulating a chich apartment, which over time was painted salmon pink and filled with more and more potted plants. The only continuity between these shows for ITV has been the engaging and professional tone of its presenters like Kate Garraway, Richard Arnold, Ben Shephard, Dr Hilary Jones and Lorraine Kelly.

 

The current “Good Morning Britain” is a different beast, particularly in the combative and controversial arguments and subject matters discussed when Piers Morgan appeared as a presented from October 2015 to March 2021, when he talked himself off the show due to his comments regarding Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. As polarising and infuriating as the programme became under Morgan – long, combative interviews, pushing out fixed and reliable times for news bulletins, weather and anything else – it succeeded in prolonging the audience for the show beyond its finish time, recycling clips from the programme through the day through online news sites and social media, much like news items from the BBC’s “Breakfast” being replayed through the day on the BBC News Channel. The content that comes out of the current “Good Morning Britain” is more important than the time it was originally broadcast, an option not available to TV-am. 

 

However, the pattern established by the original “Good Morning Britain” continues, except it appears to have been reclaimed by the BBC. “Breakfast” continues primarily as a news programme, but it fits the image I began with, down to the sofa and coffee table, and especially in the calmer, more relaxed atmosphere. The red livery of BBC News is replaced with a more morning-friendly orange, just as the previous “Breakfast News” used to substitute blue for pink.

 

Breakfast television took until 1983 to begin in the UK because it took a long time to establish that an audience would be there to watch it – as programmes for schools took up the later mornings on BBC One and ITV, regular television didn’t often start until lunchtime. Even now, breakfast television in the UK is still a minority pursuit, attracting only between five and six million viewers across all channels at 8.00am, while eighteen million are listening to the radio at that time – Zoë Ball’s BBC Radio 2 breakfast show has a greater audience than for all of television.

HE DID THE MASH, IT CAUGHT ON IN A FLASH [284]

Lately, I have been waking up extremely early on Saturday mornings. With the work week done, my mind turns to writing the next “Gatekeepers” article and will already be running through what the next subject will be, or what I should include.

 

This week, it became increasingly obvious what I should be writing. Hasbro has announced their “Mr Potato Head” line of toys will be renamed to simply “Potato Head,” with Mr and Mrs Potato Head as parts of the lines. Instead, this was interpreted as Mr Potato Head itself being made gender-neutral, and Piers Morgan was triggered into his usual Twitter tirade about woke virtual-signalling imbeciles, because “woke” uses fewer characters than “politically correct.” Perhaps everyone should be made to provide their own potato once more.

 

Meanwhile, American Republican politicians Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rand Paul – the latter named after Ayn Rand – were both rebuked for comments aimed at transgender people, repeating the usual mischaracterisations and talking points, into which I cannot be bothered to repeat, except to say that Dr Rachel Levine will become United States Assistant Secretary for Health because she proved herself to be supremely qualified for the job, and does not stop being transgender because other people decide they can live in a world that excludes things they don’t like. I wish I could do that; I would be much happier.

 

I had already decided I was going to write that transgender is not postmodern, although I feel like just saying that and leaving it there. I shouldn’t have to explain it any further than that. I don’t need discourse to explain away my own existence as a transgender woman, and if you think you do to make your own life easier, then how am I the one who has problems?

 

Anyway, transgender isn’t postmodern because transgender is older than postmodernism. I also do not need an argument about how “transsexual” became replaced by “transgender,” because it does not preclude its earlier existence. Pointing out logic does not rationalise something out of existence. Even more obviously, I don’t think transgender people that existed before even the coining of the term “postmodernism,” like Albert Cashier, Joseph Lobdell, Billy Tipton, Mark Weston, Lili Elbe, Christine Jorgensen and the Public Universal Friend – put all these names into your nearest search engine – had any problems with reconciling their existence with those of anyone else, let alone what each individual believed at any particular point.

 

And yet, I somehow left out the following from something I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

 

“Gender isn’t constructed, but an individual who desires gender re-assignment surgery is to be unarguably considered a man trapped in a woman’s body (or vice versa). The fact that both of these cannot logically be true, simultaneously, is just ignored (or rationalized away with another appalling post-modern claim: that logic itself – along with the techniques of science – is merely part of the oppressive patriarchal system.)”

 

Somehow, I wrote an entire article about Jordan Peterson a couple of weeks ago without mentioning the above statement, from page 315 of my copy of “12 Rules for Life,” in the section for rule 11, “Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.” (The italics are his.) A few sentences earlier, Peterson talks about the “insane and incomprehensible postmodern insistence” that gender is constructed, and the moral imperative for this is to make all outcomes equitable. Yep, somehow, I just focussed on his misreading of Jacques Derrida.

 

What Peterson wrote does not change anything I have said. Historical precedence overrules present-day ideology, and I can sleep at night. I prefer to take the example of Alan L Hart, a transgender man best known for pioneering the use of X-ray photography in detecting of tuberculosis, saving many lives, who completed his transition in 1917. Three years later, Hart’s surgeon Joshua Allen Gilbert, wrote, “Let him who finds himself a tendency to criticize an to offer some constructive method of dealing with the problem on hand. He will not want for difficulties. The patient and I have done our best with it.”

TWIDDLY-DIDDLY-DEE, TWIDDLY-DIDDLY-DEE [63]

“The trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it - too many twits might make a twat," said David Cameron, a year before becoming Prime Minister, while being interviewed by Christian O’Connell on Absolute Radio – he has since tweeted over 2,500 times.

Five months earlier, on 3^rd February 2009, Twitter entered the consciousness of most British people when Stephen Fry posted a message from a building at the end of London’s Oxford Street: “Ok. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on the 26^th floor of Centre Point. Hell’s teeth. We could be here for hours. Arse, poo and widdle.” Fry has since quit and rejoined Twitter a few times, including on one occasion, again in 2009, when he said there was “too much aggression and unkindness around.”

In 2017, Twitter is known as the social media website where there is not enough space to express yourself. Facebook has built its reputation as the greater data aggregator, providing acres of space through its main site, then Messenger, Instagram and so on, to give two billion people all the space they need to display their lives, make connections with others, and pour their souls straight into Facebook’s servers.

Meanwhile, Twitter may let you add a picture or a video, but the site’s origin as a way of sending SMS-like messages to small groups, and co-founder Jack Dorsey’s definition of the word “twitter” as “a short burst of inconsequential information,” show that public perception, and use, of the site has outstripped the site’s intentions. The ability to broadcast your thoughts is too compulsive for some, and the free, easy cyberspace setting makes real-life consequences feel, well, inconsequential.

How do I fit in to all this? I mainly use Twitter, and Facebook – I really cannot be bothered with any of the other sites right now – to signal I have written something new, or to highlight something interesting. However, I have felt the need to repudiate things a few people have said, once I realised I had the same means they did. I have only done this with the tweets of three people, but they are people that give the impression they could not be bothered by anything anyone said.

The people are Donald Trump, with his self-styled “modern-day presidential” attitude on social media that would get any other person fired from their job, requiring both defense and explanation  from White House Staff; Piers Morgan, a former newspaper editor who writes a column for the Daily Mail Online when not pontificating and raising his voice at people on breakfast television; and Katie  Hopkins, a contestant  on the reality TV show “The Apprentice,”  noted for her hardline views there, which has also been turned into a career as a hardline newspaper columnist, insisting it is the Left that made her, like a Frankenstein’s monster. These are all very forthright people, where I wouldn’t want to agree with them, even if I did, because of the way they force their opinion on people.

The responses I have made on Twitter have been when I could see someone was only talking from their own point of view. Humour had to be central – I am not trying to incite conflict of any sort – and if I made a point at the same time, that is fine. I like that one person described my tweets as “sassy,” because, at last, I now have proof. Basically, all you need to do is remember that, just because someone feels they can say what they like, they will become answerable in one way or another, as Katie Hopkins would know, having lost a court case over libelling the cook and blogger Jack Monroe – just because it is social media doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.

I’m not yet saying we should “drain the swamp” of annoying people from Twitter, but they shouldn’t have to be completely comfortable in saying whatever they like – there have to be consequences. We should have a backup plan - we could all migrate back to MySpace instead. No, I didn’t know it was still going either.