Last Thursday I attended a fascinating LSE event asking “What next for Rupert Murdoch?” It featured an interview with all round media expert, Vanity Fair Columnist and now guerrilla-biographer Michael Wolff. A man who, helped by the allegedly shambolic internal structure of News International, managed to wrangle hours of interviews with Murdoch himself forming the basis for the biography “The Man Who Owns the News” You can listen to a podcast of the event and read my thoughts below.
During the LSE event it was stated that as social media had played a significant role in the scandal. However, despite a few chucklesome mentions of a “London Summer” (to follow on from the Arab spring) quite what role social media technologies played was never nailed down. Here’s my view on the role social played in this story.
First up let’s reiterate that Murdoch is a notorious technophobe who famously according to Wolff “doesn’t use a computer, doesn’t get e-mail and can’t really get his smartphone to work”. He only ever takes a serious interest in technology if he perceives, accurately or not, a chance for N.I.’s rivals to gain ground on his empire (which perhaps puts the purchase and incredible subsequent $500+ loss on MySpace into some kind of context). However it’s clear that social media wasn’t as intrinsic to the phone hacking scandal in the same way it was with recent important stories from the Middle East and other recent but decidedly unimportant stories from the UK. Certainly for millions of people the story was primarily covered and experienced, as all major news stories now are, through social media. From blanket coverage (and healthy doses of liberal Shaudenfreud) on Twitter through to the obligatory Guardian live blog, social media was the best vehicle for tracking the unfolding scandal. However this wall of coverage disguised the fact that there was very little which emerged as a direct result of social media. In fact it speaks volumes that the only “twitter exclusive” from a non-journalistic source was the infamous #splat tweet of “comedian” Jonnie Marbles moments before his self-defeating attempt to shame Murdoch with a paper plate of shaving foam.
Put simply the scandal predates much of social media as we now understand it and the story would still have existed without twitter, live blogs et al. For me the key difference that social makes is expediting the process by which information is dispersed and consumed, compromising the traditional media’s ability to regulate the rate of information or even slightly control the agenda. As revelation after revelation emerged it became obvious that the only predictable thing about the saga was the regularity with which astounding new twists and turns would occur. Social, then, allowed a genuinely “developing” story to do so at a breakneck pace. Nobody anywhere had time to breathe as the story circled ever closer to the the upper echelons of The Police, The Government and of course News International itself. The curious fact that an unfolding story facilitated by new media concerned the crucifixion of one of old media’s most monolithic institutions simply provided an extra subtext.
In the future, the “Arab Summer” may well become one of social media’s creation myths, but the N.I. phone hacking scandal is not comparable in terms of the role social media played in bringing about the change. What the events of the past few months do demonstrate is that there is a technological and philosophical gulf between organisations like N.I. and those which have embraced new media technologies; consider the online success of not only the guardian but also the Daily Mail. As for the sordid and still unfolding events of hack-gate in social terms that as the medium evolves so too does the actual concept of the news story. We no longer think of journalism and the stories it tells as 500 words of static copy printed on a page but rather as highly detailed panoramas which through the lens of social media rapidly evolve and unfold before us.
