Blocking a Scene

A paradox of social media is that the leading brands are so associated with the individual personalities of their founders, notably Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Jack Dorsey at Twitter. In some ways, the desire to make these two otherwise uninteresting people the story reflects the comfort of old media commentators with the model of the domineering publisher that dates from over a century ago, much as the likes of the equally dull Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are framed as Golden Age industrialists in the manner of John D Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, even if the conspicuous consumption of their wealth on space flight hardly compares with the more mundane philanthropy of the old robber barons. But it is nonetheless striking that a genuinely novel technology should still be thought of in terms that echo the anxieties of older media, from the pernicious effects of broadcasting (think of the various moral panics over cinema and TV) to monopoly (consider the desire to "break-up" the social media giants, as if they were comparable to the old telephone companies). Obviously the social isn't new, however amplified and extended by the technology, so perhaps this just reflects the perennial fear of the mob.

The announcement that Dorsey is to stand down as Twitter's CEO in order to spend more time with his payment platform, Square, and presumably invest further in crypto-currencies and blockchains (his new holding company, Block, is pretty suggestive), has been greeted as a sign that the micro-blogging business might start to grow and generate larger profits, but this is probably a vain hope. Twitter is not puny relative to Instagram and TikTok, let alone Facebook, because it doesn't have a good product or the company has been badly run but because it has a wholly different social function to those other platforms. As John Naughton recently summarised it through comparison: "Instagram is a way of combating boredom, endlessly scrolling in the hope of finding something interesting. A user in that frame of mind is more likely to be tempted by the prospect of an impulsive purchase. Twitter users, however, are not bored. Instead, they’re combative, annoyed, outraged or looking for a fight or a joke." This isn't quite Yeats's snobbish condescenion - "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" - but it does subscribe to the idea that Twitter users are highly active, when in reality the overwhelming majority are passive spectators.

The point about the different platforms' relative value to advertisers is correct, but this is also a bit of a red herring. Twitter could probably do better commercially if it leant into its strengths: cultivating fierce loyalty and leveraging engagement. The reason why specialist magazines were traditionally able to command high advertising rates wasn't because of the size of the audience but because of its greater conversion potential, which reflected greater engagement. Twitter has the ability to create audiences with a deeper relationship, if smaller size, than its competitors. It should be charging commercial users for followers, not for promoted tweets. That it doesn't do so is probably down to Silicon Valley's limiting belief, normalised by Google, that advertising works best as a covert process that avoids the customer's conscious involvement. We all know that this doesn't actually work, even if it is more targeted than old-style blanket advertising. Who hasn't been stalked for weeks with adverts for a trivial product you were only ever likely to buy once, if at all? 

If we have to draw a parallel between Twitter and older media, it would perhaps be better to think of it in terms of those relatively low circulation but high status magazines and weekly newspapers that characterised the twentieth century, such as The New Yorker and The Economist. That might appear a bizarre comparison given the interactive, free-for-all and (largely) uncensored nature of the one and the elitist, broadcast and highly edited nature of the other, but then you have to ask why so many members of the contemporary intelligentsia (and the people who write for The Spectator) are to be found on both. And the answer is that combativeness that Naughton noted. Though they constantly deplore the incivility and trolling, it is clear that the luminaries of the established media cannot stay off Twitter. This is partly due to its strengths in breaking news, gossip and frivolity, but it is also because of its now almost unique ability to create a virtual public square in which ordinary civilians can answer back. It might not be Habermas's idealised public sphere, but it's pretty much all we've got now that so many formerly public squares, both literal and figurative, have been privatised.

Now you might think that this is the last thing that BBC journalists and Times columnists, not to mention bumptious human rights lawyers and members of the PLP, would want, but this is to ignore the power of the block, which has a very different function on Twitter than it does on other social media platforms. On the latter, blocking is something that is done routinely and without much comment: it's straightforward hygiene. On the former, blocking is a performative act, both in the sense that some habitual blockers will advertise the fact to their followers, with a detailed justification of the verdict, while those who are blocked for their derision or criticism will circulate a screengrab as a badge of honour. The difference in scale is also important, not only in the sense that Twitter is a relatively small platform but that it is only a very small fraction of the user base who actively engage with these elite (usually blue-tick) accounts, and that fraction tends to be atypical of both the user base and society at large. They have detached themselves from the crowd in the public square and thus put themselves in the firing line, and it's clear that the frisson of metaphorically pulling the trigger is an attraction for those who do the blocking.

At this point it's worth emphasising what I mean by the "intelligentsia". Broadly, this covers all those in society who are highly-educated and participate in debate on public affairs. The expansion of higher education since the 1960s, together with the greater opportunities afforded by social media since the millennium, means that this is a growing proportion of society. And this growth has been both absolute and relative. The passive readers of the traditional broadsheet press, a tiny fraction of whom might have engaged in letter-writing, have been replaced by a larger group of spectators who engage more regularly (if more superficially) through likes and retweets. The older sociology of the intellectual, such as Bourdieu's concept of the dominated-dominant (a dominated fraction of the dominant class), or Gramsci's idea of a class-specific "organic intellectual", can still apply to the core subset of the intelligensia who make a living out of the production or dissemination of cultural and symbolic capital, but it's clear that the outer layers have expanded and simultaneously become more engaged and thus critical of that core. 

This in turn has produced a counter-movement, particularly among those engaged in the production of politics, whom we might refer to as the clerisy, against what they see as the impertinence of "hipster analysis" or the incivility of the marginalised left. Twitter has become an important field in this conflict, arguably the most important (which is a symptom of the wider intelligentsia's structural weakness), hence the members of the clerisy are attracted to it as much because of their class interests (notice the regular emphasis on "solidarity" with fellow blue-ticks facing criticism) as their personal gratification. The current demand to end online anonymity, which is an important feature of Twitter, and the insistence that social media platforms do more to take down objectionable material (a demand that predictably reinforces the authoritarian), has emphasised how much the field has become one in which discipline has superseded any Habermassian notion of deliberation. In other words, the conflict is no longer between an exclusivist representative democracy and an inclusivist participatory democracy, as it arguably was in the 1980s and 90s, but between an unashamed epistocracy and a popular democracy in general retreat. 

While the choreography of this scene involves significant theoretical assaults on democracy, notably through the spectre of populism and the never-ending demands for a competent and virtuous centrism, it is mostly played out in social exchanges that emphasise hierarchy. Central to this is the role of political journalists and commentators. Where once this was, perhaps naively, thought of as a tribune-like mediation on behalf of the people against an over-mighty state and a weakening establishment, it is now clearly about the message management of that state and the defence of an establishment that has successfully absorbed the politico-media caste (mention of their incestuous relations is one of the quickest ways to earn a block). Twitter provides both the simulacrum of a public sphere that is genuinely democratic (again, anonymity is crucial to this) while also allowing those social hierarchies to be reinforced and performed through micro-punishments such as blocking and micro-rewards such as likes. It is a finely-balanced mechanism that will no doubt survive Jack Dorsey's departure. Whether democracy will survive is another matter.