Speaker 1: 0:15

Hi, this is Omid Ashtari and Natasha McElhone.

Speaker 2: 0:18

Welcome to when Shall we Meet?

Speaker 1: 0:21

Our guest this week is Roy Greenslade, a renowned journalist with a career spanning over 40 years.

Speaker 2: 0:26

He was a media commentator for the Guardian newspaper for 28 years and ex-editor of the Daily Mirror newspaper. He is also an author, a historian and former professor of journalism at City University in London, where he's had an influence on the next generation of journalists. Despite his frequent criticism of the press, Roy continues to hold a sympathy for the values of traditional media and a concern for what its loss of influence means in our culture.

Speaker 1: 0:56

In this episode, we explore legacy versus social media and, in particular, benefits of citizen journalism.

Speaker 2: 1:04

Accountability of the traditional editorial model.

Speaker 1: 1:07

Media manipulation by powerful elites.

Speaker 2: 1:10

Post-truth and post-trust.

Speaker 1: 1:13

The virality of narratives which promote simplistic answers.

Speaker 2: 1:17

Versus nuanced discussion, asking the more complicated questions.

Speaker 1: 1:21

And the proliferation of anger-tainment through algorithms. As this was our first recorded episode, we only had access to cheap mics and chairs.

Speaker 2: 1:31

Will you stop about the mics?

Speaker 1: 1:33

Okay, okay, without further ado, Hello everybody.

Speaker 2: 1:40

here is Omida Shtari and Natasha McElhone, and we are speaking today to Roy Greenslade about the media.

Speaker 1: 1:50

Media truth, various different platforms and so on. Let me paint a picture here. We just witnessed the beginning of a very traumatic Middle Eastern conflict, and one thing that became very clear is that we have different perceptions of truth out there, and the people on the digital platforms are throwing mud at the traditional media I want to call it and the traditional media is suggesting that the digital platforms are full of people who are just making up stuff. We want to triangulate today what the reality of the situation actually is. So let's maybe start off by talking about how you, Roy, given your abundant experience in the traditional media, feel the difference between the traditional media and some of these digital platforms is.

Speaker 3: 2:43

Oh, I'm glad we began with a really easy starter question, because it's manifestly difficult to come up with a short answer to that. I think it's also very important that we are in the foothills only of the digital revolution and we don't know where we're going. We do know where we've been and we're not happy so far, I think, with the situation. I'm always reminded of Zhou Enlai, who was Mao Zedong's deputy, who was once asked what do you think about the French Revolution? And he said it's too early to tell. And I think it's too early to tell where we're going, but the signs, if I read them right, are not at the moment really very good.

Speaker 3: 3:31

As a person who worked in what is now jokingly, perhaps annoyingly, called legacy media, the mainstream media, the old print media, we were very aware that within that media there were splits and that there were some papers took this point of view, other papers took the other point of view, and yet the facts were no different for either of them, but the bias, the angle, the hype was very different.

Speaker 3: 4:06

I think that if we look at these early stages of the digital revolution and social media, we see that the split is even wider, and I think that's because people feel liberated to be able to say what they like, and that's one of the the pluses was that it enabled people to do that. We, we, we talked down to people from the mainstream media, we decided what was news and they had to accept it. And I think one of the things we had to accommodate was suddenly a realization that other people, uh, came at news differently, that they had views, and suddenly you got bottom-up appreciation which the top-down found it difficult to put up with just mentioned is that there was an overt understanding of the biases of the papers that one was consuming.

Speaker 1: 5:07

Now, would you say that the people who were consuming those papers were actually really aware of the biases?

Speaker 3: 5:12

I think to an extent they were in very general terms, because we know in general terms people that read the Daily Telegraph were generally people who voted Conservative and had that view of the world, and we know that people who read the Daily Mirror largely voted Labour and had that view of the world. So I think that they were conscious choices when they bought their newspapers, about where those newspapers stood, at least in general terms. If you come down much more specifically, I think that's much more difficult to understand in the sense that each story, although filtered through this particular political ideology, would not necessarily have struck people in the same way. So they'd not be aware, perhaps, that the presentation of this story was pro-Labour or pro-conservative. They wouldn't necessarily have realised that only within the newspaper where they were manufacturing this truth. What were people consciously involved in? That particular kind of production of news and comment?

Speaker 2: 6:24

With that set up, where you had a sort of relatively overt representation of different points of view and presumably there was a bit of a spectrum there as well. I suppose that there was a sort of duty of care to the population that well, let's represent all the points of view that we know are out there, whereas with the social media we've got individuals sometimes deciding on what's going to be news. It's very much more about their own identity and what it is that they want to express and the sort of followers that they want to try and gather, rather than any sense of imparting truth.

Speaker 3: 7:00

Now, I think that's difficult to be absolutely certain, but let's get one thing straight about the duty of care in mainstream media. Mainstream media was about profit. It was a commercial enterprise and so maximising readership in order to attract advertisers, which was the funding model, was hugely important. So overarching the politics of a newspaper was its commercial viability and, the important thing, everything flowed from that. How do we make sure that we are going to increase our readership or at least maintain our readership? How do we make this more entertaining and that less entertaining? In other words, it was never simply about. There is truth and we wish to relay it. We feel a duty of care towards our readers, do we? I mean, I think lip service was paid to that, but most of the time what you were doing quite clearly was that you were engaged in a, not a game that would be an unfair thing but you were engaged in an enterprise in which truth had to fit within the needs of the corporate entity for which you worked.

Speaker 2: 8:30

So it was still about eyeballs really.

Speaker 3: 8:34

Always about the maximisation of profit and that was about ensuring that you got a big audience and that audience would be attractive to advertisers. You were selling your audience to advertisers.

Speaker 1: 8:51

So I think it's kind of refreshing that you are overtly stating this. I have the impression that a lot of the people who are vilifying the quote-unquote legacy media are suggesting that there was always a holier-than-thou approach to the content that they were creating.

Speaker 3: 9:10

Well, of course, because, let's face it, what I've just said to you would never be said to the audience. You had to justify yourself in public service terms. You would have to say our mission is to inform, we are here to help, we are here for the good of society. So you never, of course, said that there was a reason why you wanted to maximise. You said we have good ideas and these good ideas are things we're presenting to you. We have a good reason for these ideas and again, you boost that. So it was the duty of care was always within those confines. You needed to actually say to people we're good, you need us and we're doing good by you coming to us. And as long as there's a and, by the way, the other part of that conundrum is the more readers, the larger audience you had seemed to justify both is the bill for the hypocrisy that this whole model had initially?

Speaker 1: 10:30

Oh, clearly.

Speaker 3: 10:31

I mean, I think the initial burst from people able at last to answer back and then to build their own audiences was you. The rest of you were taken in by mainstream media. We all along could see through that, and now here's our chance to show you that they were wrong. So that was hugely important.

Speaker 2: 10:59

And you mentioned earlier, just before we went on air, that when you worked at the Guardian at the beginning of the digitisation of media, there was an excitement because finally specialists and people could write back in and give you feedback on articles that were inaccurate, and you thought perhaps there was going to be a more collaborative approach to this.

Speaker 3: 11:21

Oh, I think the excitement in the early days of the net was great within those people, the early adopters, of which the Guardian was the first class example. So we thought this was a terrifically wonderful moment. At last, our feeling of democratic spirit could be lived out in the round. Day after day. We were proud. We were proud to say, look, we've often got it wrong in the past, now here's your chance to put us right. So the great currency, truth currency of the early stages was that ability for people, simply underneath articles, to say no, you got that wrong, this is the truth. I'm an expert in this field. Here's how I can help you. That plane didn't come down for that reason. You don't understand, this is really the case, and so on. And so we thought this was fantastic. Here was, at last, the audience giving us help, making us better and, at the same time, in the wider scale, making it better for general readers. So, no, that was the early days of genuine pleasure in the idea of collaboration between audience and journalists.

Speaker 2: 12:41

So what went wrong?

Speaker 3: 12:42

What went wrong was that over time and it actually didn't, when you see it in the continuum it didn't take that long really, but we did have a couple of years in which those famously what we call below the line contributions the great long threads of readers answering back and taking part. Eventually, of course, what people discovered was that they could say anything they liked, and it made moderation of each day needing to go through each contribution and saying no, that doesn't follow our rules. We have to strike that out. The cost of doing that and the difficulty of doing it on a 24-hour basis meant that you were subject to constant problems about libel, about offence invective, misinformation on a wide scale and insults to journalists, gratuitous insults, sexism, racism. It was fundamentally difficult to control. In other words, what seemed like super democracy turned into anarchy.

Speaker 1: 13:57

One thing that you alluded to that I think is worth spending some time on is that even in the old heydays of legacy media, people did have a sense of the sausage being made in a certain way, and we should discuss how we believe maybe the sausage being made in the legacy media world differs from how a citizen journalist will create something that is quite one-sided One being that you just mentioned is being okay to be wrong or admitting to being wrong sometimes. There may be other things, and maybe let's talk about that one in particular.

Speaker 3: 14:34

I think the let's look at the good side, firstly of mainstream media, because easy to be critical, and I'm critical too but first of all, a lot of you were engaged in the enterprise and there was a self-correcting process that went on so that your copy when you were a reporter could be seen against other reporters' copy on the ground. It went to a sub-editor who would ask questions of the reporter. There would be an executive overlooking the sub-editor who would ask questions of the sub-editor, and so this in the hierarchy. It meant that there was a lot of work that went into story production, which was helpful. Of course, some of it was negative, because on high you still got political guidance. That's a nice way of saying bias. That's perfectly true. But in the general run of things, the general run of news, you know, the court reporting, the reporting of accidents, events, general speeches and so on it did mean that there was a collaborative process within mainstream media, which was, I think, one of its great benefits.

Speaker 3: 15:53

Now, that's different from a current situation where you get an individual without their being working alone, most obviously without there being working alone, right, most obviously citizen journalism for want of a better phrase is working alone. And then we always say I I always remember as a reporter saying I'm glad someone else is seeing my copy before it goes in, and a wise reporter would always feel that. I know, even now, as a writer, I'm glad when someone's over my shoulder looking at it. But if you are working totally alone and you are very convinced about your views and about that you're right and you're going to make everything that comes into you fit the pattern of your thought, then there is danger, and that danger is that you get the building then of I think it's been called truthiness, in other words, not the truth but my truth, and that is a danger.

Speaker 2: 16:56

And how much of the solo journalism is around, your identity being the narrative that you're seeking to find facts to support the visibility of that, that you're accountable for what you're putting out there and you're recognisable. There's a sort of I suppose there's a fame element to it that there seemed to be quite a lot more anonymity before you got your columnist in the broadsheet and tab tabloid media. You would have byline photos, but there were things that I just didn't feel that was more faceless. It seemed to be more of a team going out there to find and put together a story and some people wouldn't get credit for their input, but that was okay. How much of that is this sort of scrabble for being exceptional, for being special, for being well-known, recognisable? Certainly, social media has given people an opportunity.

Speaker 3: 17:54

The key word here I think you mentioned it almost was accountability, and I think collaborative journalism of any kind that then opens itself to perhaps a form of regulation, or at least to be accountable, is obviously not as valuable, cannot be as valued as collaborative journalism Just impossible to be, so you can't give it the level of trust. That said, the audience who are receiving it don't know that. How do you then form a trust bond? I think one of the things that mainstream media did was it created a product, a newspaper or a TV program or a radio program which existed within a channel or a station or a set of owners in which you could invest your trust.

Speaker 3: 19:06

You could feel that the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Guardian, what this represented, the BBC, this represented something you could trust, and so people acting within it you naturally trusted too. People acting within it you naturally trusted too. It's impossible to feel the same way about someone operating in social media. I think one of the reasons by the way, it's interesting you're doing this podcast one of the reasons that podcasts have become popular, I think, is because they are trying to overcome the problem of the lone person doing it and that they are building up audiences based around the trust of the podcaster. Look, we listen to this podcast because we recognise these people, so I think the podcast is a development that rode back a bit on the lone individual famously in their underpants in a bedroom saying what they like, which is problematic.

Speaker 2: 20:09

You obviously. Personally, you value more the collaborative approach than the individual approach. However, audiences seem to, given the followers that certain people have, they seem much happier to align to an individual whose point of view is put quite simply and clearly and it's not complicated and it's maybe slightly reductive, and they want to consume that because it's more digestible. They want to be told what to think. It certainly didn't you say it's of less value. It's clearly not in terms of eyeballs and an audience and advertising and whatever.

Speaker 3: 20:45

I'm talking about value to society as a whole.

Speaker 2: 20:47

Right.

Speaker 3: 20:48

I can't deal or row back on the fact that individuals will make their own decision and make sets of mistakes. Of course that's always been the case. You cannot get round the fact that people will hold the wrong ideas, In other words, not your ideas, that people will hold the wrong ideas, In other words, not your ideas. It seems to me that the thing to do is to put out there as to use that word again a valuable exercise in journalism, in news gathering, in commentary, and educating the audience over time to accept it, Because it seems to me you can't do anything about the fact that people are going to exist based on only having received prejudices.

Speaker 3: 21:33

If we just simply give up and allow that to be the case, we are actually those of us who care, are just letting it go. We're, you know, to use that awful phrase about allowing society to go to hell in a handbasket, you know, comes to mind Journalists have never wanted to do that, in my view, and the very nature of the early forms of journalism before we get on to corporate ownership, pre-mainstream media, those newspapers were founded by people who wanted to have a beneficial effect on society and in fact, the interesting thing is, if you look at the phases of media when media began, and I'm talking about newspaper media at the moment. So from the early 17th century, you are seeing people founding newspapers based on wanting to inform society, wanting to improve society.

Speaker 1: 22:37

But they were usually just loudspeakers for a particular view that people already had. Yes, it wasn't about a neutrally informing society.

Speaker 3: 22:46

Well, I think that was a mix actually, because if I look at some of the earliest papers, they were boring things about which ship was coming in with which cargo, what had happened in the court, you know those court reporters and so on. So I think there was a mixture of the two. So there was the shouting. Yeah, although when I read those papers, when I go back to those very earliest papers and there was a good bit of religion and so on as well, that's perfectly true I do see that they were doing it for what we might call the best of reasons. They weren't themselves necessarily inflaming the mob.

Speaker 2: 23:27

And was this more local pamphleteering? There was a lot.

Speaker 3: 23:31

There was a lot of local I mean, most of these were very localized newspapers. But then gradually over time that gets commercialized and corporatized.

Speaker 1: 23:42

First versus Pulitzer, all that stuff that was going on early in the 20th century.

Speaker 3: 23:47

Yeah, I mean Pulitzer wasn't the greatest of examples of a truth-telling man, nor William Randolph Hearst, of course, his contemporary. And similarly in Britain we learned over much from Hearst and we had our Northcliffs and our Beaverbrooks. And they use the media for their own ends. That's perfectly true. But at the same time they were very aware, in using it for their own ends, that they needed to appeal beyond their own politics, so that the Daily Express under Lord Beaverbrook, which many people reviled at the time. When I look back I see how incredibly positive the Daily Express was If you leave aside the politics. It really kind of celebrated the best in British society and although it's easy to condemn, you can see that and the Daily Mirror the most popular newspapers of their time were about adding to the gaiety of the nation. They weren't decrying everything that went on, although they had very separate and different political lines.

Speaker 3: 24:59

So we went through that stage and of course we now know it is dead and buried. You know we call it legacy media. It's dead media. It is having very little effect anymore, even if even online it isn't, because people are now so suspicious of it. And that's one of the good things in the digital revolution in that people now have grown to be suspicious of mainstream media. The problem is that the pendulum's gone too far in the other direction and now no one believes anything that they are told, even when it's the truth Right, and I think we saw that in Britain during the Brexit debate.

Speaker 3: 25:48

Also, natasha, earlier on you mentioned right and wrong. This was a simplistic, binary argument. We're for it or against it. All the nuances were missed out in that debate, but what it did was it split society down the centre and it made people passionate in their beliefs and they weren't listening to the facts. They were ignoring the facts and in a grotesque way. We've seen it even worse in the United States, of course, where I saw a woman interviewed recently who said that Donald Trump is the commander-in-chief of the American forces, and someone said no, no, he's not. He's not even president. Oh, yes, he is, she said, and around her were gathered people saying he is, he is. How could you not believe that's extraordinary? He is, he is. How could you not believe that's extraordinary?

Speaker 2: 26:52

But you see how worrisome this becomes if people are willing to believe what is demonstrably untrue.

Speaker 3: 27:09

But so then we get to the question of do people care about truth, or does simplicity trump truth and the complexity of truth? Yeah, I mean, I think that we want, don't we people, to believe that there is a truth, and we have to ask big philosophical questions about what is truth, what is reality? But I think we can have a general down-home view of that without really needing to explore it in philosophical terms. And I think it is concerning that people want to have their own truths and, I don't know, the failures perhaps of mainstream media have led to this situation where people now are so suspicious of the truth.

Speaker 3: 27:49

Back then, say, the daily mirror was writing nonsense papers during the 1940s, after labor came to power in the landslide following the second world war and what was noticeable was the, the way in which the right-wing newspapers accused the left-wing newspapers of communism and socialism, socialism and the big s and so on, and saw everything in those terms. And they did not. I mean, they were, as I said earlier, they were still speaking about the same set of facts, but in such a biased fashion that really it amounted to an untruth. And there you have it in a nutshell, in a sense, and that you gradually turn the facts to the point where they are now elusive to grasp. And do they become facts anymore? When they're like that, when in fact you feel you have a fact in your hand and it turns out to be a bar of soap and it's too soapy and it escapes, then suddenly this business about what is truth becomes a real problem to deal with.

Speaker 1: 29:28

So, in a way, this generation is not any different than the generations before.

Speaker 3: 29:33

In generational terms, of course, I don't think that. Yeah, I think that's definitely the case. I'm sure if I was now to go and interview people in Elizabethan England I'm not talking about our recent Queen Elizabeth, but the great Gloriana Elizabeth of the 16th century I would find. I think that people held on to all sorts of myths that they believed were facts. I mean, they were ducking women in pools of water in the belief that they were witches, and the trial by ordeal that they instituted in those days, and so on. Terrible things were done because people had impossible beliefs but they believed they were facts.

Speaker 2: 30:17

Just to go back to my original question, those are beliefs that are very, very tightly held and without the which the whole sort of latticework of that person's religious life or philosophy of life falls apart, so they will cling on to those beliefs. I think it was ever thus when presented. When someone is following someone on social media and they say something that's factually incorrect that is then corrected by another person who's a blogger or a journalist, and there's a refusal to believe in that because it becomes complicated and it starts to open up questions and uncomfortable questions. It's just easier to believe in the logline of the original advocate. Just easier to believe in the logline of the original advocate. I'm talking about whether people don't care so much about truth because truth has become so complicated. If you do have all this representation online, there is so much information that to wade through it is just too big a task.

Speaker 1: 31:17

But I don't think that's very different from the witch. In a way, not wanting to do the hard work of looking at the facts is, I think, the difference here. The reality is ultimately that there's some people who care and there's some people who don't care, and the people who don't care that are among the two million followers will always just listen to what the person says.

Speaker 3: 31:39

the same way, the church was talking about witches In other words, your two million followers are the witch believers of this era. You're right that the difficulty is nuance. Nuance demands thought, and if you don't wish to think, or you don't have the, if you don't have the education which has enabled you to think, to grasp that there are two points of view, three points of view, that there is grey areas and so on, then you're not going to. You're just not going to try. You just have this belief and everything must fit into that belief. The echo chamber that we talk about just works that way.

Speaker 2: 32:19

I think back when we're talking about, you know, the witch believers. I don't know why we've called it that, but the news travelled a lot more slowly and there was time. There was a period for perspective, there was a period to maybe muse about something, to maybe have a longer discussion. I feel that has changed the metabolic rate of how information is spread and digested. That's what I'm talking about in terms of simplicity, trumping truth. To find out and get into the reeds of what really happened is just too complicated.

Speaker 3: 32:49

I'd rather just align to this point of view. Well, I mean, I think that's obviously true. I think it was Churchill was one of the people that said the lie gets its trousers. On a well-known phrase, that the lie trumps the truth if the lie is told quickly. I remember lots of occasions in which stories happened in which, for various reasons sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident an untruth was told right at the beginning of the story. Sometimes by accident, an untruth was told right at the beginning of the story. Case in point a Brazilian man who was shot mistakenly at the station in Stockwell some years ago was said to be a terrorist and that's why he was shot, because it was totally and utterly untrue. But I met many people months and months later.

Speaker 2: 33:44

I've only got that bit of the story.

Speaker 3: 33:51

Who were absolutely certain that was the truth and it was really difficult to turn them around. And no, no, no, roy, no, I know this to be the case. I, as you probably know, a bit of a nerd on Irish history. The myth-making over the 50 years of troubles in Northern Ireland was such that it was caught on by the authorities very early on. That if you get our story which need not be the truth, but our story out there quickly, then you will win the argument and win the day and people will always believe that. So there was a very famous whistleblower called Colin Wallace. Colin Wallace decided that he was going to reveal the use of psychological operations, which were called PSYOPs in Northern Ireland.

Speaker 3: 34:43

Colin Wallace was a problem for the authorities and he was quickly shut down in a rather unique way. He was a murder was staged and he was accused of the murder, and it took him years to prove that he wasn't a murderer. Meanwhile, of course, the story that he was a murderer impinged itself on the public consciousness and it wiped out Colin Wallace's stories of what was really going on in Northern Ireland, in other words, news manipulation, which our friends in the New Labour Party were quick to understand. The whole Blair-Mandelson-Campbell era was one in which they understood how news manipulation worked. Get your story out there first. Get your rebuttal in before the story comes out.

Speaker 3: 35:37

I just recently wrote a piece about the court judgment in December last year of Prince Harry winning the case against the Mirror, in which the judge was hugely critical of the former Mirror editor, piers Morgan. Morgan, understanding how news manipulation works, quickly stepped out from his front door, made a blistering statement about the judge and about Prince Harry. The story became one about Piers Morgan, not about Prince Harry winning his award news, even though those facts didn't change how news can be circumscribed in such a way as to be beneficial to people who are in the media and who know.

Speaker 1: 36:29

For me, what comes to mind here is the story of manipulation, is the story of mankind and about power and how you know, for ages we have tried to triangulate the truth, but ultimately we know that we are biased. There's recency bias, there's confirmation bias. There are various different biases. There's Daniel Kahneman. It's a simplistic view, but also speaks about fast and slow thinking. There's fast thinking.

Speaker 1: 36:56

This is the thinking that I am currently probably causing in your minds. You're just listening without maybe questioning everything that I'm saying, but when I say 17 times 23, your pupils slightly dilate and you have to start thinking about making that calculation. And this is energetically just more expensive and it is harder to do, and, of course, it is not natural for people to want to expend energy on these type of things that require effort. So this has been used all through the ages. The thing that I think you mentioned earlier, natasha, which I liked, is like there's a higher metabolic rate right now and shorter attention spans, and the present is noisier than it has ever been, and this is why, on top of the fact that nuance has always been impossible and that our human nature is always fallible and that we always don't want to expend effort on learning and questioning. There's also an abundance and overabundance of the present that is constantly blaring into our ears.

Speaker 3: 37:55

I think you're actually spot on there. When I speak of mainstream media, I'm still only speaking about the consumer consuming part of the population as a relative minority Difference today, everyone is on new media, everyone is reading their Facebook, their Twitter, instagram. What have you? We're talking people from what? Age 13, 14, sometimes younger, who are now consuming all of that way, up to people even as old as me, and they are doing that on an hourly, minute-by-minute basis. Now, that was never true of the old media. You just never got that level of the popular, that scale. It is basically it's 100% scale. Now, that is a. That's something I think that we haven't grasped, at least we haven't grasped the implications of that, and it's understanding that and then forming a way of countering it, of saying how do we overcome that? That, I think, is the great problem for society going forward.

Speaker 1: 39:10

Absolutely, and I think the notion that we experience our times to be more extreme than times before is one that I would love to question. Do you think that all these extreme opinions just existed prior to this moment, or do you think that this is a new thing?

Speaker 3: 39:29

No, I mean, I think people have always held extraordinary convictions, because that's what they are. Everyone is prejudiced in one way or another, and they've held those prejudices over time.

Speaker 1: 39:43

Yeah, so what is different this?

Speaker 3: 39:48

bottom-up element of it is different. Well, I think Natasha's right. It happens so quickly, it's there in an instant. In other words, I think we've always had fires, intellectual fires, and, and they were difficult to contain. But now, when an intellectual fire happens, it is very difficult to damp it down. There's no mechanism within new media to rebut it, except the authorities are not believed. The church is no longer believed. In other words, those mechanisms which existed previously to contain mistakes are no longer viable, and that is the most worrying thing of all.

Speaker 2: 40:39

Earlier on, you were talking about the sort of diaspora of the media, that there being lots of different representations of various kinds of opinion and the digestible tabloid form and then the broadsheet, and now I feel we're in a space to your point. If we can't agree on the facts or that something's happening in the first place, where's the forum for discussion or disagreement or conversation? My birth father and his father had entirely different opinions and they would shout and scream at one another, but there was an argument to be had and they could then go for a pint afterwards. And when I'm saying something that people say all the time, I feel that we won't even fraternise with someone who holds an opinion that is very, very different to us, without even knowing that that's what we're doing.

Speaker 3: 41:29

No, I yeah, it is worrying because I was often outside parliament during the Brexit dramas and saw people really screaming in each other's face, not listening, just screaming at each other, and I feel, in media terms, that's what's happening. You've got silos of people who are not communicating at all. So you are right In historical terms, people have always been prejudiced, people have always had the wrong ideas, people have always believed in conspiracy theories. I think the difference now is scale and the impossibility of doing anything which would ameliorate that. You can't see a way of curing the ill, and I think that's, you know, the most worrying feature of modern media and I don't see at the moment a cure for that and I don't see at the moment a cure for that.

Speaker 1: 42:29

The other element of this is and that's what I wanted to allude to when I said it's bottom up is that previously, when you had a kooky opinion, you would regress to the mean, because you wouldn't have 100,000 people that you could find that were also flat earthers immediately available to you, to you. So the reality is that the manipulation and misinformation was dictated from very few sources and this was the traditional legacy media, right, but it couldn't bubble up. In a way, the most extreme things were left out of it, because the mainstream media also knew that it needed cohesion within society to still be able to rule quote unquote. So they didn't go all the way to the edges of it. But now, because the platforms are completely democratized and open, people can take the edges, and for every edge there's still hundreds of thousands of people, and these people can now bottom up, start a mob.

Speaker 3: 43:26

You used an interesting phrase there about the cohesion of society yeah I wonder whether in fact that and that was always a very important factor. I wonder whether now society is so fractured um that you couldn't speak of it in those terms I'm sorry to play a devil's advocate or be contrarian, don't apologise for disagreeing.

Speaker 2: 43:52

You see, that's the difference.

Speaker 1: 43:53

This is what we want.

Speaker 3: 43:54

This is the difference with this podcast we're all civilised and we're not shouting and screaming Sorry.

Speaker 2: 43:59

I actually feel that, at least in real life, extreme opinions are rarely expressed, that people would rather be neutral than truthful. People very, very often agree to what someone else is saying, even though in private they think the absolute opposite, and that to me is far more worrisome than extreme diverse opinions that can't come together or can't find.

Speaker 2: 44:22

Because we don't really get to know what people think. I have a different experience to you guys. I guess I'm not on social media that much, but I find that everyone is neutral. That's what I mean. They don't care. There's been a disengagement from truth and fact, finding that we'd rather be neutral than make the effort to be truthful and be unpopular and maybe then be outcast, maybe be cancelled, maybe be something and not included my experience of social media would not suggest that, though, people are anything but just on those platforms, yeah, whereas in real life they'll behave quite differently in real life, you mean on a day-to-day basis

Speaker 1: 45:02

face-to-face. You mentioned being in front of parliament during break that was not the case. That was not. The case that was not the case.

Speaker 3: 45:07

No, that was an extreme situation, but even then, I don't I'm not certain that in fact you could say that what we are gradually breeding through social media and through those difficulties is a much more bellicose society in which people are beginning to shout at each other, and so the neutrality of which you speak, which presupposes that famous formulation of the, the silent majority I, I think that's broken down. I think the majority are not so silent and that they are getting less silent all the time, and that they are getting less silent all the time and that they are bolstered, given confidence by their use of social media and by reading what other people say on social media.

Speaker 1: 45:59

I would say the following to your point, and that is, of course, it is true that we are pro-social monkeys that like to be liked and we have empathy cues when we're in person, the meat space makes it much harder to say something that hurts somebody else when you look into the wider their eyes and then you see that you insulted someone.

Speaker 1: 46:18

That makes you feel bad. That's how we, that's how we work. So, of course, I would say that it is true that people can be much more extreme on digital platforms. Inherently, those platforms allow for such behavior.

Speaker 2: 46:30

The the question, rather, and I think, but it doesn't just allow, it proliferates and amplifies.

Speaker 1: 46:35

The real question for me is how much of that has been trickling back into society, that behavior trickling back into society, because I do think that it is more extreme than it was when we grew up, right, even in meat space.

Speaker 2: 46:48

I mean. The other argument is that, in fact, unlike you talking about the silent majority not existing, the silent majority do exist. The majority is silent and somewhere in the middle we don't hear all the people who aren't posting and who don't particularly need to express an opinion. That must be true, I mean statistically, and express an opinion.

Speaker 3: 47:10

That must be true. I mean statistically Well, I don't have the statistics I fully admit I, just as a consumer of social media over the whole period of its existence, I would say that it has become more anarchic, more cacophonous and therefore that, although you may be right, the trend is moving against you.

Speaker 1: 47:36

I also would agree with you in the sense that we know that these recommender algorithms are going for the most inflamed stuff that they're distributing for us to see. Therefore, obviously, what we're seeing on these platforms is a warped version of reality. Of course, it is not true that everybody is as extreme as this extreme stuff that we see on social media, and it is obviously also true that statistically less people are posting than not posting I just think those are important factors too that's that.

Speaker 1: 48:05

That's just the statistics. It's always um, I think. When you look at these social platforms, it's like one percent that post and nine percent that repost and ninety percent who just consume, right? How many of those are bots, I don't know. But that's, that's the stats. So, of course, but the point is who moves society?

Speaker 3: 48:24

is it those who are investing themselves in taking part in social media, or is it this silent group who are passively consuming? I mean, surely it is the active element who are moving ideas, moving also action through their ideas. That's where I think we are going, I suppose that's what's changed.

Speaker 2: 48:50

A lot of people who felt there wasn't a representation of their point of view or felt a certain kind of invisibility can find a voice on social media, and this is the first time that that's ever happened. So on the one hand, I'm fully supportive of that, because I love the idea of all voices being represented. But those people are being particularly vociferous because they want to hold on to an identity and a set of beliefs more than find anything new that might be challenging that set of beliefs. I think that's the part of it that I feel I want to try and encourage myself at least to follow people that I do and don't disagree with, so that I don't get lost in a rabbit hole.

Speaker 1: 49:34

Absolutely. That's why this is called when Do we Meet? You know, we're kind of on a bummer right now. So I want to kind of wrap this up in a little bit more of a positive view, if we can and that is what hope is there, if there is any and even if we have to dig deep, let's try to think about how this could be salvaged, even if it has something to do with regulation and behavior change of the consumers and whatever else that comes to mind.

Speaker 3: 50:02

Well, if you have an optimistic view of the human condition I mentioned earlier, the pendulum had swung too far in one direction. There's no reason why it couldn't swing back when enough people get to realise that these forces we've made a number of mistakes. Also, I feel that the inventive nature of human beings means that we are going to find more positive outlets. I mentioned earlier the growth of podcasts, which I see as a very civilising influence. When I listen to a range of podcasts, what's so significant about them is they're not shouting. These are not generally. Even those who have political views with which I disagree do seem to be talking and talking through things and so on. There's a bit of preaching along the way, but I think that is already perhaps the seed of a new move within the media. So, gosh, I don't want to be too negative. Yeah, I remain hopeful.

Speaker 2: 51:07

So, gosh, I don't want to be too negative. Yeah, I remain hopeful. I suppose morality and ethics always follow on from advancements in technology, don't they? They catch up later. So perhaps this….

Speaker 1: 51:20

It's just the first inning, it's the first quarter, it's the, whatever the analogy that you want to use Like I said, we're only in the foothills.

Speaker 3: 51:26

We're only a few years into the digital revolution, yet we don't know. We might you know, in 20 years' time will there be a Twitter, Will there be an Instagram? You know, these things are so new and not absolutely cemented in forever. That's a rather nice thought, isn't?

Speaker 2: 51:47

it yes.

Speaker 3: 51:48

A world without Twitter, gee.

Speaker 1: 51:50

There's hope for us.

Speaker 2: 51:51

You do have a choice you know, you do have a choice. You don't have to log into these things. Maybe, Okay, that will be on our addiction podcast coming in.

Speaker 1: 52:02

Roy thanks so much for being here.

Speaker 2: 52:04

It was great to have you.

Speaker 1: 52:05

It was a pleasure.

Speaker 3: 52:05

Thank you.

Speaker 1: 52:06

Thank you so much.