Yanis Varoufakis
Showing posts with label social. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social. Show all posts
Friday 23 December 2016
Friday 19 August 2016
Thanks to the internet, there are now millions of cyber Rupert Murdochs
Mark Steel in The Independent
The scientists who invented the internet believed they were creating the means for humanity to reach a heightened level of co-operation never considered possible. People from remote corners of the globe could communicate, bringing an understanding of the spectrum of human experience within instant reach of us all.
And that’s how it’s worked out, with discourse such as “Why you not pis off Trottsky scum!” – “Shutt you mouth and join Tories Blairite yak droppings”, advancing the discussion about the Labour party on Twitter and website forums, to enlighten us all.
This process hasn’t just taken place in politics. On sporting forums, someone may advance the premise “Man U rule Arsnal go and do 1 Wenger lik my ars”, and you find yourself considering the points made all day, often reading it many times, to find something new in the sub-text you hadn’t noticed before.
On YouTube, when a local band uploads a song, it will be followed by a series of comments. The first will say “awesome guys” from a friend, then comes 80 more such as “I’d rather eat my own liver with gravy made from the green stuff in Olympic pool than lissen to that dog sick”.
There’s probably a gardening forum, in which someone writes “I’d say now is about the right time of year to plant your begonias.” Then someone replies “That shows what u know about gardning u compost face donky breath bet cant even tell rose from venis flytrap knobhead nippelface hope u trellis falls down kils runner beens lol I tell u what its write time of year to plant tree up you arse”.
I expect the Buddhist Meditation community has its own website, on which followers can share their experiences of finding inner peace, in which a convert may suggest “I learned to love through the mindfulness of breathing, and find my sense of place has found a new calm”
And the first reply will be “my temple beet yous anyday u chant nothing but shite its om not um any Buddhist know that our meditashin only way to troo peace we tear your robe up eesy hope u reinkarnate as wosp”.
Twitter, especially, offers a marvellous service to people who take everything literally. For example, on the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War, it was suggested by the government that we remember the occasion by turning off our lights in the evening. So I mentioned on Twitter “I’ve done my bit to commemorate the soldiers, I turned off my headlights as I was driving up the M23.”
Back came a torrent of abuse that I still haven’t finished sifting through, so it’s lovely to know people care.
There is probably no combination of words you can put on Twitter that someone won’t go berserk about. You could write “What a lovely sunset over Dorset this evening”, and someone will reply “not so lovely if you suffer from Sunset Aversion Depressive Dusk Syndrome actually. Think before you insult SADDS victims please Mark”.
The advanced student of Twitter anger won’t even need a real comment, they can reply with fury to nothing. I noticed someone firing a series of fuming comments about me for “mocking the mentally ill”. Eventually she acknowledged she’d mixed me up with someone else entirely, then without missing a beat carried on being furious about something else that probably hadn’t happened.
This is how the internet has honed our debating skills, as no longer are we bound to the tyranny of having to make sure we’re talking about the right person. We can scream “Why should we take any notice of Clare Balding’s opinions on the Olympics when she ruined Zimbabwe.”
After a couple of weeks we might accept we’ve mixed her up with Robert Mugabe but the original point is still valid.
This is why sometimes, it’s a relief to see one of those petitions that says “Please sign to stop new park bench being built as this will destroy one of Lewisham’s most colourful cluster of dandelions.”
The wonder of the internet, it was suggested, would be to take power from the old media and allow everyone an outlet for their views. We would all, in effect, own a newspaper.
But this week The Times newspaper published a story that Billy Bragg, at the Edinburgh Festival, denounced Jeremy Corbyn for “not reaching out to the wider electorate”, having previously supported him.
This was an imaginative effort, as what Billy said was he still backed Corbyn, and “hoped he would reach out to the wider electorate.”
This is a new and exciting way of reporting news. If Mo Farah’s coach says “I hope Mo starts strongly in the 5000 metres final”, they can report that as “Coach turns on Farah…the previously supportive trainer insisted Mo hasn’t been starting strongly enough, leading some athletes to wonder whether the trainer may decide to replace him with Owen Smith.”
One lesson of this is the worrying revelation that newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch may sometimes distort the facts in some way.
But the reaction to the story on social media was that many Labour members opposed to Corbyn were triumphant, while Corbyn supporters denounced Bragg, and were especially angry that he’d “given an interview to The Times” which he hadn’t.
The genius of this is it means people were angry about Billy Bragg, because someone they trust had spoken to a paper which they believe makes up stories, having read this in the paper they believe makes up stories.
Somehow the internet has made the old papers even more powerful than before.
Soon we’ll need clinics, where the addicted angry people can be weaned off the internet, wandering through gardens occasionally calling the rockery “scum” and writing “#traitor” in the mud about one of the fish until they’re cured.
The scientists who invented the internet believed they were creating the means for humanity to reach a heightened level of co-operation never considered possible. People from remote corners of the globe could communicate, bringing an understanding of the spectrum of human experience within instant reach of us all.
And that’s how it’s worked out, with discourse such as “Why you not pis off Trottsky scum!” – “Shutt you mouth and join Tories Blairite yak droppings”, advancing the discussion about the Labour party on Twitter and website forums, to enlighten us all.
This process hasn’t just taken place in politics. On sporting forums, someone may advance the premise “Man U rule Arsnal go and do 1 Wenger lik my ars”, and you find yourself considering the points made all day, often reading it many times, to find something new in the sub-text you hadn’t noticed before.
On YouTube, when a local band uploads a song, it will be followed by a series of comments. The first will say “awesome guys” from a friend, then comes 80 more such as “I’d rather eat my own liver with gravy made from the green stuff in Olympic pool than lissen to that dog sick”.
There’s probably a gardening forum, in which someone writes “I’d say now is about the right time of year to plant your begonias.” Then someone replies “That shows what u know about gardning u compost face donky breath bet cant even tell rose from venis flytrap knobhead nippelface hope u trellis falls down kils runner beens lol I tell u what its write time of year to plant tree up you arse”.
I expect the Buddhist Meditation community has its own website, on which followers can share their experiences of finding inner peace, in which a convert may suggest “I learned to love through the mindfulness of breathing, and find my sense of place has found a new calm”
And the first reply will be “my temple beet yous anyday u chant nothing but shite its om not um any Buddhist know that our meditashin only way to troo peace we tear your robe up eesy hope u reinkarnate as wosp”.
Twitter, especially, offers a marvellous service to people who take everything literally. For example, on the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War, it was suggested by the government that we remember the occasion by turning off our lights in the evening. So I mentioned on Twitter “I’ve done my bit to commemorate the soldiers, I turned off my headlights as I was driving up the M23.”
Back came a torrent of abuse that I still haven’t finished sifting through, so it’s lovely to know people care.
There is probably no combination of words you can put on Twitter that someone won’t go berserk about. You could write “What a lovely sunset over Dorset this evening”, and someone will reply “not so lovely if you suffer from Sunset Aversion Depressive Dusk Syndrome actually. Think before you insult SADDS victims please Mark”.
The advanced student of Twitter anger won’t even need a real comment, they can reply with fury to nothing. I noticed someone firing a series of fuming comments about me for “mocking the mentally ill”. Eventually she acknowledged she’d mixed me up with someone else entirely, then without missing a beat carried on being furious about something else that probably hadn’t happened.
This is how the internet has honed our debating skills, as no longer are we bound to the tyranny of having to make sure we’re talking about the right person. We can scream “Why should we take any notice of Clare Balding’s opinions on the Olympics when she ruined Zimbabwe.”
After a couple of weeks we might accept we’ve mixed her up with Robert Mugabe but the original point is still valid.
This is why sometimes, it’s a relief to see one of those petitions that says “Please sign to stop new park bench being built as this will destroy one of Lewisham’s most colourful cluster of dandelions.”
The wonder of the internet, it was suggested, would be to take power from the old media and allow everyone an outlet for their views. We would all, in effect, own a newspaper.
But this week The Times newspaper published a story that Billy Bragg, at the Edinburgh Festival, denounced Jeremy Corbyn for “not reaching out to the wider electorate”, having previously supported him.
This was an imaginative effort, as what Billy said was he still backed Corbyn, and “hoped he would reach out to the wider electorate.”
This is a new and exciting way of reporting news. If Mo Farah’s coach says “I hope Mo starts strongly in the 5000 metres final”, they can report that as “Coach turns on Farah…the previously supportive trainer insisted Mo hasn’t been starting strongly enough, leading some athletes to wonder whether the trainer may decide to replace him with Owen Smith.”
One lesson of this is the worrying revelation that newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch may sometimes distort the facts in some way.
But the reaction to the story on social media was that many Labour members opposed to Corbyn were triumphant, while Corbyn supporters denounced Bragg, and were especially angry that he’d “given an interview to The Times” which he hadn’t.
The genius of this is it means people were angry about Billy Bragg, because someone they trust had spoken to a paper which they believe makes up stories, having read this in the paper they believe makes up stories.
Somehow the internet has made the old papers even more powerful than before.
Soon we’ll need clinics, where the addicted angry people can be weaned off the internet, wandering through gardens occasionally calling the rockery “scum” and writing “#traitor” in the mud about one of the fish until they’re cured.
Sunday 14 August 2016
From Donald Trump to the Brexit campaign, outrageous untruths are almost a matter of course. How did we reach the point where ‘falsehood flies’?
Steven Poole in The Guardian
Champion of ‘free speech’: Donald Trump at a campaign rally last week. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Not so long ago it was “soundbites” that were thought to be corrupting political debate by reducing complex ideas to slogans. The 1988 US presidential election was called the “soundbite election” by some commentators, the most famous example being George HW Bush’s promise: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” (Two years later Bush agreed to a bipartisan budget that did increase taxes.) It was a mysteriously brilliant piece of verbal engineering. Why would you have to read Bush’s lips when you could hear what he was saying on the TV? But the surprising image and arresting rhythm made it stick.
Soundbites and slogans (“Take Back Control”) still work. Trump, too, has a conventional campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again”. (Great how, exactly? By doing what? Don’t ask.) But he gets most publicity for his antic, apparently off-the-cuff remarks that rhetorically perform an absence of rhetoric. His real genius might be read as a satirical absolutism about the first amendment. If speech is genuinely free, there should be no consequences to speech whatsoever. And, to the mystification of the commenting class, this is what Trump repeatedly finds to be the case.
After the media furore surrounding Trump’s claim that Obama founded Isis, he tweeted: “THEY DON’T GET SARCASM?” Thus he rows back from any outrageous claim dreamed up by a brain that works like a cleverly programmed internet meme-generator. “I don’t know,” he says, all innocence, “that’s what some people are saying.” (No one was before he did.) Yet the idea Obama is the founder of Isis will stick in at least some voters’ minds come polling day, as will the imaginary Mexican wall (though they will probably have forgotten its “big beautiful door”) – just as the “£350m a week for the NHS” promise did for many Leave voters.
Trump is not a perversion of the tradition of political campaigning; he is the logical culmination of it. It doesn’t matter what you say, if it helps you get elected. Trump is not a liar, exactly, but a bullshitter. According to the canonical definition by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, a liar still cares about the truth because he wants to conceal it from you. A bullshitter, on the other hand, simply doesn’t care what is true at all.
Trump is merely the most energetic current exploiter of a fact that modern politicians have long known: the media is broken, and you can mercilessly exploit its flaws to your own benefit. (That, after all, is what “spin doctors” are for.) If you repeat a lie often enough, then that claim becomes the story, and it’s what most people remember. And a structural confusion between “impartiality” and “balance” undermines the mission to inform of institutions such as the BBC. To be impartial would be to point out untruths wherever they come from. But to be “balanced” is to have a three-way between a presenter and two economists on opposite sides of some question. Never mind that one economist represents the views of 95% of the profession and the other is an ideologically blinkered outlier: the structure of the interview itself implies to the audience that the arguments are evenly divided.
In the age of social media, moreover, dubious political claims are packed into atomised fragments and attract thousands of enthusiastic retweets, while the people who help to redistribute them are unlikely ever to see a rebuttal that comes later or in someone else’s timeline. We’ve all moved on.
Social media is less a conversation than it is a virtually distributed riot of “happy firing” (a term for the celebratory shooting of assault rifles into the sky). That lies can go viral more quickly than the truth is another old observation. In 1710 Jonathan Swift wrote: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” But what is certain is that Twitter and Facebook now help it fly faster and further than ever before.
Nigel Farage proved the power of powerful slogans and images during the EU referendum campaign. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA
Because attention is the currency of social media, public figures are incentivised to use outrage to vie for visibility, which further coarsens the public discourse – as when the American shock-journo Ann Coulter lately defended Trump by calling him a “victim of media rape” who is being blamed for “wearing a short skirt”. Any such outburst these days, along with the wave of overt post-Brexit racism in Britain, may be defended as a healthy refusal to kowtow to “political correctness”, a term that originally denoted the careful use of language so as not to needlessly upset people, and now just means common decency.
What, then, is to be done? The modern bullshitting demagogue succeeds because he says arresting and often amusing things that cut through the anomie of those who feel left behind by politics as usual. Exquisitely reasoned liberal conversation is exactly what turns those voters off. Lately it has been notable that Hillary Clinton, not previously considered the wittiest person in US politics, has used an impressive array of scripted zingers to put down her opponent. What the bullshitters do so well is define the rules of the game, so perhaps their opponents will have to play it at least to this extent, while trying to keep the moral high ground by still caring about what is true and what isn’t.
It’s not an edifying thought, but if the insurgent right is to have its Trumps and its Farages, maybe the centre and the left need their own versions too.
A Vote Leave battle bus, rebranded outside parliament in London by Greenpeace last month. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images
Donald Trump announced last week that Barack Obama was the “founder of Isis” and its “most valuable player”. Earlier he had hinted that gun activists might want to assassinate Hillary Clinton to prevent her appointing liberal justices to the Supreme Court. In Britain, meanwhile, calls for the moderation of violent political language after the death of Jo Cox have not resulted in much reduction of the gleeful talk of “stabbings” and “traitors”, and did not discourage Nigel Farage from exulting that the Brexit vote had been won “without a shot being fired”. In what some call an era of “post-truth politics”, public discourse seems more abusive and angry, and further from the ideal of reasoned conversation about social goods, than ever before. Is our political language broken?
Well, people have been complaining about the corruption of political language since political language existed. Confucius warned that a ruler should use the correct names for things, or social catastrophe would result. Orwell lamented that political language in his time was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. And the era of the “war on terror” gave rise to a whole new constellation of what I call Unspeak: carefully engineered phrases designed to smuggle in a biased point of view and shut down thought and argument – like “war on terror” itself.
Nor is flat-out lying in politics anything new. There is a marvellous 18th-century pamphlet usually attributed to John Arbuthnot, friend of Swift and Pope and founder of the Scriblerus club. It describes a yet-to-be-written book, The Art of Political Lying, in which the author will show “that the People have a Right to private Truth from their Neighbours ... but that they have no Right at all to Political Truth”.
The coinage “post-truth politics”, indeed, implies that there was once a golden age of politics in which its elevated practitioners spoke nothing but perfect truth. The sun never dawned on such a day. But perhaps what feels new to us now is the shamelessness of the lying, and the barefaced repeating of a lie repeatedly debunked. Arbuthnot cautioned that the same lie should not be “obstinately insisted upon”, but he did not live to see this strategy work so brilliantly during the EU referendum, with the Leave campaign’s claim that we sent £350m a week to the EU.
Shameless, too, was the haste with which this lie, having done its work, was disowned on the morning of the referendum result. It was a “mistake”, muttered Nigel Farage, before carefully lowering his snout back into the EU trough that continues to pay his MEP’s salary. This rather called to mind Paul Wolfowitz’s candid admission that the issue of Saddam’s alleged WMD was chosen as the justification for the Iraq war “for bureaucratic reasons”. The surprise, perhaps, is that you can show how the magic trick works, and people still believe it next time.
Donald Trump announced last week that Barack Obama was the “founder of Isis” and its “most valuable player”. Earlier he had hinted that gun activists might want to assassinate Hillary Clinton to prevent her appointing liberal justices to the Supreme Court. In Britain, meanwhile, calls for the moderation of violent political language after the death of Jo Cox have not resulted in much reduction of the gleeful talk of “stabbings” and “traitors”, and did not discourage Nigel Farage from exulting that the Brexit vote had been won “without a shot being fired”. In what some call an era of “post-truth politics”, public discourse seems more abusive and angry, and further from the ideal of reasoned conversation about social goods, than ever before. Is our political language broken?
Well, people have been complaining about the corruption of political language since political language existed. Confucius warned that a ruler should use the correct names for things, or social catastrophe would result. Orwell lamented that political language in his time was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. And the era of the “war on terror” gave rise to a whole new constellation of what I call Unspeak: carefully engineered phrases designed to smuggle in a biased point of view and shut down thought and argument – like “war on terror” itself.
Nor is flat-out lying in politics anything new. There is a marvellous 18th-century pamphlet usually attributed to John Arbuthnot, friend of Swift and Pope and founder of the Scriblerus club. It describes a yet-to-be-written book, The Art of Political Lying, in which the author will show “that the People have a Right to private Truth from their Neighbours ... but that they have no Right at all to Political Truth”.
The coinage “post-truth politics”, indeed, implies that there was once a golden age of politics in which its elevated practitioners spoke nothing but perfect truth. The sun never dawned on such a day. But perhaps what feels new to us now is the shamelessness of the lying, and the barefaced repeating of a lie repeatedly debunked. Arbuthnot cautioned that the same lie should not be “obstinately insisted upon”, but he did not live to see this strategy work so brilliantly during the EU referendum, with the Leave campaign’s claim that we sent £350m a week to the EU.
Shameless, too, was the haste with which this lie, having done its work, was disowned on the morning of the referendum result. It was a “mistake”, muttered Nigel Farage, before carefully lowering his snout back into the EU trough that continues to pay his MEP’s salary. This rather called to mind Paul Wolfowitz’s candid admission that the issue of Saddam’s alleged WMD was chosen as the justification for the Iraq war “for bureaucratic reasons”. The surprise, perhaps, is that you can show how the magic trick works, and people still believe it next time.
Champion of ‘free speech’: Donald Trump at a campaign rally last week. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Not so long ago it was “soundbites” that were thought to be corrupting political debate by reducing complex ideas to slogans. The 1988 US presidential election was called the “soundbite election” by some commentators, the most famous example being George HW Bush’s promise: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” (Two years later Bush agreed to a bipartisan budget that did increase taxes.) It was a mysteriously brilliant piece of verbal engineering. Why would you have to read Bush’s lips when you could hear what he was saying on the TV? But the surprising image and arresting rhythm made it stick.
Soundbites and slogans (“Take Back Control”) still work. Trump, too, has a conventional campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again”. (Great how, exactly? By doing what? Don’t ask.) But he gets most publicity for his antic, apparently off-the-cuff remarks that rhetorically perform an absence of rhetoric. His real genius might be read as a satirical absolutism about the first amendment. If speech is genuinely free, there should be no consequences to speech whatsoever. And, to the mystification of the commenting class, this is what Trump repeatedly finds to be the case.
After the media furore surrounding Trump’s claim that Obama founded Isis, he tweeted: “THEY DON’T GET SARCASM?” Thus he rows back from any outrageous claim dreamed up by a brain that works like a cleverly programmed internet meme-generator. “I don’t know,” he says, all innocence, “that’s what some people are saying.” (No one was before he did.) Yet the idea Obama is the founder of Isis will stick in at least some voters’ minds come polling day, as will the imaginary Mexican wall (though they will probably have forgotten its “big beautiful door”) – just as the “£350m a week for the NHS” promise did for many Leave voters.
Trump is not a perversion of the tradition of political campaigning; he is the logical culmination of it. It doesn’t matter what you say, if it helps you get elected. Trump is not a liar, exactly, but a bullshitter. According to the canonical definition by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, a liar still cares about the truth because he wants to conceal it from you. A bullshitter, on the other hand, simply doesn’t care what is true at all.
Trump is merely the most energetic current exploiter of a fact that modern politicians have long known: the media is broken, and you can mercilessly exploit its flaws to your own benefit. (That, after all, is what “spin doctors” are for.) If you repeat a lie often enough, then that claim becomes the story, and it’s what most people remember. And a structural confusion between “impartiality” and “balance” undermines the mission to inform of institutions such as the BBC. To be impartial would be to point out untruths wherever they come from. But to be “balanced” is to have a three-way between a presenter and two economists on opposite sides of some question. Never mind that one economist represents the views of 95% of the profession and the other is an ideologically blinkered outlier: the structure of the interview itself implies to the audience that the arguments are evenly divided.
In the age of social media, moreover, dubious political claims are packed into atomised fragments and attract thousands of enthusiastic retweets, while the people who help to redistribute them are unlikely ever to see a rebuttal that comes later or in someone else’s timeline. We’ve all moved on.
Social media is less a conversation than it is a virtually distributed riot of “happy firing” (a term for the celebratory shooting of assault rifles into the sky). That lies can go viral more quickly than the truth is another old observation. In 1710 Jonathan Swift wrote: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” But what is certain is that Twitter and Facebook now help it fly faster and further than ever before.
Nigel Farage proved the power of powerful slogans and images during the EU referendum campaign. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA
Because attention is the currency of social media, public figures are incentivised to use outrage to vie for visibility, which further coarsens the public discourse – as when the American shock-journo Ann Coulter lately defended Trump by calling him a “victim of media rape” who is being blamed for “wearing a short skirt”. Any such outburst these days, along with the wave of overt post-Brexit racism in Britain, may be defended as a healthy refusal to kowtow to “political correctness”, a term that originally denoted the careful use of language so as not to needlessly upset people, and now just means common decency.
What, then, is to be done? The modern bullshitting demagogue succeeds because he says arresting and often amusing things that cut through the anomie of those who feel left behind by politics as usual. Exquisitely reasoned liberal conversation is exactly what turns those voters off. Lately it has been notable that Hillary Clinton, not previously considered the wittiest person in US politics, has used an impressive array of scripted zingers to put down her opponent. What the bullshitters do so well is define the rules of the game, so perhaps their opponents will have to play it at least to this extent, while trying to keep the moral high ground by still caring about what is true and what isn’t.
It’s not an edifying thought, but if the insurgent right is to have its Trumps and its Farages, maybe the centre and the left need their own versions too.
Tuesday 29 September 2015
Saturday 29 August 2015
Why happy couples cheat?
Why happy couples cheat? Esther Perel
Why we love, why we cheat? Helen Fisher
Sunday 28 June 2015
State or private? Painful school choice that still fuels inequality in Britain
Will Hutton in The Guardian
I remember vividly one harrowing night at the end of the school summer term 23 years ago. My nine-year-old daughter was inconsolable. All her friends were leaving her very good state school to be placed by their parents in various private schools in the Oxford area. She cried at her loss. My wife cried. Her younger sister cried, because her sister and mother were crying. The house was drenched in tears. We were living the continuing divisive disaster that is the British education system, the most socially engineered to advantage privilege in the world.
At the playground swings a few days earlier, I had overheard a group of mothers explaining to one another why they were going private. The state schools weren’t challenging enough for exceptional children like their own and the comprehensive was only just recovering from a reorganisation. They just weren’t prepared to take the risk. Best of all, their daughters could continue their friendships and mix with other children like them.
I remember thinking that the local comprehensive didn’t deserve such criticism; it got an exceptional proportion of its students to university. But it was part of the national conversation that there was little good in state education, dominated, as it was, by trade unions, trendy teaching methods, an ideology that all should have prizes and a general lack of commitment to excellence. Two years later, Chris Woodhead was appointed chief inspector of schools. The language and attitudes of those mothers at the swings suddenly became the lingua franca of the man charged with improving our schools.
His death last week was the trigger for another outpouring of brave-Chris-the-man-who-said-it-like-it-should-be-said pieces, admiring his honesty in declaring that there were 15,000 teachers who should be sacked, his excoriation of soft teaching methods and praise of his insistence that kids needed to acquire both skills and knowledge for knowledge’s sake. His target was the “blob”, the educational establishment identified by former education secretary Michael Gove, who defend “collectivist” public education and the mediocrity of the status quo. The consensus was that we need yet more of that energy now to mount the ongoing fight against the liberal/left blob still defending the indefensible.
Except there has been a quiet revolution taking place in our state schools, especially primary schools, which would be hard to imagine if the blob really was as effective in sustaining mediocrity as its critics say. The inconvenient truth is that the state school system is in the round good and improving. Sir Michael Wilshaw, who enraged so many educationalists by insisting when he took the job as chief inspector of schools that he would tolerate no excuses for failure, now declares that after 7,000 school inspections over the last year, 82% of primary schools and 71% of secondary schools are good or outstanding.
Governance is better; leadership is better; incentives are better; teachers are better motivated; trade unions support higher standards; academies are working; even initiatives such as Teach First are making a measurable difference. Indeed, a recent Sutton Trust report found that there are now 11,000 ex-Oxbridge teachers in the state sector, having doubled since 2003. Young men and women, as I know from my college in Oxford, want to make a difference to society rather than teach the already privileged. In some parts of the country, there has been something of a revolution. London now outperforms the rest of the country in GCSE and A-level results, a legacy of the last Labour government melding a Woodheadian commitment to academic rigour with more collectivist money and encouraging and rewarding better leadership. A generation of education reform has worked.
Yet I have no doubt that there are groups of middle-class mothers at playgrounds still shaking their heads at the well-publicised problems of the state system – despite its improvement. They need state schools to be crap to justify what would otherwise be an obvious attempt to advantage their own children over others and embrace the social apartheid of private education. The centre-right press ensures that every failing is magnified, every success under-reported. Wilshaw, complain centre-right commentators, has gone rogue. Doesn’t he know that state school teachers are unionised second-raters who don’t understand the importance of literacy and numeracy and who put up with disruptive classes? Ofsted should be abolished and the state school system dismantled into a system of free schools removed from all forms of suffocating public influence. Indeed, with the government pledged to create another 500 on top of 400 already created, the free school movement is well entrenched.
Which, as it grows, will become a disaster. The derided blob has always had one aim: to offer the best education for all. It probably did over-emphasise comprehensiveness over excellence in the 1970s and 80s, but those days are long gone. Today’s left/right blend of commitment to universality, less bad funding, rigour and leadership has worked. The danger is that the government is going to kill that alchemy and by rolling back universality, publicness and, crucially, the funding so crucial to recent success, further worsen the dreadful inequalities besetting education and wider society. But from their point of view, who cares? The casualties of this process don’t vote Tory anyway. Their constituency is the opters-out, private and public; 48% of Tory MPs are privately educated.
Opting out is the process that fuels inequality, still the hallmark of our education system. The Sutton Trust found that despite the recent improvement, children from the richer fifth of neighbourhoods are nine times more likely to go to a good university than the fifth from the poorest. Inequality defines life chances. Part of the explanation is private schools: part that socioeconomic background is crucial to family stability; and part that free schools and academies are disproportionately represented in richer areas. If we want a society in which the mass flourishes, then fragmenting our system into one built on autonomy, opting out and individualism – cementing inequalities – is precisely the wrong direction of travel.
Anthony Seldon, outgoing headmaster of Wellington College, complains of the narcissism of so many parents – videoing, rather than watching, school plays and rarely turning up for parents’ evenings. But that is where the values of libertarian conservatism leads. Looking back, my wife and I felt that parents like us should stand by the universal system; our daughter did well and many of her friends at the time, whose parents believed in their exceptionalism, have had unhappy lives. It would have been so much better if those children had been allowed to stick together in a system that spelled out their togetherness while teaching them with rigour. The English tragedy is that we will never get there.
Locals and Harrow boys meet outside Lord’s at the 1937 Eton v Harrow cricket match. Photograph: Jimmy Sime/Getty Images
I remember vividly one harrowing night at the end of the school summer term 23 years ago. My nine-year-old daughter was inconsolable. All her friends were leaving her very good state school to be placed by their parents in various private schools in the Oxford area. She cried at her loss. My wife cried. Her younger sister cried, because her sister and mother were crying. The house was drenched in tears. We were living the continuing divisive disaster that is the British education system, the most socially engineered to advantage privilege in the world.
At the playground swings a few days earlier, I had overheard a group of mothers explaining to one another why they were going private. The state schools weren’t challenging enough for exceptional children like their own and the comprehensive was only just recovering from a reorganisation. They just weren’t prepared to take the risk. Best of all, their daughters could continue their friendships and mix with other children like them.
I remember thinking that the local comprehensive didn’t deserve such criticism; it got an exceptional proportion of its students to university. But it was part of the national conversation that there was little good in state education, dominated, as it was, by trade unions, trendy teaching methods, an ideology that all should have prizes and a general lack of commitment to excellence. Two years later, Chris Woodhead was appointed chief inspector of schools. The language and attitudes of those mothers at the swings suddenly became the lingua franca of the man charged with improving our schools.
His death last week was the trigger for another outpouring of brave-Chris-the-man-who-said-it-like-it-should-be-said pieces, admiring his honesty in declaring that there were 15,000 teachers who should be sacked, his excoriation of soft teaching methods and praise of his insistence that kids needed to acquire both skills and knowledge for knowledge’s sake. His target was the “blob”, the educational establishment identified by former education secretary Michael Gove, who defend “collectivist” public education and the mediocrity of the status quo. The consensus was that we need yet more of that energy now to mount the ongoing fight against the liberal/left blob still defending the indefensible.
Except there has been a quiet revolution taking place in our state schools, especially primary schools, which would be hard to imagine if the blob really was as effective in sustaining mediocrity as its critics say. The inconvenient truth is that the state school system is in the round good and improving. Sir Michael Wilshaw, who enraged so many educationalists by insisting when he took the job as chief inspector of schools that he would tolerate no excuses for failure, now declares that after 7,000 school inspections over the last year, 82% of primary schools and 71% of secondary schools are good or outstanding.
Governance is better; leadership is better; incentives are better; teachers are better motivated; trade unions support higher standards; academies are working; even initiatives such as Teach First are making a measurable difference. Indeed, a recent Sutton Trust report found that there are now 11,000 ex-Oxbridge teachers in the state sector, having doubled since 2003. Young men and women, as I know from my college in Oxford, want to make a difference to society rather than teach the already privileged. In some parts of the country, there has been something of a revolution. London now outperforms the rest of the country in GCSE and A-level results, a legacy of the last Labour government melding a Woodheadian commitment to academic rigour with more collectivist money and encouraging and rewarding better leadership. A generation of education reform has worked.
Yet I have no doubt that there are groups of middle-class mothers at playgrounds still shaking their heads at the well-publicised problems of the state system – despite its improvement. They need state schools to be crap to justify what would otherwise be an obvious attempt to advantage their own children over others and embrace the social apartheid of private education. The centre-right press ensures that every failing is magnified, every success under-reported. Wilshaw, complain centre-right commentators, has gone rogue. Doesn’t he know that state school teachers are unionised second-raters who don’t understand the importance of literacy and numeracy and who put up with disruptive classes? Ofsted should be abolished and the state school system dismantled into a system of free schools removed from all forms of suffocating public influence. Indeed, with the government pledged to create another 500 on top of 400 already created, the free school movement is well entrenched.
Which, as it grows, will become a disaster. The derided blob has always had one aim: to offer the best education for all. It probably did over-emphasise comprehensiveness over excellence in the 1970s and 80s, but those days are long gone. Today’s left/right blend of commitment to universality, less bad funding, rigour and leadership has worked. The danger is that the government is going to kill that alchemy and by rolling back universality, publicness and, crucially, the funding so crucial to recent success, further worsen the dreadful inequalities besetting education and wider society. But from their point of view, who cares? The casualties of this process don’t vote Tory anyway. Their constituency is the opters-out, private and public; 48% of Tory MPs are privately educated.
Opting out is the process that fuels inequality, still the hallmark of our education system. The Sutton Trust found that despite the recent improvement, children from the richer fifth of neighbourhoods are nine times more likely to go to a good university than the fifth from the poorest. Inequality defines life chances. Part of the explanation is private schools: part that socioeconomic background is crucial to family stability; and part that free schools and academies are disproportionately represented in richer areas. If we want a society in which the mass flourishes, then fragmenting our system into one built on autonomy, opting out and individualism – cementing inequalities – is precisely the wrong direction of travel.
Anthony Seldon, outgoing headmaster of Wellington College, complains of the narcissism of so many parents – videoing, rather than watching, school plays and rarely turning up for parents’ evenings. But that is where the values of libertarian conservatism leads. Looking back, my wife and I felt that parents like us should stand by the universal system; our daughter did well and many of her friends at the time, whose parents believed in their exceptionalism, have had unhappy lives. It would have been so much better if those children had been allowed to stick together in a system that spelled out their togetherness while teaching them with rigour. The English tragedy is that we will never get there.
Thursday 7 May 2015
How friendship became a tool of the powerful
William Davies in The Guardian
Imagine walking into a coffee shop, ordering a cappuccino, and then, to your surprise, being informed that it has already been paid for. Where did this unexpected gift come from? It transpires that it was left by the previous customer. The only snag, if indeed it is a snag, is that you now have to do the same for the next customer who walks in.
This is known as a “pay-it-forward” pricing scheme. It is something that has been practised by a number of small businesses in California, such as the Karma Kitchen in Berkeley and, in some cases, customers have introduced it spontaneously. On the face of it, it would seem to defy the logic of free-market economics. Markets, surely, are places where we are allowed, even expected, to behave selfishly. With its hippy idealism, pay-it-forward would appear to go against the core tenets of economic calculation.
But there is more to it than this. Researchers from the decision science research group at the University of California, Berkeley have looked closely at pay-it-forward pricing and discovered something with profound implications for how markets and businesses work. It transpires that people will generally pay more under the pay-it-forward model than under a conventional pricing system. As the study’s lead author, Minah Jung, puts it: “People don’t want to look cheap. They want to be fair, but they also want to fit in with the social norms.” Contrary to what economists have long assumed, altruism can often exert a far stronger influence over our decision-making than calculation.
Such findings are typical of the field of behavioural economics, which emerged in the late 1970s. Like regular economists, behavioural economists assume that individuals are usually motivated to maximise their own benefit – but not always. In certain circumstances, they are social and moral animals, even when this appears to undermine their economic interests. They follow the herd and act according to certain rules of thumb. They have some principles that they will not sacrifice for money at all.
It seems that this undermines the cynical, individualist theory of human psychology, which lies at the heart of orthodox economics. Could it be that we are decent, social creatures after all? A great deal of neuroscientific research into the roots of sympathy and reciprocity supports this. Optimists might view this as the basis for a new political hope, of a society in which sharing and gift-giving offer a serious challenge to the power of monetary accumulation and privatisation.
But there is also a more disturbing possibility: that the critique of individualism and monetary calculation is now being incorporated into the armoury of utilitarian policy and management. One of the key insights of behavioural economics is that, if one wants to control other human beings, it is often far more effective to appeal to their sense of morality and social identity than to their self-interest.
This is symptomatic of a more general shift in policy and business practices today. Across various fields of expertise, from healthcare to marketing, from military training to finance, there is rising hope that strategic goals can be achieved through harnessing the power of the “social”. But what exactly does this mean? As the era of social democracy recedes further into the past, the meaning of the term is undergoing a profound transformation. Where once the term implied something concerning society or the common good, increasingly it refers to a technique of psychological intervention on the individual. Informal social connections and friendships are being rendered more visible and measurable. In the process, they are being turned into possible instruments of power.
Using the social to make money
Over recent years, generosity has become big business. In 2009, Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired magazine, published Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson argued that there was now a strong business case for giving products and services away for free, in order to forge better relationships with customers. Giving things away for free becomes a means of holding an audience captive or building a reputation, which can then be exploited with future sales or advertising. Michael O’Leary, boss of Ryanair, has even suggested that airline tickets might one day be priced at zero, with all costs recovered through additional charges for luggage, using the bathroom, skipping queues, and so on.
What Anderson was highlighting was the potential of non-monetary relationships to increase profits. And just as corporate giving can be used as a way of boosting revenue, so can the magic words that are used in return. Marketing specialists now analyse the optimal way of saying the words “thank you” to a customer, so as to deepen the social relationship with them.
The language of gratitude has infiltrated a number of high-profile advertising campaigns. Around Christmas 2013, Lloyds TSB, one of the British banks to bemost embarrassed by the 2008 financial crisis, launched a campaign consisting entirely of cutesy images of childhood friends enjoying happy moments together, concluding with the words “thank you”, written in party balloons. There was no mention of money. More bizarrely, Tesco, whose brand has suffered in recent years, released a series of YouTube videos in 2013 with men in Christmas jumpers singing “thank you” to everyone from the person who cooks Christmas dinner, to those driving safely, to other companies such as Instagram and so on. Tesco, it was implied, sprays gratitude in all directions, regardless of its own private interests.
There is inevitably a limit to how much of a social bond an individual can have with a multinational company. Businesses today are obsessed with being social, but what they typically mean by this is that they are able to permeate peer-to-peer social networks as effectively as possible. Brands hope to play a role in cementing friendships, as a guarantee that they will not be abandoned for more narrowly calculated reasons. So, for example, Coca-Cola has tried a number of somewhat twee marketing campaigns, such as putting individual names (“Sue”, “Tom”, etc) on their bottles as a way to encourage gift-giving. Managers hope that their employees will also act as “brand ambassadors” in their everyday social lives. Meanwhile, neuromarketers have begun studying how successfully images and advertisements trigger common neural responses in groups, rather than in isolated individuals. This, it seems, is a far better indication of how larger populations will respond to advertising.
All this – along with the rise of the “sharing economy”, exemplified by Airbnb and Uber, offers a simple lesson to big business. People will take more pleasure in buying things if the experience can be blended with something that feels like friendship and gift-exchange. The role of money must be airbrushed out of the picture wherever possible. As marketers see it, payment is one of the unfortunate “pain points” in any relationship with a customer, which requires anaesthetising with some form of more social experience. The market must be represented as something else entirely.
Digitising the social
Yet the greatest catalyst for the new business interest in being social is, unsurprisingly, the rise of social media. At the same time that behavioural economics has been highlighting the various ways in which we are altruistic creatures, social media offers businesses an opportunity to analyse and target that social behaviour. It allows advertising to be tailored to specific individuals, on the basis of who they know, and what those other people like and purchase. These practices, which are collectively referred to as “social analytics”, mean that tastes and behaviours can be traced in unprecedented detail. The end goal is no different from what it was at the dawn of marketing and management in the late 19th century: making money. What has changed is that each one of us is now viewed as an instrument through which to alter the attitudes and behaviours of our friends and contacts. Behaviours and ideas can be released like “contagions”, in the hope of infecting much larger networks.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Illustration by Pete Gamlen
The most valuable trick, from a marketing perspective, is how to induce individuals to share positive brand messages and adverts with each other, almost as if there were no public advertising campaign at all. The business practice known as “friendvertising” involves creating images and video clips that social media users are likely to share with others, for no conscious commercial purpose of their own. The science of viral marketing, or the creation of buzz, has led marketers to seek lessons from social psychology, social anthropology and social network analysis.
Businesses have long worried about their public reputations and the commitment of their employees. It also goes without saying that informal social networks themselves are as old as humanity. Despite the countercultural rhetoric of the “sharing economy”, what has changed is not the role of the social in capitalism, but the capacity to subject it to a detailed, quantitative, economic analysis, thanks primarily to the digitisation of social relationships.
In the longer term, the most profound cultural and ethical implications of this may be how we come to view ourselves and those around us. As data about social ties becomes easier to collect and access, and as concepts of duty and altruism become increasingly understood by economists (as the pay-it-forward study exemplifies), the temptation to ask self-interested, strategic questions about one’s own social circle will arise. Applying the mentality of cost-benefit analysis beyond the realms of the market is often controversial to start with, but can quickly become normal. Government economists today have no problem calculating the price of human life or the natural environment, if it is useful for purposes of policy appraisal.
Could we come to view our own personal acts of generosity and friendship in a similarly utilitarian sense? The evidence to support such an egocentric logic is growing rapidly. The area where there could be most to gain from such calculations is in the domain of health: social contact is good for us, in both body and mind. Just be sure that it is contact with the right people.
Using the social to improve health
In February 2010, I found myself sitting in a large hall, with a huge golden throne on my left, and the future leader of the Labour party, Ed Miliband, to my right. We were watching images on a screen that reminded me of the fractal videos that used to be sold by “herbal remedy” salesmen on Camden market in London in the early 1990s. Also present were a number of government policy advisers, all straining to appear as relaxed as possible – a status game that goes on in the corridors of power, played to indicate that one is at home there. (The game was won under the coalition government by David Cameron’s former adviser, Steve Hilton, who was notorious for wandering into meetings barefoot.)
There were about 10 of us in the room, one of the more baroque offices in the Cabinet Office, and we were all staring at the screen, transfixed by the movement of individual lines and dots that were being displayed. Standing next to the screen, clearly enjoying the impact that his video was having on this influential audience, was the American medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis. Christakis was on a speaking tour, promoting his book Connected, and had been invited to present some of his findings to British policymakers during the dying days of Gordon Brown’s government. As a sociologist with an interest in policy, I had been invited along.
Christakis is an unusual sociologist. Not only is he far more mathematically adept than most, but he has also published a number of articles in respected medical journals. The images we were watching on the screen that day represented social networks in a Baltimore neighbourhood, within which particular “behaviours” and medical symptoms were moving around. Christakis’s message to the assembled policymakers was a powerful one. Problems such as obesity, poverty and depression, which so often coincide, locking people into chronic conditions of inactivity, are contagious. They move around like viruses in social networks, creating risks to individuals purely by virtue of the people they happen to hang out with.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Illustration by Pete Gamlen
Christakis is part of a growing movement within the policy world. While marketers desperately seek to penetrate our social networks in order to alter our tastes and desires, policymakers have come to view social networks as means of improving our health and wellbeing. The “social neuroscience” pioneered by John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago suggests that the human brain has evolved in such a way as to depend on social relationships. Cacioppo’s research suggests that loneliness is an even greater health risk than smoking. Practices such as “social prescribing”, in which doctors recommend that individuals join a choir or voluntary organisation, are aimed at combating isolation and its tendency to lead to depression and chronic illness.
Driven particularly by neuroscience, the expert understanding of social life and morality is rapidly merging into the study of the body. One social neuroscientist, Matt Lieberman, has shown how pains that we have traditionally treated as emotional (such as separating from a lover) involve the same neurochemical processes as those we typically view as physical (such as breaking an arm). Social science and physiology are converging into a new discipline, in which human bodies are studied for the ways they respond to one another physically.
At the Cabinet Office presentation, there was something mesmeric and seductive about Christakis’s images. Could entrenched social problems really be represented by graphics of this sort? Christakis’s technical prowess was certainly alluring. In the grand tradition of American GIs bringing chewing gum and nylon stockings to the British during the second world war, his hi-tech social network analysis seemed novel and irresistible.
But what I found slightly surreal that day, aside from the gold throne, was the freakish view of this particular inner-city US community that we were privy to. Like the social analytics companies, which try to spot consumer behaviour as it emerges and spreads, there we were in London observing how the dietary habits and health problems of a few thousand relatively deprived Baltimore residents were moving around, like a disease. It felt as if we were viewing an ant colony from above. The fact that these flickering images represented human beings, with relationships, histories and agendas, was almost incidental.
It would seem a little perverse to suggest that policymakers ignore this evidence of the impact of social networks and altruism on health. If medical practitioners can change the behaviour of just a few influential people in a network for the better, they can potentially spread a more positive “contagion”. Yet there is a danger lurking in this worldview, which is the same problem that afflicts all forms of social network analysis. In reducing the social world to a set of mechanisms and resources, the question repeatedly arises as to whether social networks might be redesigned in ways to suit the already privileged. Networks have a tendency towards what are called power laws, whereby those with influence are able to harness that power to win even greater influence.
One example of this is known as “emotional contagion”. Psychologists working with social analytics can now track the spread of positive and negative emotions, as they travel through social networks. This was the topic of Facebook’s controversial experiment using newsfeed manipulation, the results of which were published last summer. Different moods, including anger and depression, are now recognised to be more socially contagious than others. But what will we do with this knowledge? The anxiety, as social life becomes swept up by quantitative analysis, is that happy, healthy individuals might tailor their social relationships in ways that protect them against the “risk” of unhappiness. Guy Winch, an American psychologist who has studied this phenomenon, advises happy people to be on their guard. “If you find yourself living with or around people with negative outlooks,” he wrote on the website Psychology Today, “consider balancing out your friend roster.” The impact of this rebalancing on those unfortunate friends with the “negative outlooks” is all too easy to imagine.
The fabric of social life is now a problem that is addressed within the rubric of health policy, and there is something a little sad about that. Loneliness now appears as an objective problem, but only because it shows up in the physical brain and body, with calculable costs for governments and health insurers. Generosity and gratitude are urged upon people by positive psychologists, but mainly to alleviate their own mental health problems and private misery. And friendship ties within poor inner-city neighbourhoods have become a topic of government concern, but only to the extent that they mediate epidemics of bad nutrition and costly inactivity.
The irony is that, for all the talk of giving and sharing, this is potentially an even more egocentric worldview than that associated with the market. The cornerstone of orthodox economics, dating back to Adam Smith, is that self-interest in the marketplace is ultimately beneficial for society. The era of social optimisation looks set to stand this claim upside down: being social in your everyday life is worth it, because it will ultimately deliver benefits back to you. The trouble is that our appetites for this new commodity can spiral out of control.
Addicted to contact
Over the past decade, the ubiquity of digital media – and social media in particular – has become a lightning rod for media hysteria. The internet or Facebook can be blamed for the fact that young people are increasingly narcissistic, unable to make commitments to one another or concentrate on anything that is not interactive, and so on. There is indeed some evidence to suggest that individuals who use social media compulsively are more egocentric, prone to exhibitionism and grandiose behaviour. But rather than treat the technology as some virus that has corrupted people psychologically and neurologically, it is worth standing back and reflecting on the broader cultural logic at work here.
What makes social media so compulsive, even addictive? It is the experience of social life, stripped of all its frustrations and obligations. People who cannot put down their smartphones are not engaging with images or gadgetry for the sake of it: they are desperately seeking some form of human interaction, but of a kind that does nothing to limit their personal, private autonomy.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Illustration by Pete Gamlen
What we witness, in the case of a social media addict, is only the more pathological element of a society that cannot conceive of relationships except in terms of the psychological pleasures that they produce. The person whose fingers twitch to check their Facebook page when they are supposed to be listening to their friend over a meal is a victim of a philosophy in which other people are only there to please, satisfy and affirm an individual ego from one moment to the next. This inevitably leads to vicious circles: once a social bond is stripped down to this impoverished psychological level, it becomes harder and harder to find the satisfaction that one wants. Viewing other people as instruments for one’s own pleasure represents a denial of the core ethical and emotional truths of friendship, love and generosity.
One grave shortcoming of this egocentric idea of the social is that none (or at least, vanishingly few) of us can ever constantly be the centre of attention, receiving praise. And so it also proves with Facebook. As an endless stream of exaggerated displays of positivity or success, Facebook often serves to make people feel worse about themselves and their own lives. The mathematics of networks means that most people will have fewer friends than average, while a small number of people will have far more than average. The tonic to this sense of inferiority is to make one’s own exaggerated displays of positivity or success, to seek the gaze of the other, thereby reinforcing a collective vicious circle. As positive psychologists are keen to stress, this inability to listen or empathise is a significant contributor to depression.
If wellbeing resides in discovering relationships that are less ego-oriented, less purely hedonistic, than those an individualistic society offers, then Facebook and similar forms of social media are rarely a recipe for happiness. It is true that there are specific uses of social media that lend themselves towards stronger, more fulfilling social relations. One group of positive psychologists has drawn on its own evidence of what types of social relations lead to greater happiness, to create a new social media platform, Happier, designed around expressions of gratitude and generosity, which are recognised to be critical ingredients of mental wellbeing.
What remains unquestioned by such efforts to redesign social networks for greater wellbeing is the underlying logic, which implies that relationships are there to be created, invested in and – potentially – abandoned, in pursuit of individual optimisation. The darker implication of strategically pursuing positive emotion via relationships is that the relationship is only as good as the psychic value that it delivers. “Friend rosters” may need to be “balanced”, if it turns out that one’s friends are not spreading enough pleasure or happiness.
Neoliberal socialism
Our society is excessively individualistic. Markets reduce everything to a question of individual calculation and selfishness. Unless we can recover the values associated with friendship and altruism, we will descend into a state of ennui.
These types of claims have animated various critiques of capitalism and markets for centuries. They have often provided the basis of arguments for reform, whether moderate attempts to restrain the reach of markets, or more wholesale demands to overhaul the capitalist system. Today, the same types of lament can be heard, but from some very different sources. Now, the gurus of marketing, behavioural economics, social media and management are first in line to attack the individualistic and materialist assumptions of the marketplace. But what they are offering instead is a marginally different theory of individual psychology and behaviour, in which the social is primarily an instrument for one’s own medical, emotional or monetary gain.
What we encounter in the current business, media and policy euphoria for being social is what might be called “neoliberal socialism”. Sharing is preferable to selling, so long as it does not interfere with the financial interests of dominant corporations. Appealing to people’s moral and altruistic sense becomes the best way of nudging them into line with agendas that they had no say over. Brands and behaviours can be unleashed as social contagions, without money ever changing hands. Empathy and relationships are celebrated, but only as particular habits that happy individuals have learned to practise. Everything that was once external to economic logic, such as friendship, is quietly brought within it.
How would one break out of this trap? The example of “social prescribing” by doctors is an enticing one. While it starts from a utilitarian premise, that individuals can improve their wellbeing through joining associations and working collaboratively, it also points towards the institutions to make this happen, and not simply more cognitive or behavioural tips. If people have become locked in themselves, gazing enviously at others, this poses questions that need institutional, political, collective answers. It cannot be alleviated simply with psychological appeals to the social, which can exacerbate the very problems they aim to alleviate, once combined with digital media and the egocentric model of connectivity those media facilitate. There is a crucial question of how businesses, markets, policies, laws and political participation might be designed differently to sustain meaningful social relationships, but it is virtually never confronted by the doyens of social capitalism.
It is not very long since the internet offered hope for different forms of organisation altogether. As the cultural and political theorist Jeremy Gilbert has argued, we should remember that it was only a few years ago that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire was completely defeated in its efforts to turn Myspace into a profitable entity. The tension between the logic of the open network and the logic of private investment could not be resolved, and Murdoch lost half a billion dollars. Facebook has had to go to great lengths to ensure that the same mistakes are not made – particularly by anchoring online identities in “real” offline identities, and tailoring its design around the interests of marketers and market researchers. Perhaps it is too early to say that it has succeeded.
The reduction of social life to psychology, or to physiology as achieved by social neuroscience, is not necessarily irreversible. Karl Marx believed that by bringing workers together in the factory and forcing them to work together, capitalism was creating the very class formation that would eventually overwhelm it. This was despite the “bourgeois ideology” that stressed the primacy of individuals transacting in a marketplace. Similarly, individuals today may be brought together for their own mental and physical health, or for their own private hedonistic kicks; but social congregations can develop their own logic, which is not reducible to that of individual wellbeing or pleasure. This is the hope that currently lies dormant in this new, neoliberal socialism.
Imagine walking into a coffee shop, ordering a cappuccino, and then, to your surprise, being informed that it has already been paid for. Where did this unexpected gift come from? It transpires that it was left by the previous customer. The only snag, if indeed it is a snag, is that you now have to do the same for the next customer who walks in.
This is known as a “pay-it-forward” pricing scheme. It is something that has been practised by a number of small businesses in California, such as the Karma Kitchen in Berkeley and, in some cases, customers have introduced it spontaneously. On the face of it, it would seem to defy the logic of free-market economics. Markets, surely, are places where we are allowed, even expected, to behave selfishly. With its hippy idealism, pay-it-forward would appear to go against the core tenets of economic calculation.
But there is more to it than this. Researchers from the decision science research group at the University of California, Berkeley have looked closely at pay-it-forward pricing and discovered something with profound implications for how markets and businesses work. It transpires that people will generally pay more under the pay-it-forward model than under a conventional pricing system. As the study’s lead author, Minah Jung, puts it: “People don’t want to look cheap. They want to be fair, but they also want to fit in with the social norms.” Contrary to what economists have long assumed, altruism can often exert a far stronger influence over our decision-making than calculation.
Such findings are typical of the field of behavioural economics, which emerged in the late 1970s. Like regular economists, behavioural economists assume that individuals are usually motivated to maximise their own benefit – but not always. In certain circumstances, they are social and moral animals, even when this appears to undermine their economic interests. They follow the herd and act according to certain rules of thumb. They have some principles that they will not sacrifice for money at all.
It seems that this undermines the cynical, individualist theory of human psychology, which lies at the heart of orthodox economics. Could it be that we are decent, social creatures after all? A great deal of neuroscientific research into the roots of sympathy and reciprocity supports this. Optimists might view this as the basis for a new political hope, of a society in which sharing and gift-giving offer a serious challenge to the power of monetary accumulation and privatisation.
But there is also a more disturbing possibility: that the critique of individualism and monetary calculation is now being incorporated into the armoury of utilitarian policy and management. One of the key insights of behavioural economics is that, if one wants to control other human beings, it is often far more effective to appeal to their sense of morality and social identity than to their self-interest.
This is symptomatic of a more general shift in policy and business practices today. Across various fields of expertise, from healthcare to marketing, from military training to finance, there is rising hope that strategic goals can be achieved through harnessing the power of the “social”. But what exactly does this mean? As the era of social democracy recedes further into the past, the meaning of the term is undergoing a profound transformation. Where once the term implied something concerning society or the common good, increasingly it refers to a technique of psychological intervention on the individual. Informal social connections and friendships are being rendered more visible and measurable. In the process, they are being turned into possible instruments of power.
Using the social to make money
Over recent years, generosity has become big business. In 2009, Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired magazine, published Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson argued that there was now a strong business case for giving products and services away for free, in order to forge better relationships with customers. Giving things away for free becomes a means of holding an audience captive or building a reputation, which can then be exploited with future sales or advertising. Michael O’Leary, boss of Ryanair, has even suggested that airline tickets might one day be priced at zero, with all costs recovered through additional charges for luggage, using the bathroom, skipping queues, and so on.
What Anderson was highlighting was the potential of non-monetary relationships to increase profits. And just as corporate giving can be used as a way of boosting revenue, so can the magic words that are used in return. Marketing specialists now analyse the optimal way of saying the words “thank you” to a customer, so as to deepen the social relationship with them.
The language of gratitude has infiltrated a number of high-profile advertising campaigns. Around Christmas 2013, Lloyds TSB, one of the British banks to bemost embarrassed by the 2008 financial crisis, launched a campaign consisting entirely of cutesy images of childhood friends enjoying happy moments together, concluding with the words “thank you”, written in party balloons. There was no mention of money. More bizarrely, Tesco, whose brand has suffered in recent years, released a series of YouTube videos in 2013 with men in Christmas jumpers singing “thank you” to everyone from the person who cooks Christmas dinner, to those driving safely, to other companies such as Instagram and so on. Tesco, it was implied, sprays gratitude in all directions, regardless of its own private interests.
There is inevitably a limit to how much of a social bond an individual can have with a multinational company. Businesses today are obsessed with being social, but what they typically mean by this is that they are able to permeate peer-to-peer social networks as effectively as possible. Brands hope to play a role in cementing friendships, as a guarantee that they will not be abandoned for more narrowly calculated reasons. So, for example, Coca-Cola has tried a number of somewhat twee marketing campaigns, such as putting individual names (“Sue”, “Tom”, etc) on their bottles as a way to encourage gift-giving. Managers hope that their employees will also act as “brand ambassadors” in their everyday social lives. Meanwhile, neuromarketers have begun studying how successfully images and advertisements trigger common neural responses in groups, rather than in isolated individuals. This, it seems, is a far better indication of how larger populations will respond to advertising.
All this – along with the rise of the “sharing economy”, exemplified by Airbnb and Uber, offers a simple lesson to big business. People will take more pleasure in buying things if the experience can be blended with something that feels like friendship and gift-exchange. The role of money must be airbrushed out of the picture wherever possible. As marketers see it, payment is one of the unfortunate “pain points” in any relationship with a customer, which requires anaesthetising with some form of more social experience. The market must be represented as something else entirely.
Digitising the social
Yet the greatest catalyst for the new business interest in being social is, unsurprisingly, the rise of social media. At the same time that behavioural economics has been highlighting the various ways in which we are altruistic creatures, social media offers businesses an opportunity to analyse and target that social behaviour. It allows advertising to be tailored to specific individuals, on the basis of who they know, and what those other people like and purchase. These practices, which are collectively referred to as “social analytics”, mean that tastes and behaviours can be traced in unprecedented detail. The end goal is no different from what it was at the dawn of marketing and management in the late 19th century: making money. What has changed is that each one of us is now viewed as an instrument through which to alter the attitudes and behaviours of our friends and contacts. Behaviours and ideas can be released like “contagions”, in the hope of infecting much larger networks.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Illustration by Pete Gamlen
The most valuable trick, from a marketing perspective, is how to induce individuals to share positive brand messages and adverts with each other, almost as if there were no public advertising campaign at all. The business practice known as “friendvertising” involves creating images and video clips that social media users are likely to share with others, for no conscious commercial purpose of their own. The science of viral marketing, or the creation of buzz, has led marketers to seek lessons from social psychology, social anthropology and social network analysis.
Businesses have long worried about their public reputations and the commitment of their employees. It also goes without saying that informal social networks themselves are as old as humanity. Despite the countercultural rhetoric of the “sharing economy”, what has changed is not the role of the social in capitalism, but the capacity to subject it to a detailed, quantitative, economic analysis, thanks primarily to the digitisation of social relationships.
In the longer term, the most profound cultural and ethical implications of this may be how we come to view ourselves and those around us. As data about social ties becomes easier to collect and access, and as concepts of duty and altruism become increasingly understood by economists (as the pay-it-forward study exemplifies), the temptation to ask self-interested, strategic questions about one’s own social circle will arise. Applying the mentality of cost-benefit analysis beyond the realms of the market is often controversial to start with, but can quickly become normal. Government economists today have no problem calculating the price of human life or the natural environment, if it is useful for purposes of policy appraisal.
Could we come to view our own personal acts of generosity and friendship in a similarly utilitarian sense? The evidence to support such an egocentric logic is growing rapidly. The area where there could be most to gain from such calculations is in the domain of health: social contact is good for us, in both body and mind. Just be sure that it is contact with the right people.
Using the social to improve health
In February 2010, I found myself sitting in a large hall, with a huge golden throne on my left, and the future leader of the Labour party, Ed Miliband, to my right. We were watching images on a screen that reminded me of the fractal videos that used to be sold by “herbal remedy” salesmen on Camden market in London in the early 1990s. Also present were a number of government policy advisers, all straining to appear as relaxed as possible – a status game that goes on in the corridors of power, played to indicate that one is at home there. (The game was won under the coalition government by David Cameron’s former adviser, Steve Hilton, who was notorious for wandering into meetings barefoot.)
There were about 10 of us in the room, one of the more baroque offices in the Cabinet Office, and we were all staring at the screen, transfixed by the movement of individual lines and dots that were being displayed. Standing next to the screen, clearly enjoying the impact that his video was having on this influential audience, was the American medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis. Christakis was on a speaking tour, promoting his book Connected, and had been invited to present some of his findings to British policymakers during the dying days of Gordon Brown’s government. As a sociologist with an interest in policy, I had been invited along.
Christakis is an unusual sociologist. Not only is he far more mathematically adept than most, but he has also published a number of articles in respected medical journals. The images we were watching on the screen that day represented social networks in a Baltimore neighbourhood, within which particular “behaviours” and medical symptoms were moving around. Christakis’s message to the assembled policymakers was a powerful one. Problems such as obesity, poverty and depression, which so often coincide, locking people into chronic conditions of inactivity, are contagious. They move around like viruses in social networks, creating risks to individuals purely by virtue of the people they happen to hang out with.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Illustration by Pete Gamlen
Christakis is part of a growing movement within the policy world. While marketers desperately seek to penetrate our social networks in order to alter our tastes and desires, policymakers have come to view social networks as means of improving our health and wellbeing. The “social neuroscience” pioneered by John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago suggests that the human brain has evolved in such a way as to depend on social relationships. Cacioppo’s research suggests that loneliness is an even greater health risk than smoking. Practices such as “social prescribing”, in which doctors recommend that individuals join a choir or voluntary organisation, are aimed at combating isolation and its tendency to lead to depression and chronic illness.
Driven particularly by neuroscience, the expert understanding of social life and morality is rapidly merging into the study of the body. One social neuroscientist, Matt Lieberman, has shown how pains that we have traditionally treated as emotional (such as separating from a lover) involve the same neurochemical processes as those we typically view as physical (such as breaking an arm). Social science and physiology are converging into a new discipline, in which human bodies are studied for the ways they respond to one another physically.
At the Cabinet Office presentation, there was something mesmeric and seductive about Christakis’s images. Could entrenched social problems really be represented by graphics of this sort? Christakis’s technical prowess was certainly alluring. In the grand tradition of American GIs bringing chewing gum and nylon stockings to the British during the second world war, his hi-tech social network analysis seemed novel and irresistible.
But what I found slightly surreal that day, aside from the gold throne, was the freakish view of this particular inner-city US community that we were privy to. Like the social analytics companies, which try to spot consumer behaviour as it emerges and spreads, there we were in London observing how the dietary habits and health problems of a few thousand relatively deprived Baltimore residents were moving around, like a disease. It felt as if we were viewing an ant colony from above. The fact that these flickering images represented human beings, with relationships, histories and agendas, was almost incidental.
It would seem a little perverse to suggest that policymakers ignore this evidence of the impact of social networks and altruism on health. If medical practitioners can change the behaviour of just a few influential people in a network for the better, they can potentially spread a more positive “contagion”. Yet there is a danger lurking in this worldview, which is the same problem that afflicts all forms of social network analysis. In reducing the social world to a set of mechanisms and resources, the question repeatedly arises as to whether social networks might be redesigned in ways to suit the already privileged. Networks have a tendency towards what are called power laws, whereby those with influence are able to harness that power to win even greater influence.
One example of this is known as “emotional contagion”. Psychologists working with social analytics can now track the spread of positive and negative emotions, as they travel through social networks. This was the topic of Facebook’s controversial experiment using newsfeed manipulation, the results of which were published last summer. Different moods, including anger and depression, are now recognised to be more socially contagious than others. But what will we do with this knowledge? The anxiety, as social life becomes swept up by quantitative analysis, is that happy, healthy individuals might tailor their social relationships in ways that protect them against the “risk” of unhappiness. Guy Winch, an American psychologist who has studied this phenomenon, advises happy people to be on their guard. “If you find yourself living with or around people with negative outlooks,” he wrote on the website Psychology Today, “consider balancing out your friend roster.” The impact of this rebalancing on those unfortunate friends with the “negative outlooks” is all too easy to imagine.
The fabric of social life is now a problem that is addressed within the rubric of health policy, and there is something a little sad about that. Loneliness now appears as an objective problem, but only because it shows up in the physical brain and body, with calculable costs for governments and health insurers. Generosity and gratitude are urged upon people by positive psychologists, but mainly to alleviate their own mental health problems and private misery. And friendship ties within poor inner-city neighbourhoods have become a topic of government concern, but only to the extent that they mediate epidemics of bad nutrition and costly inactivity.
The irony is that, for all the talk of giving and sharing, this is potentially an even more egocentric worldview than that associated with the market. The cornerstone of orthodox economics, dating back to Adam Smith, is that self-interest in the marketplace is ultimately beneficial for society. The era of social optimisation looks set to stand this claim upside down: being social in your everyday life is worth it, because it will ultimately deliver benefits back to you. The trouble is that our appetites for this new commodity can spiral out of control.
Addicted to contact
Over the past decade, the ubiquity of digital media – and social media in particular – has become a lightning rod for media hysteria. The internet or Facebook can be blamed for the fact that young people are increasingly narcissistic, unable to make commitments to one another or concentrate on anything that is not interactive, and so on. There is indeed some evidence to suggest that individuals who use social media compulsively are more egocentric, prone to exhibitionism and grandiose behaviour. But rather than treat the technology as some virus that has corrupted people psychologically and neurologically, it is worth standing back and reflecting on the broader cultural logic at work here.
What makes social media so compulsive, even addictive? It is the experience of social life, stripped of all its frustrations and obligations. People who cannot put down their smartphones are not engaging with images or gadgetry for the sake of it: they are desperately seeking some form of human interaction, but of a kind that does nothing to limit their personal, private autonomy.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Illustration by Pete Gamlen
What we witness, in the case of a social media addict, is only the more pathological element of a society that cannot conceive of relationships except in terms of the psychological pleasures that they produce. The person whose fingers twitch to check their Facebook page when they are supposed to be listening to their friend over a meal is a victim of a philosophy in which other people are only there to please, satisfy and affirm an individual ego from one moment to the next. This inevitably leads to vicious circles: once a social bond is stripped down to this impoverished psychological level, it becomes harder and harder to find the satisfaction that one wants. Viewing other people as instruments for one’s own pleasure represents a denial of the core ethical and emotional truths of friendship, love and generosity.
One grave shortcoming of this egocentric idea of the social is that none (or at least, vanishingly few) of us can ever constantly be the centre of attention, receiving praise. And so it also proves with Facebook. As an endless stream of exaggerated displays of positivity or success, Facebook often serves to make people feel worse about themselves and their own lives. The mathematics of networks means that most people will have fewer friends than average, while a small number of people will have far more than average. The tonic to this sense of inferiority is to make one’s own exaggerated displays of positivity or success, to seek the gaze of the other, thereby reinforcing a collective vicious circle. As positive psychologists are keen to stress, this inability to listen or empathise is a significant contributor to depression.
If wellbeing resides in discovering relationships that are less ego-oriented, less purely hedonistic, than those an individualistic society offers, then Facebook and similar forms of social media are rarely a recipe for happiness. It is true that there are specific uses of social media that lend themselves towards stronger, more fulfilling social relations. One group of positive psychologists has drawn on its own evidence of what types of social relations lead to greater happiness, to create a new social media platform, Happier, designed around expressions of gratitude and generosity, which are recognised to be critical ingredients of mental wellbeing.
What remains unquestioned by such efforts to redesign social networks for greater wellbeing is the underlying logic, which implies that relationships are there to be created, invested in and – potentially – abandoned, in pursuit of individual optimisation. The darker implication of strategically pursuing positive emotion via relationships is that the relationship is only as good as the psychic value that it delivers. “Friend rosters” may need to be “balanced”, if it turns out that one’s friends are not spreading enough pleasure or happiness.
Neoliberal socialism
Our society is excessively individualistic. Markets reduce everything to a question of individual calculation and selfishness. Unless we can recover the values associated with friendship and altruism, we will descend into a state of ennui.
These types of claims have animated various critiques of capitalism and markets for centuries. They have often provided the basis of arguments for reform, whether moderate attempts to restrain the reach of markets, or more wholesale demands to overhaul the capitalist system. Today, the same types of lament can be heard, but from some very different sources. Now, the gurus of marketing, behavioural economics, social media and management are first in line to attack the individualistic and materialist assumptions of the marketplace. But what they are offering instead is a marginally different theory of individual psychology and behaviour, in which the social is primarily an instrument for one’s own medical, emotional or monetary gain.
What we encounter in the current business, media and policy euphoria for being social is what might be called “neoliberal socialism”. Sharing is preferable to selling, so long as it does not interfere with the financial interests of dominant corporations. Appealing to people’s moral and altruistic sense becomes the best way of nudging them into line with agendas that they had no say over. Brands and behaviours can be unleashed as social contagions, without money ever changing hands. Empathy and relationships are celebrated, but only as particular habits that happy individuals have learned to practise. Everything that was once external to economic logic, such as friendship, is quietly brought within it.
How would one break out of this trap? The example of “social prescribing” by doctors is an enticing one. While it starts from a utilitarian premise, that individuals can improve their wellbeing through joining associations and working collaboratively, it also points towards the institutions to make this happen, and not simply more cognitive or behavioural tips. If people have become locked in themselves, gazing enviously at others, this poses questions that need institutional, political, collective answers. It cannot be alleviated simply with psychological appeals to the social, which can exacerbate the very problems they aim to alleviate, once combined with digital media and the egocentric model of connectivity those media facilitate. There is a crucial question of how businesses, markets, policies, laws and political participation might be designed differently to sustain meaningful social relationships, but it is virtually never confronted by the doyens of social capitalism.
It is not very long since the internet offered hope for different forms of organisation altogether. As the cultural and political theorist Jeremy Gilbert has argued, we should remember that it was only a few years ago that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire was completely defeated in its efforts to turn Myspace into a profitable entity. The tension between the logic of the open network and the logic of private investment could not be resolved, and Murdoch lost half a billion dollars. Facebook has had to go to great lengths to ensure that the same mistakes are not made – particularly by anchoring online identities in “real” offline identities, and tailoring its design around the interests of marketers and market researchers. Perhaps it is too early to say that it has succeeded.
The reduction of social life to psychology, or to physiology as achieved by social neuroscience, is not necessarily irreversible. Karl Marx believed that by bringing workers together in the factory and forcing them to work together, capitalism was creating the very class formation that would eventually overwhelm it. This was despite the “bourgeois ideology” that stressed the primacy of individuals transacting in a marketplace. Similarly, individuals today may be brought together for their own mental and physical health, or for their own private hedonistic kicks; but social congregations can develop their own logic, which is not reducible to that of individual wellbeing or pleasure. This is the hope that currently lies dormant in this new, neoliberal socialism.
Thursday 9 April 2015
Unconnected and out of work: the vicious circle of having no internet
Stephen Armstrong and Maruxa Ruiz del Arbol in The Guardian
In a modern-day version of the old casual labour scrum outside the local docks, Nick East scrambles for a free computer screen when the doors of Newcastle’s city centre library open.
The fourth floor computer room of the glass-fronted library is stocked with 40 terminals, plus a handful of iMacs. Even so, it’s almost always packed, with people waiting for a computer to become free for a designated two-hour slot.
“You have to get there very early or all the screens will be gone and you have to hang around,” said the 24-year-old, who has been unemployed for 18 months. “And you can’t afford a city centre coffee [while waiting], so you just walk about the streets.”
East’s need for computer time has nothing to with catching up with friends on social media, online shopping or video downloads. He must apply for 24 jobs a week – with applications taking up to an hour each – on the government’s digital jobcentre looking for work, or lose his benefits. When you don’t own a computer, this is no mean feat – as East has found out.
In an increasingly digital society, large swaths of the population – lacking computers, broadband, email addresses or even phones that function without regular cash top-ups – are discovering harsh consequences to being unconnected. About one fifth of households, have no internet access, according to figures compiled by broadband analysts Point Topic, although government statistics put the figure at 16%. At any one time, there are an estimated 10m pay-as-you-go phones without the credit needed to make calls or pick up voicemail messages.
“The primary reason people don’t have broadband is cost,” said Oliver Johnson, Point Topic’s CEO. “It’s still expensive to buy all the kit you need, let alone the monthly subscription. Ironically, the cheapest rail fares and the cheapest goods are online – meaning poorer people suffer twice over.”
Meanwhile, the government is moving more and more services online. Significantly, universal credit, a benefit which will replace six means-tested allowances and tax credits, will be a digital-only service. Claimants are expected to apply online, manage any subsequent changes online, and contact between the government and the claimant will be made online.
Jobcentres are installing extra computers to cope with this, according to the Department for Work and Pensions. “We expect jobseekers to do all they reasonably can to find work and many employers are now only advertising their jobs online,” a spokesperson said. “Jobcentres across the UK now provide free Wi-Fi and more than 6,000 job search terminals, with staff providing additional support if needed so benefit claimants can look for and apply for jobs.”
But with the number claiming jobseeker’s allowance currently standing at 791,200, it is clear 6,000 terminals cannot service all those who need to be online between 10 and 35 hours each week. “You can’t just walk in to the jobcentre and use the computers, you have to make an appointment,” said Andrew Young of Newcastle Citizens Advice. “We had one client who was homeless and couldn’t get an appointment to use the computer but the jobcentre insisted he apply online. They told him to use the library – but you need an address to apply for a library card.”
East lost his job as a kitchen porter in a country pub after being late for work one time too many. His ageing motorbike had finally collapsed and he didn’t have the money to replace it; the bus was irregular and dropped him off some way from the pub. When he signed on, the jobcentre told him to apply for a minimum 24 jobs per week on Universal Jobmatch, the government’s digital replacement for the old jobcentre noticeboard.
Universal Jobmatch seems like a smart response to the digital age. It can monitor online activity to make sure people are actively hunting for work. If they don’t meet their targets, they are sanctioned, losing benefits for anything from four weeks to three years. But applying for 24 jobs on the Universal Jobmatch system is, at best, a complex and time-consuming business – and for those without broadband, it’s far worse.
East travels to Newcastle’s city centre library from his flat in Newbiggin-by-the-Sea – a good 30 minutes away, with one bus every half hour, and a return fare costing £3.90. The journey three times a week takes almost £12 from his jobseeker’s allowance, leaving him about £6 per day to pay for food, bills and other essentials.
Each job takes a minimum of half an hour to apply for, up to an hour if there are added questionnaires on skills – requiring 12 to 24 hours per week online. If he reaches the end of his two-hour session with an unfinished application, Universal Jobmatch does not give him the option of saving for later completion, meaning he has to start afresh at the next session.
Four months ago, he failed to hit his target of 24 applications and received an official warning. “There just weren’t the jobs,” he said. “I was down for bar work, factory work and general labouring but there weren’t any jobs.”
A few weeks later, he missed his target again when he did not have enough cash for the bus fare to the library. “They sanctioned me. Four weeks with no money – they took my JSA [jobseeker’s allowance], my housing benefit and council tax benefit. I had nothing.”
In Wigan, Lisa Wright, 47, a former factory worker who has been unemployed for three years after the food processing plant she worked for closed, is doing a mandatory six-month community work programme. Alongside 30 hours of community service each week, she has to put in 10 hours on Universal Jobmatch.
“I can only get to a computer in Wigan library on Thursday evenings, Fridays and Saturday mornings,” she said. “There’s sometimes a queue so you can hang around for up to an hour. That’s the only time I can check my emails, which means if I get sent a reply to a job application on Monday I don’t see it for days. It feels like you’re constantly doing things wrong and struggling just to keep up. I met a kid last week doing 200 hours’ community service for robbing a shop. I’m doing 780 hours’ community service and my only crime is being unemployed.”
She feels under constant pressure from using shared computers. “I like to do an application and then go back to it and perfect it and make sure it’s good - but using a shared computer, someone else is waiting. You’re cutting and pasting things from another application. Before you get your application in, you’re already at a disadvantage.”
One of the most deprived areas in the country is Speke, Liverpool – designed as a postwar garden suburb built around a cluster of factories, but the factories closed in the late 70s and early 80s. “Around 85% of our clients don’t even have email addresses,” said Bob Wilson at Speke Citizens Advice.
Citizens Advice clients use its phones to appeal against benefits sanctions if they have no phone credit or cannot afford long calls on an 0800 number, which until June this year are free from landlines but not from mobiles.
Rebecca Thompson, 36, was sanctioned for turning up late to a jobcentre interview and then could not afford to top up her phone for two weeks. She had to borrow a neighbour’s phone to make a doctor’s appointment when she was sick, and faced difficulty applying for an emergency loan to tide her over.
“It takes about two hours to apply for a crisis loan from the welfare fund over the phone. It’s a free number, but it’s not free from a mobile and most people on benefits don’t actually have a landline,” she said.
Data on how many pay-as-you-go mobile phone customers regularly run out of credit is elusive. The UK has 36.1 million pre-pay users, according to Ofcom figures, but no company will release exact figures on how many have zero credit at any one time. A source at one mobile phone company suggested this ran at about 30% – “but it’s hard to be sure exactly why they’ve got a zero balance”, he said. So there could be about 10 million people unable to make calls or access their voicemail at any one time.
And for those who can afford broadband, there’s a final divide: broadband quality. Last June, Ofcom surveyed broadband speeds in 11 UK cities, finding wide variations in speed by region. Residents of Cardiff and Inverness were twice as likely to be on a slower connection as those in London or Birmingham. Superfast broadband was more restricted in city neighbourhoods with lower household incomes. For example, 57.8% of homes and business in the poorest parts of Glasgow had access to superfast broadband, while for most of the cities the figure was 90%.
In December 2014 the government set out its digital inclusion strategy, aiming to reduce the number of people offline. “By 2020, we will have reduced the number of people who lack basic digital skills to around 4.7 million – less than 10% of the adult population,” said the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude.
Meanwhile, the country is racing towards increasingly digitised election campaigns in which online petitions and Twitter storms can influence government policy. “If 20% of the country can’t take part in this, they can’t be part of the conversation,” warned Mike Harris, CEO of policy and public affairs consultancy 89Up.
For Nick East, the strain of bouncing from home to library to jobcentre is starting to show. He has always been friendly and sociable, with a mop of tousled hair and a cheerful grin, but he’s started to feel miserable every time he climbs the library stairs or walks in to the jobcentre.
“You can see all these gloomy faces – no one wants to be there, I don’t want to be there,” he says quietly. “If I get sanctioned again it’ll be for longer – how do they expect you to pay for stuff? It’s like they’re pushing you to go and commit crime.”
Saturday 29 November 2014
Misjudging universities
Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Daen
THE headlines earlier this week were celebratory: a Pakistani university has been included in the “500 Best Global Universities” by the US News and World Report. Although Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU) in Islamabad occupied only the 496th place — well below 10 other universities from neighbouring India and Iran — this is welcome news. Have we actually zoomed up and away from the rock-bottom standards of our higher education?
Sadly, the flawed methodology used by the Report means that this happy conclusion cannot be affirmed or denied. If used to assess universities in the United States and Europe the approach, though controversial, has some degree of validity. But, applied to developing countries like Pakistan, Iran, and India, it can lead to absurd conclusions.
Take, for example, the inclusion of QAU but the absence of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) from the top 500 list. QAU is a rather ordinary Pakistani public-sector university where I have taught for 41 years, and where I still continue to teach voluntarily. I have much affection for it. LUMS, on the other hand, is a private university for Pakistan’s pampered super-elite with much greater resources, financial and intellectual. I do not have the same positive feelings for LUMS, where my two years of teaching ended mysteriously and unpleasantly. So, whereas I wish it were the other way around, honesty compels me to say that LUMS is superior as a university to QAU. Those familiar with both institutions will surely agree.
The rot can be stemmed if the HEC and PCST agree to reverse policies that incentivise corruption.
Just what have the Report’s editors been smoking? According to its website, the Report judges a university by the quantity of research produced. More precisely, 65pc of the grade comes from counting the number of PhDs produced, papers published, and citations earned. Another 25pc is for an (undefined and undefinable) “research reputation”, while the remaining 10pc is for “international collaborations”. This recipe is not unreasonable. After all, publishing research articles in good journals and counting citations is important in assessing individual and institutional academic achievement. Having PhD students undoubtedly helps generate a culture of research.
But there’s a catch. Social scientists call it Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” This law is nearly as ironclad as one of physics. A corollary: robust systems may suffer some distortion but weaker ones can be willfully deformed and massively manipulated by prevailing local interests.
Pakistan’s academic system is, as everyone agrees, far from robust. An estimated 40pc of students cheat in matriculation, intermediate, and college examinations. Teachers are no more ethical than shopkeepers, policemen, politicians, judges, and generals. Because of policies that reward authors of research articles and PhD supervisors with cash and promotions, our universities have turned into factories producing junk papers and PhDs. Publishing papers is now a well-developed art form that combines outright plagiarism, faking data, showcasing trivia, repeating old papers, and using fly-by-night journals. With apologies to the few genuine students and their supervisors, the fact is that PhDs are awarded to all and sundry.
From many grotesque examples, I will repeat one that I had argued out fruitlessly for many months with Dr Javed Leghari, who became the Higher Education Commission (HEC) chairman following Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, the principal architect of the numbers game.
This concerned a physics PhD thesis that was guided by an “HEC meritorious professor” at Balochistan University, co-supervised by the then vice-chancellor of Quaid-i-Azam University, Dr Masoom Yasinzai. The thesis title was A quantitative study on chromotherapy. The text contained equations that apparently bestowed respectability. Together with several notable Pakistani physicists, I saw this as nonsense. But months of effort failed to convince Dr Leghari, who refused to reveal the names of the referees.
As a last-ditch effort, I sent a copy to two distinguished physicists who I knew for many years. One was the physics Nobel Prize (1979) winner, Steven Weinberg, and the other was the physics Nobel Prize (1988) winner, Jack Steinberger.
Weinberg wrote a point by point criticism which ended up saying: “I am appalled by what I have seen. The thesis shows a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of physics. This thesis is not only unworthy of a PhD, it is positively dangerous, since it might lead patients with severe illnesses to rely on ‘chromotherapy’ rather than on scientific medicine. I find it difficult to understand how this thesis could have earned its author any academic degree.”
Steinberger was equally negative: “a reasonable physics department should not have accepted anything like this work … Following world news this past decade, I have been very unhappy about the Pakistani political instability and social problems, but I had imagined that its cultural level was better than what I now see.”
This rot can be stemmed if the HEC and Pakistan Council for Science & Technology agree to reverse policies that incentivise corruption. This will not be easy. Resisting pressures from greedy beneficiaries of the present system will require enormous moral strength, especially now that the Report has demonstrated the rewards for wholesale publishing.
My last meeting with the current HEC chairman, Dr Mukhtar Ahmad, was a surprisingly pleasant one. He expressed concern at the decay within and seemed receptive to the following suggestion: “Let the HEC require that an author of a research paper, for which he or she desires official credit, to give a video-recorded presentation before the institution’s faculty. This would be archived for free access on the HEC website.”
All necessary technologies needed to implement the above are already in place. The benefits would be two-fold. First, any piece of genuinely important research would become widely known. Second, fake research and corrupt practices would be readily spotted.
Many months have passed since our meeting. Although my emails requesting signs of progress remain unanswered, I remain hopeful that the honourable chairman’s reply is somewhere out there in cyberspace.
The writer teaches physics and mathematics in Lahore and Islamabad.
Thursday 28 August 2014
Closed shop at the top in deeply elitist Britain, says study
Elitism so embedded in Britain that it could be called social engineering, social mobility commission concludes
Eton College. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Getty Images
Britain is "deeply elitist" because people educated at public school and Oxbridge have in effect created a "closed shop at the top", according to a government report published on Thursday.
The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission said its study of the social background of those "running Britain" was the most detailed of its kind ever undertaken and showed that elitism was so embedded in Britain "that it could be called 'social engineering'".
Alan Milburn, the Labour former cabinet minister who chairs the commission, said that, as well as being unfair, this situation was unacceptable because "locking out a diversity of talents and experiences makes Britain's leading institutions less informed, less representative and, ultimately, less credible than they should be".
The commission's 76-page report mostly focuses on analysis, but it does include recommendations, saying government, schools, universities, employers and even parents all need to play their part in promoting social diversity.
Looking at the background of more than 4,000 people filling jobs at the top of government, the civil service, the judiciary, the media, business and the creative industries, the commission investigated where they went to school, on the grounds that going to a private school is reasonably indicative of a wealthy background.
Only 7% of members of the public attended a private school. But 71% of senior judges, 62% of senior officers in the armed forces, 55% of permanent secretaries in Whitehall, 53% of senior diplomats, 50% of members of the House of Lords and 45% of public body chairs did so.
So too did 44% of people on the Sunday Times Rich List, 43% of newspaper columnists, 36% of cabinet ministers, 33% of MPs, 26% of BBC executives and 22% of shadow cabinet ministers.
Oxbridge graduates also have a stranglehold on top jobs. They comprise less than 1% of the public as a whole, but 75% of senior judges, 59% of cabinet ministers, 57% of permanent secretaries, 50% of diplomats, 47% of newspaper columnists, 44% of public body chairs, 38% of members of the House of Lords, 33% of BBC executives, 33% of shadow cabinet ministers, 24% of MPs and 12% of those on the Sunday Times Rich List.
The report says the judiciary is the most privileged professional group. About 14% of judges attended one of just five independent schools (Eton, Westminster, Radley, Charterhouse and St Paul's Boys).
And senior armed forces officers are the second most exclusive group, the report says. Some 62% of them went to a private school, and only 7% attended a comprehensive.
Milburn said that having such little diversity at the top of society was "not a recipe for a healthy democratic society".
He explained: "Where institutions rely on too narrow a range of people from too narrow a range of backgrounds with too narrow a range of experiences, they risk behaving in ways and focusing on issues that are of salience only to a minority but not the majority in society."
Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, said the report showed the coalition was failing on social mobility. "Under the Tories, the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and the rest is increasing, millions of hardworking people are seeing their living standards go backwards and child poverty is set to increase," he said.
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