'It's amazing. It's the first time that all quarters of the internet have come together'

Una Mullally

There are three things new media loves: subversion, humour, and an opportunity to overtake traditional media. When RTé apologised for reporting on the Sunday Tribune story of portraits of Brian Cowen hung by a (then) anonymous artist in the RHA and National Gallery, the story took flight online, as well as across mainstream media. The result was probably the internet in Ireland's biggest ever week, in terms of content created, the volume of communication online – and the social impact both these elements have had. Although it was traditional media that broke the story, new media is now driving it forward.

Things only really blew up when RTé decided to apologise on last Tuesday's Nine O'Clock News for the report that aired on Monday night. That rollback – along with the removal of the report from the RTé website – whipped blogs into outrage mode. Any whiff of censorship, and the blogosphere is off.

Damien Mulley (www.
mulley.net), the most high-profile blogger in the country – whose posts are not so much commentary but bulletins to the entire blogging community – had already recorded the report and uploaded it to YouTube. By today, views of that video will be hitting the 30,000 mark. Mamanpoulet.com (a political blog and winner of Best Irish Blog at this year's Blog Awards) tracked the story live, notifying her readers that there would be an apology on the Nine O'Clock News before the bulletin even went out.

A Facebook group called 'Leave the Cowen guerrilla artist alone!' (subsequently changed to 'Leave Conor Casby alone!') had nearly 4,000 members by Friday. Endless blogs and message boards were abuzz with comment and discussion.

Much of the reaction happened on Twitter, the micro-blogging social network where users post 140-character updates about what they are doing at any given time. Ordinarily, the site is a calm enough zone, rather benign and friendly, but when a Twitter storm takes hold, the social network comes into its own. Acting as a massive collective venue for conversation and communication, users tagged any related post with "#picturegate", posting relevant links from blogs, discussing the controversy, providing links to the Cowen portraits for users to print out and paste around their area, commenting live on Picturegate items on radio shows, talking about articles that appeared in the daily papers and so on. For a time on Wednesday afternoon, the tag #picturegate was the number one trend on Twitter globally, which is saying something about the volume of traffic the controversy was creating, considering Twitter digests three million messages a day. Eventually the term Picturegate, which was created on Twitter, crossed over, with Newstalk referring to the Cowen controversy as such.

For the first time, Mulley attests, the entire online community was united in one frame of mind – not particularly enamoured by the portraits, or the subversive act of planting them in galleries, but over what they saw as censorship between Government Information Services and RTé, and also over the visit of gardaí to Today FM in an attempt to find out the artist's name. "Traditional media still drives a lot of content on blogs in Ireland," Mulley told the Sunday Tribune. "When they saw that it was censored, they reacted in a way they'd react if they themselves were censored. They saw it almost as an affront on themselves, not just RTé."

Mulley believes the reaction was so strong online that further offline action will happen. "It's amazing. It's the first time all quarters of the internet have come together en masse and shared the same opinion... It's finally given people a very strong voice."

March 29, 2009

Comments

#1 Tomás MacGearailt commented, on March 29, 2009 at 10:42 p.m.:

Mulley is easily amazed - nerds tend to get over-excited about the "power" of the web, bless 'em. "It's the first time all quarters of the internet have come together en masse and shared the same opinion," - big whoop. Sounds like a Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis to me - down with that sort of thing. "It's finally given people a very strong voice," - oh please! Finally? Have we been freed at last and brought to the Promised Land by wittering on Twitter? And this "strong voice" has been listened to by whom and achieved what exactly? Apart from using up a lot of electricity, absolutely nothing (Earth Hour, me hole). "#picturegate" scored a "number one trend" due to the amount of tweets (words fail me), and the Paddies think that they've finally reached the Brave New World. Like we did with our financial system and our housing market and our thrusting economy. Plus ça change...

#2 Allan Cavanagh commented, on March 30, 2009 at 12:42 a.m.:

You're absolutely right Tomás, best we just say nothing and put up with everything.

#3 Phil Hoey commented, on March 30, 2009 at 7:27 p.m.:

Where were all these voices of outrage and anger I read in comments like these,where were they over the last ten years?Did they choose to look the other way and ignore the corruption-which has existed in this country for years-because everyone was doing ok out of it..Jack!If its the case,no wonder we re in this mess.We really need to go right back to looking at our values of our society and where it all went wrong-its going to take a bit more than righting a Government and fixing a few banks-until we do this how are we going to learn from our mistakes.I never really understood this word"confidence"when associated with the economy;does it suggest that without an SUV we are insecure and hopeless failures?as for the pictures:personally speaking I think they did the bloke too much justice!

#4 Tomás MacGearailt commented, on March 30, 2009 at 11:32 p.m.:

Oh dear, Allan Cavanagh (comment #2), your disappointing response is typical of many a Pointless Internet Argument Forum in its wilful misconstruction of what I wrote. My point is that all this digital indignation simply gratifies its authors and achieves nothing, which is worse than saying nothing. The equivalent of those “something-must-be-done” outbursts that are amusing to read in the Letters Page of the ‘Daily Heil’. Having read some of your Tweets: “Right off to make the salad, good evening Twitterland.”; “I'm having dinner with a load of theatre PhDs. I'm going to be bluffing my ass off”; “Need to make hummus soon. The secret ingredient is chickpeas”; maybe you should consider occasionally saying nothing. It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool…

#5 Tim Mac an Airchinnigh commented, on March 31, 2009 at 2:37 p.m.:

Tomás, not to gratify you as the author of pointless digital indignation (yes, look up at your post, that's what you are now too), but if you sit down and take a good hard think about this, you might notice that your argument eats itself up in an instant because you've posted it in an online forum.

#6 Tomás MacGearailt commented, on March 31, 2009 at 11:31 p.m.:

Indignant! Moi? Au contraire, Tim Mac an Airchinnigh (comment #5), you confuse virtual world-weariness with digital indignation. ’Tis easily done. I would never give *anything* online a second thought, “good”, “hard” or otherwise. The worldwide web is, like all mass media, just another advertising platform. Taking such expressions of rapacious capitalism seriously is what has brought us to this sorry state. I like your idea of an argument eating itself. It put me in mind of the emblem of the Snake Cult in the film ‘Conan the Barbarian’. Now there was a bloke with no time for indignation. Or thought. Except for misquoting Temüjin. Obviously.

#7 Vandala commented, on April 1, 2009 at 12:35 p.m.:

An ass is still an ass, even if they are twitters.

#8 Riki commented, on April 1, 2009 at 4:43 p.m.:

Tomas,the scarce replies to your comments in this article speaks volumes!

#9 Castillo commented, on April 3, 2009 at 1:24 a.m.:

Tomás, I love how you write your posts, and that you think the medium on which they reached me is some sort of great vacuum saddens me. Would you level the same charge, that all "digital indignation simply gratifies its authors and achieves nothing" at what this article calls the traditional media, even if it has more reach? And if so, would you recommend the cessation of indignation in all "quarters" of publication?

I don't know that #2 has misconstrued you at all, or perhaps you are being very cute - the basis of all your replies has been that anything that happens online is as easily ignored as it is to publish, which some would call begging the question. I'm sure Gutenberg had the same detractors in the hundred years after his invention that the web's architects have after its first sixteen - his medium brought a lot of twitter to us as well, certainly in its early uses.

#10 Gary commented, on April 3, 2009 at 10:04 a.m.:

The odds of your view getting an airing online are far better than getting a letter printed in the media - who after all are just looking after their vested interests in everything they print. Waving a placard on Kildare street is of course a better form of protest but really, could you be arsed

#11 Tomás MacGearailt commented, on April 4, 2009 at 3:33 a.m.:

Cute? Ah, you’re only saying that Castillo (comment #9). You’ll make me blush. I don’t think that the web is a vacuum (vacuous, certainly). Just look at this page alone. There’s a banner ad for AIG (yes *that* AIG). The Dublin Medical Centre wants to recover lost sex drives. Deloitte Executive Selection is head hunting in Ireland (Deloitte provided, among other things, tax services to Anglo Irish Bank). And so on. A typically topical selection of stuff that makes the web go ’round. So much so that the medium has become the message to an extent unanticipated by McLuhan. The “message” is nothing more than the endless reiteration of unoriginal “opinions” usually gleaned from other media. I’ve read more original thought on the walls of public toilets than in the vast majority of opinions expressed on the web. However, I wouldn’t expect the walls of public toilets to be taken seriously as a medium (although there are, of course, several web-sites devoted to their content).

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