Facebook Groups, Spin & The NGO Sector

One of the benefits of the relatively new approach of Facebook to its Groups is that they can be used for quite finely tuned and flexible qualitative shared intelligence gathering.

Facebook Groups

You can set a Group at secret, closed or open levels of engagement, gather in like minds or 'sources' and share information from the rest of the internet that would otherwise take a great deal of time to put together on your own.

The point of it all is 'sharing' but the Group's Founder(s) must be prepared to put up more material than others and manage the Group - allowing them to die if they are not doing their job, moderating lightly to keep things on track or keep out 'trolls' and perhaps letting them go to float free in the market.

The Group tool is qualitative not quantitative, focused not broad, and biased towards its own members (which has to be taken into account as group-think develops). It is just that - a tool. Groups come and they go with their practical value to their Members.

It is not a replacement for a 'newswire' approach to information (Google News is better at that) nor for in-depth and focused research or investigation but it is a useful tool nevertheless - if only to counter the general group-think of the mainstream media or political process.

The Value of Groups

Currently (meaning the last three months), such Groups have given us exceptional insights into the recent riots in the UK, the Occupy Movement in the US, the diffuse nature of the radical right and the perhaps insidious rise of faith-based politics within the West.

They have supplied insights into odd corners of international affairs, the tensions between libertarianism and the increasing cultural authoritarianism of what likes to be called the Left and the theories and movements surrounding up-coming trends like trans-humanism and the rediscovery of mythic narrative.

Nor do we own these insights - all Members of a particular Group share in the benefits, disproportionately in the case of the free riders who just watch and read for their own benefit. Anyone can draw their own conclusions from the flow of data.

Understandably enough, the Groups are particularly useful on mediating between street experts on privacy, hacking and the free internet and less technically advanced users. The best users, of course, do not speak at other Members but with them and you may have to put up with provocative tub-thumping.

Some Trends

Three trends stand out - the flow of 'institute of the bleeding obvious' research from universities trying to justify their funding, the effect of social media in countering rather than endorsing propaganda from special interest NGOs and campaigns and the ability to cut out official discourse as 'distrusted'.

It is this last that has most commentators excited but we suspect they are exaggerating the effect. In fact, conspiracy theory is usually alluded to humorously. What is shared critically are examples of 'spin' and half-truths' and a new realism about the 'interest' that dictates a news release or statement.

It is not that authority is seen now as actively lying so much as that it is clearly far less competent than it has claimed to be and is often trying to buy time or cover up the inconsistencies and internal contradictions in its own behaviour. It is this latter effect that social media is wryly exposing.

'Good' and 'Bad' Authority

But what is more interesting is that no authority is now immune from analysis. The world is no longer being divided up so clearly into bad and good authority by which progressive authoritarians, NGOs and academics are somehow more virtuous than states, the military and business.

Things have become vastly more complex as it becomes clearer that progressive campaigns, NGOS and the universities are also using spin and manipulation to try to win over our minds and so our time and money. And that these 'good' organisations tergiversate and make excessive claims too.

One case we have taken an interest in is the quickening and intelligent critique of the celebrity-driven sex trafficking campaign by Laura Agustin, an academic with a much deeper and more humane analysis of what is going on under globalisation than many in the 'rescue industry'.

Another case has been the conflict between NGOs over the aid given to Ethiopia with 'political' and 'rights' NGOs spinning like mad while aid-based humanitarian NGOs struggle (it would seem, successfully) to protect their charges. The blogger Daniel Berhane is a good source on this story.

The New Complexity

The social media and the blogosphere now enable the received ideas of alleged progressives (often in odd alliance with moralising conservatives) to be challenged from the ground up instead of having the wider population simply accept passive receipt of simple 'broadcast messages'.

The Ethiopian case is particularly interesting because one suspects that the 'outraged' progressives and the BBC were quite surprised that the establishment did not cave in to their 'evidence' but questioned it and clearly assisted in that questioning being made public.

However, this message that truth and analytical argument may be returning after the era of spin and manipulation may be premature because it depends on a greater struggle for control of technology analogous to that over the free print press and censorship over the last 500 years.

The truth is (and we do not take sides on the Ethiopian case) that the critique of Ethiopia got the broadcast coverage and the critique of the critique was only read amongst the knowledgeable but this imbalance between news 'grazing' and the actual conversion of news into power may be changing.

The Primer (Again!) on Spin

'Spin' arises from centralised media that broadcast information through intermediaries. The journalists who control information are subject to severe time and resource constraints and so are susceptible to special interest manipulation through dossiers. This is no more than Nick Davies' 'churnalism'.

Politicians (Ed Miliband's sound bite performances are now merely embarrassing), business (with more natural ease), NGOs and universities are forced into this model of simplification of language and narrative. This has dominated politics and culture for the last two decades.

But the combination of the blogosphere and of specialist online feature journalism with the sharing function of Facebook and other tools (Linked-In, Twitter and Google+) means that the 'official version' delivered through the mainstream media can be challenged and used to mobilise action.

This can lead to a reversal of the classic position of the mainstream media. They are now just 'them' (alongside the state and business), whereas once they were, literally, intermediary between the forces of order and the forces of change, brokers between the State and the people.

The Occupy Movement

For example, it became clear that one of the early drivers of the Occupy Movement was outrage at the failure to report events by the media. It was assumed that this was deliberate (when it was probably simply disinterest in small protests as poor copy) and class-based, media as tool of bankers.

One trigger for that outrage was a scan of the New York Times showing an anti-protester change timed (allegedly) to a call from a spin doctor.

Similarly, the 'investment' of sponsorship by JP Morgan in the NYPD (coincidental or not) was exposed by bloggers not the mainstream media. Yes, as one blogger suggests, the funding could be innocent and just crassly timed, but it should have been discussed at a 'higher media level' as relevant news.

The point is that the mainstream media allowed this story to be appropriated by the margins and conspiracy theorists. But let us close with an example of a communication from one of our 'Institutes of the Bleeding Obvious', one that pinpoints the root of the problem in the attitudes of authority.

What Exactly Do Charities Do?

Back in June, the UK Charity Commission published research it had commissioned from Sheffield Hallam University that said that charities were not spelling out how they benefit the public.

Trustees could, it would seem, rabbit on about aims and targets but not about practical benefits and yet that is what most people who give to charity really want to hear. Instead (our opinion, not Sheffield Hallam's), they get a lot of passive-aggressive normative language and chuggers down the Strand.

Here is Plan UK Director of Communications. Leigh Daynes, in the July 8th Edition of PR Week: "Often charities bamboozle the public with jargon and faux management speak when they're sitting on a gold mine of human interest stories." The PR industry always wants case studies.

In fact, I worry about this statement because it implies that the alternative is invasions of client privacy and 'Little Nell' stories to tug at our hearts. This is not what we need. We need the provision of clear data about something that might embarrass some NGOs - actual delivery and efficient administration.

And this brings us back to the social media which are in a constant state of flux. NGOs and the media itself are no longer going to be taken at their face value. No longer is the assumption that righteous 'good' people cannot be critiqued. No one is now not subject to analysis from their peers.

Exaro - New Fleet-Street Based Investigative Web Site

Field trials have now started for Exaro, the new investigative website edited by Mark Watts and financed according to a business plan developed by figures experienced in the media and the City.

The founders are making no secret of the risks involved but they think that the time is right for a commercial approach to one of the greatest informational problems of our age - what Nick Davies called 'churnalism', that is a media that simply takes material from PROs and launders it to the public.

This may be unfair on a lot of journalists in the mainstream media who are working very hard to maintain traditional standards but the economics of big media groups are working against them. Resources are spread too thinly and the temptation is to gear copy to the quick advertising or revenue fix.

Although it has mindfully based itself at the corner of Fleet Street with El Vino's and The Olde Cheshire Cheese as its locals (in a nod to traditionalism), it is not an 'indulgence' where 'old salts' try to recapture the 'golden age' of Sunday Times Insight and Granada. Those days are now gone.

Nor is it yet another Foundation-financed ideological shop-front for eager exposes that simply take dossiers from the 'good guys', dossiers that may be no more reliable than those of the 'bad guys' in the security and intelligence services of warring nations. Dossiers are dossiers whoever supplies them.

Exaro is different because, although its motto is 'holding power to account' (all power, that is, including the cultural power of NGOs), it is not only entirely online but it is holding to a tight commercial business model. It is prepared to take the 'hit' of the high cost of evidence-based journalism.

Undoubtedly things will not be so simple in the real world. I won't second-guess the Editor who can speak for himself but the attempt to create an honest and evidence-based investigative journalism that pays its way as a business is undertaken in good faith.

As of yesterday, the site can be accessed for free (for a limited time) by anyone interested enough to register at http://www.exaronews.com/

Registrants are warned that what they will see is perhaps only 50% of the capacity at eventual subscription rates but there are already some very interesting stories that show real energy amongst the small team of experienced investigators and young talent after scarcely six months since start-up.

Now, I am assiduous about revealing my interest in anything so let me be clear. The concept was developed over a considerable period of time by me and a small group of people, including Mark, who were disturbed by the flow of unevidenced material appearing in the mainstream media.

As a group, we also saw the opportunities provided by the sheer weight of unanalysed material increasingly available under various FOI regimes and the new culture of openness. Exaro is not aligned with Wikileaks but it recognises the role Assange has taken in making data widely available.

The issue is not (as Assange would probably agree) just making data available but understanding and interpreting it - and, in this role, the death of the traditional journalist has been much exaggerated. The public and business need reliable narrators and Exaro aspires to be just that - reliable.

As of now, I have been helping to build the business side. I (as an individual but not as TPPR) have a minority shareholding and I am a Non-Executive Director in that capacity but the editorial is ring-fenced and I have no involvement in it - and, indeed, I will be written out of the office completely in six months.

If the Editor wants to and he can find an evidenced abuse of power in my circle, then he can go for my and my friends jugular and I cannot do a thing about it. Good! Maybe I will be embarrased from an oversight. Good! I can take it. 'Courage, mon brave!'

Ethical journalism should help inspire ethical business. Our whole culture will benefit if wealth creation and the provision of information to the public are conducted in the open and according to the evidence.

With that uncharacteristic burst of idealism, I commend Exaro to you. Succeed or fail, it is the first major attempt to create an independent voice for investigative journalism along commercial lines in an online context and it is well worth the shot.

Practical Thinking, Panic & The Riots

The marketing industry has been caught out. Young males respond to messages of defiance and individualism but, when they act out the fantasy presented to them on a plate by clothes and shoes manufacturers to sell their products, we suddenly have a 'PR problem'.

But what is a 'PR problem' when it is at home? It would appear to be that point when fantasy becomes reality, when Levi's young male squaring up to riot police actually does square up to riot police.

We are now in the midst of yet another 'moral panic' where analysis of the long term structural causes of a social phenomenon are ignored in favour of a wave of emotion resulting in gut reactions that only store up problems for the future. No one is thinking.

The current response of the marketing community comes down to a question that is at the heart of the political crisis: does it appeal to the emotional instincts of its customer base or respond to the emotional reaction of a herd-like media and political culture in a state of confusion, ignorance and fear?

I think we have the answer: it joins in the panic and suddenly becomes 'socially responsible', meaning, in fact, conservative in the worst sense, part of the problem of suppressing discontent rather than stating firmly that it is merely responding to the mood of the time as sound business.

If people are discontented, it is not because of moral laxity but because they have reasons for discontent - local policing, lack of opportunity, overcrowding, underemployment, generational lack of respect (from the old to the young), the hypocrisy of the rich and the lack of representation by the Left.

Watch this short segment of an articulate employed black telling it like it is to the Mayor of London. This man is bright, talented and on the right side of the law but he is not happy.

He does not have to look far to see a world where others no better than he is are raking in bonuses despite bringing the country to its economic knees.

Now, for balance, watch this tough black lady taking on the rioters. The tragedy here is that small traders and property owners with little capital are being ruined and threatened by people with no capital.

Both sides have been shoved into the position of the soldiery of the competing powers in 1914. Neither side then asked why they should even be in this position and neither side is asking that question today.

Here is where one has to put in the mantra that all this does not justify the riots. The riots, of course, were not political as we generally understand them but closer to 'carnival' - anarchic, criminal and strangely authentic. People really suffered but not perhaps the people who should have done.

The most admirable reaction to the whole business was that of The (Tory) Lord Harris. He did not pontificate or moralise. He did not even try to analyse (the job of others). He dealt like a practical man with a fact and offered material assistance to the victims and called on the Government to provide jobs.

The mantra of moralistic blame from 'commentators' misses the point. The riots were a fact on the ground. They happened because they were ready to happen. It is like expecting to humiliate Germany in 1919 and not expect another war.

Business is now stuck in the middle. The selling process is an emotional process, a manipulative process, of entering into the consciousness of its targets and tweaking it into an action in the interest of the sellers. It is not much different from the classical view of magicians of their craft.

Politicians are also not much different except that they are 'channellers', responding to the emotions of the voters and seeking to manipulate them for their own ends, raising intermediary demons (the media) who, like all raised demons, are untrustworthy tricksters.

In the end, the only authentic behaviour seems to be that of the people themselves at the hard edge of the crisis - the rioters rioting in a context of their own, the police trying to do their job under difficult conditions, the victims of the rioting and those attempting to clean up afterwards.

The magistrates panicked, the politicians panicked, the media panicked and the marketeers panicked - the only people not panicking were the population at large. Listen to conversations around you and the question was always: why did this happen now? 

But this was a question avoided by the panic-stricken Establishment because it was an inconvenient question, partly because nobody knew the answer although everyone had an opinion, an opinion usually cast in terms of morality and 'oughts' rather than what was actually happening on the ground.

It does not really want to answer that question because it raises more serious questions about what the politicians and the media have been doing for the last three or four decades. It certainly raises questions about whether the political and economic system is more broken that we had all thought.

This is not the first time that the Establishment has failed to predict an event of great importance - we might start with the fall of the Soviet Union or the rise of Islamic terror but failures to predict economic collapse and urban mayhem are less forgivable because there is no excuse about lack of data.

Naturally, we should now be asking questions about the riots and how they came to be, but before jumping into bed with authoritarian moralists who wish to re-introduce the strap, conscription, hanging and all forms of social terror to a free young population, most of whom did not riot, we should ask this.

How is it that the persons we hired to govern us failed to structure a society where everyone feels they have opportunity, where perhaps one in five of the population is now on the economic edge and where policy can be made rationally before a crisis instead of irrationally after one?

We could learn a great deal from Lord Harris' humane, practical approach to the business of recovery and it strikes me as no surprise that an experienced businessman should put the rest of the panicking and hysterical elite to shame.