Should President Recep Tayyip Erdogan thank his lucky stars, the gods or technology for quashing the coup against him last weekend? Many news outlets sang the praises of communications technology. According to a BBC report last Monday, for example, the Turkey coup was an example of ‘How mobiles beat tanks’.
The picture of a CNN Türk journalist in front of a studio TV camera holding a smartphone with Erdogan making a video-call through Face Time was beamed all over the world. Erdogan appealed to his supporters to occupy the streets and resist the soldiers. This appeal was buttressed by a string of tweets and messages to all Turks in possession of a mobile phone.
But is it true that mobiles beat tanks? This may appear to be a facile question as many still believe that the Arab Spring was the only child of the social networks and smartphones. The question is not flippant and the answer is far from simple.
Turn the clock back to Turkey in 2013 when it was awash with huge protests. Demonstrators then had also used social media networks to organise and sustain their weeks-long anti-government protests at Gezi Park, Istanbul. Government did everything to block all digital technology communications but many still got through to others. Erdogan then vowed to wipe out Twitter, calling it a “menace to society”. He finally won by repressive methods and the police.
At Gezi Park, smartphones did not prevail over the tanks.
On the other hand, during last weekend’s failed coup, communications technologies immensely helped Erdogan because they were in synergy with other factors.
Erdogan was lucky. His aides whisked him away just a few minutes before the place he was in was attacked by elite marines. He should thank the gods for imams who urged people to oppose the coup, a task billed as both a religious and a civic duty.
The Turkish President should be grateful to technology too, for without it he would not have been able to contact and rally his supporters.
New media also worked hand in hand with the legacy media. Erdogan’s Face Time communication was only effective on a wide scale when transmitted through television. Add to all this the fact that he enjoys the solid support of millions who are ready to die for his cause as they believe it is their cause. Besides, the armed forces were not fully united against him.
It is a pity that in this scenario truth and facts are considered to be unwelcome nuisances that come in the way of a ‘good’ story or contradict one’s position
Media technology on its own would not have won him the day, although it is powerful in itself and makes a great difference.
Malta, like Turkey, is part of a world and a culture in which communications technologies have a pivotal role which one ignores at one’s peril. Marshall McLuhan, the well-known Canadian media scholar, considered these technologies so important that he described them as extensions of our bodies.
Harold Innis, the Canadian economic historian, showed how the things that words are written on are more important than the words themselves; an earlier version of the slogan that the medium is the message. Imagine how many commandments we would be lumped with, I jokingly tell students during lectures, if Moses had with him an electronic tablet instead of stone tablets! Media technology changes our way of thinking as well as perceiving and organising the world.
But although I greatly admire the Toronto School referred to in the preceding paragraph, which emphasised the power of media as technology, I gladly concede that this technology does not exist in a vacuum. Media technology is embedded in ongoing social processes that affects its evolution. There are economic, cultural, political and religious forces, to name but a few. Human agency is also very important. A central question of the cultural studies approach today concerns how people are creating meaning from the media.
It is this ensemble of media technology together with so many other societal structures that form the environment we live in. From time to time, one factor dominates over the others (for example, the economy or the media) but even this dominating factor will probably be multi-faceted. Reality is always more complex than any one of the factors that compose it or any one theory that tries to explain it. It is essential in today’s world that one is cognisant of how the media operate because we are created in their image, though they, in turn, are fashioned in our likeness.
Katherine Viner, editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, in The Guardian of July 12, penned an excellent piece showing how communications technologies and the business model under which they operate are changing us and society.
Viner’s description of society under the dominance of media technology and the neo-liberal business model can be verified in Malta as well. Truth, writes Viner, is the first victim, with news a close second. Can democracy, for example, function without truth?
The social media have ushered an era where individuals have their own facts which they ‘feel’ are true just because they ‘feel’ they are true. In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true. Viner writes that there is now confusion between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour; the connected and the alienated; an informed public and a misguided mob. Chaos soon follows in the media-generated post-truth society where, for economic reasons, clicks are important and facts are irrelevant.
Under this dual influence (technology and neoliberal business model), Malta, like many Western societies, is fast becoming a post-truth society. We are experiencing the influence of television programmes whose main value is high ratings together with the ‘churnalism’ of social networks dominated by the strategy that if it clicks, it leads.
It is a pity that in this scenario, truth and facts are considered to be unwelcome nuisances that come in the way of a ‘good’ story or contradict one’s position. The price society is paying for this attitude is a hefty one indeed.
(Viner’s piece can be accessed from https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology-disrupted-the-truth?CMP=fb_gu )
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt