James Murdoch will today be hauled over the coals once more, by a House of Commons select committee determined to find out exactly what lay at the bottom of the phone-hacking affair. It has all the best ingredients of a modern political story – a too close relationship of politicians and press; a secret world of networking and influence now dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light; secret payments, cover-ups, and public outrage; and a strong whiff, not to say stench, of corruption in the air. The story of the ex-policeman, now a private investigator, detailed to pursue the lawyers of Milly Dowler in the hope of unearthing something discreditable or scandalous, is only the latest twist in what seems a peculiarly modern spiral of press misbehaviour and political greed.

The Murdoch affair seems the most contemporary of stories, chock-full of hacked mobile phones, high-tech surveillance equipment and secret video-recordings. But although the technology might have changed, it is a world that would have been only too familiar to nineteenth-century author Anthony Trollope. He was as fascinated as we are by what lies behind the public face of politics: the personal passions, rivalries and love affairs, the ins and outs of office, the spectacular rises and equally rapid falls.

It’s been a strange and revealing business, editing and living with Anthony Trollope’s 1873 Palliser novel, Phineas Redux, over the past couple of years. In one way, the Palliser novels seem to come from a world immeasurably distant from our own – aristocrat-run, high-imperial Britain before universal suffrage, motor cars and telephones, let alone the 24-hour news cycle that today’s politicians have learned to live with. But then again, the Palliser world very often seems strangely familiar, and not simply because the parliamentary rituals and furniture seem to have changed so little over the past century and a half. Almost daily throughout the editing process I would turn from thinking about Phineas’s complex love life, or Mr Daubeny’s machinations to stay in office, to the day’s news stories with a wry smile of recognition.

Trollope is sometimes wrongly thought to be a rather soothing or comforting writer, an old pair of slippers or the kind of Trollope a male politician could admit to cuddling up with in perfect safety. If that’s your view, Phineas Redux will make you think again. Not long before, Trollope, who had always wanted a parliamentary career, had stood as a Liberal candidate for Beverley in East Yorkshire. He came bottom in the poll and the corruption and inanity of electioneering disgusted him. The insight and disillusionment that followed fuels the novel, a story about a young politician in the making, who finds himself entangled in a nasty political quarrel that turns even nastier when his hated rival, with whom he has just very publicly quarrelled, is found dead, stabbed in a back alley. It’s not the first bit of violence in the book; a little earlier Phineas himself has been shot at by the enraged and half-mad husband of his intimate (but not too intimate) friend Lady Laura Kennedy (the bullet missed, or the book would have had to end there). By the time we get our hero safely to the end of the book and into the loving arms of the mysterious heiress Madame Max, he and we have also survived a corrupt election, accusations of bribery and electoral malpractice, alleged adultery and a secret investigation into bigamy in Poland. These adventures climax in a legal and political battle fought out over the publication of a private letter in the press, which claims to reveal the truth of Phineas’s adultery. Only through some very fast legal footwork and a last-minute injunction can Phineas prevent its publication, and his own and Lady Laura’s ruin.

It is at times like this that Trollope seems the most contemporary and prescient of novelists. He is a brilliantly perceptive observer of the power of newspaper reporting, and what we now call ‘the media’, in the making and breaking of political careers, and of the complex and often dirty tangles that politicians, editors and journalist find themselves in. The epicentre of these intrigues in the novel is Quintus Slide, the ‘indefatigable, unscrupulous’ editor of The People’s Banner. Formerly a radical, Slide now supports the Conservatives ‘with great zeal and with an assumption of consistency and infallibility’. Trollope gives us plenty to hate in Slide, whose populist Toryism is a mix of high-minded moralising and vitriolic personal attacks. A press quick to condemn others but utterly immoral in its own behaviour: seems a familiar mix?

Political hatreds, sexual scandals, unscrupulous editors, and last-minute injunctions: it is no wonder that Trollope has remained such a favourite, and so perennially topical, for so long. For his are the most clear-sighted and capacious of all novels about what we call, genteelly enough, the modern political process. But it is far from genteel in Trollope. Perhaps the Victorian equivalent of Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga parties might not have found a home in his work – the Victorian public would hardly have tolerated it – but the politician, his wife, his mistress, and the kidnapped cat almost certainly would have done.

John Bowen is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at University of York. Most recently he has edited the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Phineas Redux, and is also the author of Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (2000).

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By Purdy, Director of Publicity
Back in 2000 I left Oxford University Press to cut my managerial teeth at Princeton University Press.  Truth was, my head was hitting a promotional ceiling here at OUP and if I wanted to move up, I had to move out.  Princeton seemed an ideal place to go since OUP and PUP shared many academics, including Cass Sunstein.  The lead title when I arrived in Princeton would be none other than Republic.com, a polemic on how the Internet was quickly becoming a self-segregating forum that, if not regulated, could easily divide and spoil the great experiment in democracy our founding father had set in motion back in 1776. Now back at OUP (since 2006) I see the subject of ideological segregation on and offline is still a concern and just as controversial.  Here’s what Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro find to be true when examining…

Ideological Segregation in Various Media Channels

Democracy is most effective when citizens have accurate beliefs (Downs 1957; Becker 1958). To form such beliefs, individuals must encounter information that will sometimes contradict their preexisting views. Guaranteeing exposure to information from diverse viewpoints has been a central goal of media policy in the United States and around the world (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2008).

New technologies such as the Internet could either increase or decrease the likelihood that consumers are exposed to diverse news and opinion. The Internet dramatically reduces the cost of acquiring information from a wide range of sources. But increasing the number of available sources can also make it easier for consumers to self-segregate ideologically, limiting themselves to those that are likely to confirm their prior views (Mullainathan and Shleifer 2005).

The possibility that the Internet may be increasing ideological segregation has been articulated forcefully by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com (Princeton University Press, 2001), “Our communications market is rapidly moving” toward a situation where “people restrict themselves to their own points of view—liberals watching and reading only mostly liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; Neo-Nazis, Neo-Nazis.”  This limits the “unplanned, unanticipated encounters [that are] central to democracy itself” Sunstein also notes that the rise of the Internet will be especially dangerous if it crowds out other activities where consumers are more likely to encounter diverse viewpoints. He argues that both traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters, and face-to-face interactions in workplaces and local communities are likely to involve such diverse encounters.

“People who rely on [newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters] have a range of chance encounters…with diverse others, and also exposure to materials and topics that they did not seek out in advance…The diverse people who walk the streets and use the parks are likely to hear speakers’ arguments about taxes or the police; they might also learn about the nature and intensity of views held by their fellow citizens…When you go to work or visit a park…it is possible that you will have a range of unexpected encounters” (Sunstein/Republic.com, p. 30).

In an article published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Gentzkow and Shapiro assess the extent to which news consumption on the Internet is ideologically segregated, and compare online segregation with segregation of both traditional media and face-to-face interactions.  The tables below illuminate their findings.

The evidence suggests that ideological segregation on the Internet is low in absolute terms, higher than most offline media (excluding national newspapers), and significantly lower than segregation of face-to-face interactions in social networks. Internet news consumers with homogeneous news diets are rare. These findings may mitigate concerns expressed by Sunstein and others that the Internet will increase ideological polarization and threaten democracy.  For a more in-depth exploration of this data and their methods please refer directly to the full article.

One might assume that anything involving breast cancer awareness would be based on the best available evidence. Unfortunately, this assumption would be wrong. I’ve evaluated hundreds of campaigns, advertisements, websites, educational brochures, and other sundry materials related to breast cancer awareness only to find information that is inaccurate, incomplete, irrelevant, or out of context. We could spend the whole year analyzing them. For now, consider a print advertisement for mammograms by CENTRA Mammography Services. [Note: I previously shared this ad back in July in an essay called Mammogram Mania.]

The full-page ad was published last October in a special issue magazine devoted to breast cancer awareness. Such special issues are now a common feature in magazines and other media outlets during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. They include personal stories, information, interviews with experts, fund-raising events, pink ribbon promotions, and of course a slew of product placements that come with their own versions of “helpful” health information.

Awareness advertorials tend to include factoids and impressions, and the impressions come first.

Color matching. The reader’s eye moves between a pink foreground and a matching pink sweatshirt. Pink, we already know, signifies breast cancer awareness.

Joy, nature, sisterhood, and health. A group of smiling women, friends in fact, of varied ages and ethnic backgrounds walk outside, arm in arm, wearing sneakers and sweatshirts. The sunshine, trees, and “just do it” attitude nearly walk off the page.

The hook. After the impressions are set, they are reinforced and followed with a directive. A large caption: “All your friends are doing it,” is followed by a sheepish, “Shouldn’t you?” Peer pressure directed toward adult women to sell mammography services. CENTRA follows up its peer pressure with a finger-pointing guilt grip.

With early detection, diagnosis and improved treatment, women are beating breast cancer. But still, many of you aren’t doing the one thing that may help prevent and diagnose it in the first place, a mammogram.

The “shame on you” accusations are reminiscent of the bad old days of paternalistic medicine, in which doctors used fear of physical and/or social mutilation to promote breast examination and medical intervention. In the 1940s and 1950s physicians and popular health magazines used imagery of women “blowing their brains out” to represent the seriousness of their responsibility to examine their breasts. At the same time, the words are misleading and/or inaccurate.

Early detection is a common and overused phrase that gives the impression that mammograms unequivocally find cancers early, so early in fact that if they are found on a mammogram and then treated, you will not die from breast cancer. Not true.

•  Some breast cancers are slow growing and unlikely to spread.
•  Other breast cancers grow and spread quickly.
•  The most important factor related to whether a person’s breast cancer is likely to cause death is related to tumor biology.
•  Stage zero breast conditions such as DCIS are not in themselves life threatening. They are called precancers or risk factors for invasive breast cancer.
•  People found to have stage zero conditions may develop an invasive breast cancer later in their lives, but most won’t.
•  People diagnosed across stages I, II or III have a recurrence in 20 to 30 percent of cases. The longer someone lives without having a recurrence, the greater the chance that there won’t be one.
•  Clinical trials show that population screening reduces the mortality rate by 15 to 30 percent.

In reality, the detection of a cancer on a mammogram before it has become symptomatic has been translated into the phrase early detection. Although routine screening sometimes leads to a reduction in mortality from breast cancer, as stated above, improved treatment for breast cancer is more likely to account for known reductions in mortality. Still, somewhere around 40 to 41 thousand women and men die each year from metastatic breast cancer regardless of whether or not their cancer was detected on a mammogram.

The ad does not include any of this information. Instead it states that mammograms the “one thing” that matters to “prevent and diagnose” breast cancer in the first place. Mammograms do not prevent breast cancer, and they identify (with varied degrees of accuracy) cancers that are already there. The National Cancer Institute reports that screening mammograms “miss up to 20 percent of breast cancers that are present at the time of screening.”

To show how much their mammography services are needed, the ad provides a 2010 incidence statistic of 207,090, and claims that “a mammogram detects 90 percent of all breast cancers.” I don’t know where that statistic comes from. The ad includes no information about how many results are inconclusive, false-positives, or false-negatives.  It does not give the number of deaths.

Beneath the hours of operation and contact information for CENTRA’s mammography centers, the box reads: “Why risk it? Be proactive!” Playing on both the fear and uncertainty of breast cancer as well as the general social expectation that individuals should be responsible and proactive medical consumers, the ad reinforces its earlier message that preventing breast cancer is completely within women’s power. Should a woman learn at some point in her life that she has breast cancer but did not take the action recommended in the ad, the outcome must be due to her failure to act as warned. The exclamation point emphasizes the importance of the directive.

If the ad were just an ad it could be taken at face value, but it is not just an ad. It is yet another cultural message within a sea of messages in the name of breast cancer awareness that plays on fear of breast cancer, hope for the future, and the goodness of jumping on a pink bandwagon. At the same time, these types of ads and campaigns are almost always accompanied with some type of “legitimizing” evidence. The information sounds right. It rings true to the reader but without telling the whole story. Of course, the ultimate appeal is to get consumers to buy the product.

Should women get screened for breast cancer? It’s clearly not a simple answer. It requires deep thought about the strengths, limitations, risks, and benefits of this diagnostic tool. Some women will benefit from it. Others will not. The conditions vary. Yet the “just do it” tide in breast cancer awareness floods advertisements, campaigns, and product placements.

Thank you, CENTRA Mammography Services, for telling me what to do for my own good, but I can think for myself! [That's an exclamation point to indicate strong feeling.]

P.S. I just got this E-card from a friend!

Gayle A. Sulik, Ph.D. is a medical sociologist and was a 2008 Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities for her research on breast cancer culture. She is author of Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women’s Health. You can read her previous OUPblog posts here and learn more on her website, where this article originally appeared. For more consciousness raising essays, check out “30 Days of Breast Cancer Awareness.”

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A few weeks ago, I spotted this tweet by Braden Graeber:

Minutes later—in a moment of true synchronicity—I saw a white dude in camouflage cargo pants. Whoa.

As a fashion-challenged, oft-confused doofus, I appreciated the heads-up to two facts: 1) those shorts are an atrocity, and 2) this phrase is a snowclone that’s invaluable in mocking anything fake or contrived that annoys or pains us.

The original use was in the Tina Fey-penned 2004 movie Mean Girls, when Regina tells would-be word-coiner Gretchen “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s not going to happen.” While fetch has not happened, this phrase has happened like crazy. It’s one of the most useful snowclones around, with new examples piling up every day. No wonder. We live in a world of contrived, obnoxious, omnipresent fakery. Politician pronouncements, media creations, and fashion disasters set off all but the most malfunctioning fake-dar. This snowclone is a reliable tool for calling bullshit on such malarkey.

Like most successful snowclones, this one is also versatile. People use it to complain about every conceivable topic, such as:

Politics:

Movies:

TV:

Social media:

Tabloid media:

Parents:

Language:

Candy:

Ourselves:

I expect this expression to outlive us all. It’s as solid as “Give a man a fish” and “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” From now till the sun blows up, there will always be someone trying to make something happen that either can’t happen, or—for the love of all that is good and decent and right—should not happen. Today it’s camo cargo shorts. Tomorrow it may be Astro-Robo-Spanx. Snowclones like this help ease the pain.

Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, language columnist for Visual Thesaurus, and the blogger behind The Rosa Parks of Blogs and The Pancake Proverbs.

In the three videos below, Martin Kemp discusses three of those iconic images: the Mona Lisa, the Coca-Cola bottle, and the swastika.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Martin Kemp FBA is Emeritus Professor in the History of Art at Trinity College, Oxford. He has written, broadcast, and curated exhibitions on imagery in art and science from the Renaissance to the present day, and his books include The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Bruneslleschi to Seurat (1992), Leonardo (2004, new edition publishing October 2011), and the prize-winning Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (1989 and 2006). His newest book is Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon.

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After my co-editor, Jonathan N. Katz, and I took over editorship of Political Analysis in January 2010, one of our primary goals was to extend the readership and intellectual reach of our journal.  We wished to grow our readership internationally, and to also deepen our reach outside of political science, into other social sciences.

This has required a multi-faceted approach, using traditional advertising, email marketing, and continued evolution of our primary website.  One of the approaches that we have been experimenting with in the past year has been using social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter.

Our experience with Facebook and Twitter has been largely positive.  As of this article’s publication, we have 348 Twitter followers and 463 Facebook followers who have “liked” our page.  While this obviously pales in comparison to celebrities like Ashton Kutcher (one of the celebrities that officials in Los Angeles recently appealed to for help getting the word out about “Carmageddon”, who has approximately 7.3 million Twitter followers and 10.4 million Facebook “likes”), we are pleased by our social media efforts so far, and we are looking for new ways to use both social media approaches to continue to get the word out about the great research appearing in Political Analysis.

It’s taken us about a year to get to this point with our social media initiative, and during that time we have learned a few important lessons.

1. As we already have an established website and a long-standing listserv, there are many pre-existing ways in which people get information about our journal.  Early on, our social media outreach focused on passing along updates about papers hitting our Advance Access, or new issues being published.  We found that we got little traction from those efforts. Instead, we have been much more successful using social media to pass along information that is related to the journal.  For example, calls for papers to upcoming meetings, papers of interest that are published in other journals, and other professional news.  We have seen much stronger growth in our social media following after changing our strategy in this way.

2. You have to promote your social media presence.  It is not necessarily the case that “if you build it they will come.”  Instead, we have found that aggressive outreach, in particular using other approaches like email, helps to build our social media presence.  (e.g. Working closely with the Press, we provided a discount code for anyone who visited our Facebook page.)

3. You have to keep in mind that social media is interactive and dynamic.  That means that when someone posts to your journal’s Facebook wall, you should respond. Even a simple “Thanks” keeps the conversation going and makes the Facebook dialogue more interesting.  On Twitter, that means retweeting interesting material from your followers, and acknowledging when someone promotes your material.  Social media is not static.

4. You have to stick with it.  Ideally, someone needs to actively add material to the social media sites on a routine basis.  We typically have only one or two postings a week–what the ideal rate of posting would necessarily be for any journal will be a function of both the journal’s editors and the interest of those following the social media site.  But the editors, or those who are running the social media sites, need to be proactive and keep posting material to keep people focused on the site and interested.

The big questions for many editors are how will I ever find the time to set up a social media presence, and how will I stay on top of it.  Setting up a Facebook page, or a Twitter feed, is not difficult–and I suspect that most of us have a student, colleague or friend who would be happy to help get things started.   How you then maintain it is a different question, whether you want to do it yourself, or have someone else maintain it. The costs are not great, and the potential benefits are important (just keep in mind that at this time each time we post to Twitter and Facebook hundreds of people see our brand and the information in our post).

Of course, many challenges for our social media presence remain.  We would like to build the following of both of our Facebook and Twitter sites in the coming year.  We are also going to experiment with ways to get more of our followers to interact using our social media, in particular on Facebook.  And there are other social media tools that we are thinking about, including blogging and Google+.  Each represents new possibilities to expand our journal’s readership and presence.

R. Michael Alvarez is Professor of Political Science at Caltech and co-editor with Jonathan N. Katz of Political Analysis. Follow the journal on Twitter and like it on Facebook.

The riots which occurred in London and several other major cities early in August have provoked a debate, still on-going, around a range of crucial sentencing issues. Two developments have most interested me. First has been the tension between the government and the judiciary and, second, the apparent mark-up because the offending took place in the context of a riot.

Indications of the constitutional issue can be found in several occurrences reported in the press. For example, the Prime Minister’s first message to the rioters appears to anticipate the outcomes in sentencing courts when he told them that “you will feel the full force of the law and if you are old enough to commit these crimes you are old enough to face the punishment”. A week later the PM praised the courts for imposing tough custodial sentences. It would also appear that a senior clerk in Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service circulated instructions to court clerks that they should advise magistrates to consider disregarding normal sentencing guidelines (Guardian 15.8.2011). One of the judges imposing allegedly tough sentences (Andrew Gilbart QC) explicitly justified his approach, explaining that such criminal behaviour “must be met with sentences longer than they would be if the offences had been committed in isolation” (The Telegraph 16.8.2011). Leading Liberal Democrat peers, on the other hand, voiced concern about a lack of proportion in sentencing rioters and that “the sacrosanct separation of powers between the government and the judiciary was being put at risk” (Guardian 17.8.2011).

The debate, then, has been whether the government, as well as parts of the press, has exerted untoward pressure on the courts and whether this has resulted in sentences which would not “normally” be imposed. We do not yet know whether the riot context has indeed led to harsher sentences although an analysis by the Guardian newspaper of 1,000 riot-related cases heard by magistrates suggested that those sentenced were receiving prison terms 25% longer than normal and that the overall imprisonment rate of 70% was much higher than the previous rate (Guardian 30.8.2011).

It is clear, however, that not all sentencers are in agreement as to whether such riot-related sentences should be longer and by how much. Appeals against some of the orders imposed by magistrates’ courts have already been heard and in one reported case – that of a mother-of-two, Ursula Nevin, 24, sentenced to five months imprisonment for accepting looted shirts – the sentence was reduced by a Manchester Crown Court judge to a community sentence of 75 hours unpaid work although the fact that Nevin did not go into the city centre – was not actually in the riot – appeared to be critical to the decision.

What is apparently at issue here is the extent to which the context of the riot should ‘aggravate’ the seriousness of the offending. In a sentencing system where, except when the ‘dangerousness’ legislation is applied, offenders are given a sentence commensurate with the ‘amount’ of seriousness in their offending, greater seriousness equals a tougher sentence. If one or both of the culpability and harm aspects which make up seriousness are deemed to be greater because of the context of a riot then the proportionate sentence will be a (longer) custodial one. Proportionality is at the heart of a retributivist, just deserts, sentencing framework and so the riots have focused attention on the matters which guidance from the appellate courts, the Sentencing Guidelines Council and, now, the Sentencing Council, suggests can be taken into account. As guidelines do not generally mention riots the debate has centred on the extent to which the guidelines can be bypassed because of the context.

I have a personal interest in this issue of context. In 1800 an Isaac Farnsworth, probably married to my great-great-great-great grandma was sentenced to transportation by Derby Quarter Sessions for ‘obtaining money etc, at the head of a mob’ (Derby Mercury 9.10.1800). The Justices of the Peace who had committed Farnsworth to the Quarter Sessions under 5 counts of theft (food and/or money) had two weeks earlier placed a notice in the Derby Mercury as follows:

[We] do hereby declare, that (in consequence of a Proclamation dated the 18th September instant, commanding us the said magistrates to suppress all riots and tumults which impede the regular Supplies of the Market, and the free sale of Articles brought to the same) we will use our utmost Endeavours for discovering, seizing, and apprehending all Persons who may be concerned in such dangerous Practices.

These ‘bread riots’ occurred periodically in the 18th century in England but in 1800 the unrest on account of the soaring price of grain during the Napoleonic Wars caused panic across the country. Farnsworth was clearly given a harsh sentence as an example: The Times reported the sentence (13.10.1800) as did Bercow’s Journal in Worcester (although earlier in the summer when panic was high before the harvest, the Assizes at Chesterfield had been imposing death sentences). It has always seemed to me – admittedly with a family connection – to be unfair that volatile political and social pressures surrounding the bread riots had so strong an influence on the sentencing of the individuals involved.

So has the sentencing of those involved in the riots which took place in England in August 2011 also been unjustifiably influenced by social and political pressures? Without some careful academic research we may never know but it would be fair to point out that guidance on factors which aggravate seriousness has always endorsed the following as legitimate factors to take into account: planning in advance, acting with others, causing more than normal alarm (by, for example, offending at night), targeting vulnerable victims, gratuitous violence, and causing extensive damage and loss. All of these are relevant to the riot situation. I would argue that there should be no further markup, however.

Finally, it is a matter of concern to all commentators that so many children and young people were involved in offending during the riots. It should also be a matter of concern that fewer have questioned the focus on their punishment: the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales, despite the best efforts of the UNCRC in its periodic reports, is very low at 10 years old. Nevertheless, the principle in the 1933 Children and Young Persons Act that the courts should “have regard to” the welfare of the child is still good law and should not be disregarded in the aftermath of riots.

Christine Piper is Professor of Law at Brunel University. She is the co-author (with Susan Easton) of Sentencing and Punishment: The Quest for Justice. Susan Easton has previously written this post for OUPblog.

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In the course of 17 minutes, Newsnight managed to review six years’ worth of all that had gone wrong in Ethiopia, from post-election violence in 2005, to the intensified anti-insurgency operations in Somali Region after 2007, to more recent opposition complaints that their supporters were being deprived of international development assistance.  To emphasise the British aid connection, the film concluded: ‘The purpose of development aid is to help Ethiopia on to its feet, to establish democracy, justice and the rule of law.  The evidence we’ve gathered suggests it is failing.’

The BBC commissioned its Ethiopia film from the recently established Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London whose website now carries no fewer than 13 stories on the trouble with Ethiopia under the generic tagline ‘Ethiopia Aid Exposed.’  Headlines include ‘Revealed: Aid to Ethiopia increases despite serious human rights abuses,’ ‘Aid as Weapon of political oppression in the Southern Regions’ and ‘Analysis: European taxpayers fund abuses in Ethiopia.’  Under the same tagline, there is also ‘Get the Data: UK Aid to Ethiopia.’

The timing of the programme could hardly have been worse for the hungry and the very poor in Ethiopia.  The country is directly affected by the current East African food emergency and additionally burdened by many thousands of refugees fleeing Somalia in search of food across the border.   The broadcast came as official and private appeals for international help are faltering, and just 24 hours after the United Nations declared an extension of formal famine conditions to cover five regions of southern Somalia.  It is now Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis in 20 years.

Because the BBC crew travelled to Ethiopia as tourists, not journalists, they did not interview any Ethiopian officials.  Nor did they approach any foreign aid officials in the country, so the field was left to opposition politicians and a foreign critic.  Nor was any minister from either the Department for International Development or the Foreign Office able to give up an evening to explain why Britain gave aid to Ethiopia in the first place.  It is now the largest single recipient of UK bilateral assistance, a commitment that will rise from £290 million this year to £390 million by 2015.

So it was Mr Abdirashid Dulane, the deputy Ethiopian Ambassador in London, who faced a seven-minute inquisition from Kirsty Wark on torture, rape and human rights abuse.   He had received a written account of the programme’s allegations, but was denied the chance to view the film before it was aired.   He managed in passing to make the point that the Newsnight film lacked ‘even-handedness,’ and the embassy followed up the next day with a statement complaining that the report’s timing was ‘guaranteed to inflict maximum damage on those who are suffering from the worst drought in sixty years in our region.’

The programme-makers insist they were not canvassing the suspension of emergency or development aid to Ethiopia, although that was certainly the message received by many respondents to the programme.   Overseas Ethiopian critics of the government were cock-a-hoop with the story, and one early British comment on the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s website recommended that ‘the UK government stop any financial help to this country until they can be assured that any monies given are used in a non-political way and are for the benefit of the people who are in greatest need.’  An Addis Ababa reporter for the online news service Ezega.com urged her own government to investigate the allegations, yet concluded that the BBC report ‘might cost millions who are starved the food aid they expect from the international community.’

As for the aid-givers, the critical issue here is their handling of allegations over the past two years that development assistance is being used as a political tool by Ethiopia’s ruling party to favour government supporters and, through withholding it, punish their opponents.   The complaints were first made by opposition figures in Ethiopia, but gained traction with the publication of ‘Development without Freedom: How aid underwrites repression in Ethiopia,’ a thorough piece of work researched in 2009 by Human Rights Watch and published in October 2010

With the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) in the lead, the aid-givers’ Development Assistance Group in Addis Ababa pre-empted the Human Rights Watch report by commissioning one of their own.   ‘Aid Management and Utilisation in Ethiopia’ was published in July 2010 as ‘a study in response to allegations of distortion in donor-supported development programmes.’ It has since been used by the Ethiopian government and the donors to assert that no credible evidence has been found to substantiate the allegations.  DFID repeated the same line last week.  It is at best disingenuous.  The report was in its own estimation ‘an exploratory and desk-based study’ – in other words, its compilers did not leave the office – and it emphasised repeatedly that it was ‘not an investigation’ and ‘does not seek to prove or disprove allegations of distortion.’

Worse, the report said donors were drawing up plans for a second phase of the study that ‘could include detailed fieldwork.’   More than a year has passed, and there appears to have been no such fieldwork, only more attention to the paperwork.   The aid-givers do not even seem to have acted on the invitation of the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in his exchanges with Human Rights Watch.  ‘If we get credible reports, we will investigate,’ he said, ‘not to please anyone, but to ensure the credibility of our party.’  The DFID record here is hardly an inspiring example of that new regime of transparency and rigorous results-based monitoring promised by Andrew Mitchell, the new Secretary of State.

Part of the reason for DFID’s tangled response to the aid allegations lies in its own heavy investment in the ‘governance’ agenda.   What was once a straightforward departmental commitment to ‘eliminating world poverty’ has since become, in the swiftly changing fashions of the aid world, a determination to promote democracy, justice and the rule of law.  Thus Newsnight was able to overlook Ethiopia’s significant achievements in bearing down on poverty and extending health and education services to conclude that our aid effort was failing.

Where should outsiders draw the line on which poor countries to help, and when to stop?   Is the rich world interested in helping Africa’s poor or in promoting government systems which resemble its own?   Three days after the Newsnight report on BBC Television, BBC Radio posed the same question this way:  ‘How badly does a country have to behave to forfeit support from the British taxpayer?’   A powerful edition of File on Four investigated allegations that Rwanda and Zimbabwe had sent spies to Britain to stifle opposition abroad, sometimes even to kill, and had used our asylum system to infiltrate refugee communities.

The evidence presented was strong, but File on Four was careful not to answer its own question.   It got a senior Labour politician to do it for them instead.   Kim Howells was a Foreign Office minister and chaired the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.  He was certain these countries should be threatened with having their aid cut off.  He accepted there would be a human price to be paid:  ‘It may be that the poor people who receive the aid are going to grow poorer and their children are going to suffer and so on, but I don’t think we can go on like this.’

At a time of intensifying controversy over the UK aid budget – increasing while almost everything else is cut – it is a provocative notion that Britain should use aid to reward and punish foreign governments for their record on ‘governance’ rather than for helping the poor out of poverty.   It comes close to the bad old ways with aid during the Cold War in Africa.  What would the British taxpayer have to say to that, if he or she was ever asked?

Peter Gill is a journalist specialising in developing world affairs, and first travelled to Ethiopia in the 1960s. He has made films in and reported from Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, South Africa, Uganda, and Sudan, as well as Ethiopia. He has led BBC World Service Trust campaigns on leprosy and HIV/AIDS in India. He is the author of Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid. This post first appeared on the Royal Africa Society blog, and is reposted with permission.

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What do you guys think of this Greenwald piece? I think it’s excellent, but I’m not convinced. Obama didn’t get the tax cuts he wanted. It’s not clear this will help him electorally (the state of the economy in the fall of 2012 will matter much more than his pose of bipartisanship now; there is zero evidence to suggest this deal will help the economy and lots of reasons to think it will hurt.) Though it’s true that Obama has wanted cuts to entitlement programs for some time, he doesn’t get them in the first phase of the deal, and in the second phase, assuming the trigger mechanism kicks in, Social Security remains off-limits.

What’s your sense of why Obama wants these cuts? We know why the GOP wants them. But what are the ideological underpinnings or economic/political interests of Obama’s position? Even within the framework of neoliberalism, I’m not sure I get the motivation. Have the financial markets really been pushing for these cuts? My anecdotal sense was that people like Summers — I know, now out of the administration, but I took him to be a fairly good representative of that sector — thought this wasn’t the way to go. My assumption is that the reason Obama has taken this route is that he thinks it’s a good way to position himself electorally, and that this is coming less from the money people than the politicos. But I am more than happy to be told otherwise.

So what do you guys think: Weak president? Moderate right president? Shrewd negotiator? What?

Soon, Robin’s Facebook page “exploded” with responses from some prominent political voices. Here are just a few highlights.

Rick Perlstein‎: “The people hate partisan gridlock”; “I defeated partisan gridlock”; “The people will hail me as a hero, bearing me aloft on their shoulders.” The fellow’s not quite well….

Jay Driskell: To me, [Obama] reads like a classic late 19th century progressive – that there are smart people who know smart things and it is they who should sit down in a room and hammer out the details above the “partisan fray.” The problem, then as now, is that there is no way above that fray – especially when one or both parties are trying to game the non-partisan/bi-partisan negotiations for their own partisan advantage. However, I really do think that Obama really believes that he is making progress. Otherwise, his negotiating strategies make absolutely no sense. I’d like to think he’s in the thrall of capital, but more and more of me think that he is naive and clueless and out of his depth. That is, if he were in the thrall of capital, that would at least be comprehensible (and reprehensible) to me….

Adolph Reed: He’s a one-trick pony, always has been, and that trick is performing judiciousness, reasonableness, performing the guy who shows his seriousness by being able to agree with those with whom he supposedly disagrees and to disagree with those with whom he supposedly agrees. He has never — not at any moment in his political career — stood for anything more concrete than a platitude. He is also one of those get all the smart people in the room to figure out what’s best for us all technocratic left-neoliberals and at the end of the day (well, even at dawn) believes that the Wall St types are smarter than the rest of us….

Tom Sugrue: I am with Adolph. There is little about Obama’s trajectory on economic issues that is surprising, except to those who believed that (despite both his words and his record) he was a crypto-leftist waiting for the right moment. Whether or not Obama believes what he practices is immaterial. I would also add that we are where we are because BHO glamored “progressives” including the Nation‘s editors and so many more who should have known better. Without a well-organized, vocal left, we can’t expect any better. FDR did not tack leftward in 1935 and 36 out of principle, but because he was pulled there. (And remember that he veered just as quickly rightward in 1937, when he succumbed to bipartisan deficit-mania.)

Thaddeus Russell: I am struck again and again by how closely Obama’s rhetoric and policies adhere to Kristol’s and Podhoretz’s founding documents of neoconservatism: imperialism, cultural homogenization (e.g., his “post-racial” discourse and especially Race to the Top), and the dismantling of the welfare state. So, to me, this explains his “willingness” to sacrifice SS and Medicare. Also, the elitist attitude toward policy-making, which the neocons got from the original progressives.

Joshua Cohen:

1. I think BHO’s political views are in the neighborhood of Cass Sunstein’s: pretty centrist, with different leans on different issues. But much less conventionally left than some supporters painted him as being. Part of the reason for the painting was the poetic rhetoric, but that rhetoric (hope….change….etc etc) was always VERY VERY abstract, not tied to policy.

2. BHO has shown a willingness to be reasonable with the unreasonable: which is an invitation to being exploited by the unreasonable. People smell weakness: and they treat a willingness to compromise as a sign of weakness, esp. when you compromise right out of the box. That is who BHO is: he does not have a back-up political style.

3. I also think that critics like Greenwald and Krugman, who have zero political sense or experience, have been much too quick to be dismissive of the constraints. (I think Krugman is more careful on this issue than Greenwald.)

4. Huge factor in contemporary politics is extraordinary disarray of mass politics on the left. Unions at 6%, no peace movement, and no jobs movement of any consistent and public visibility. It is much easier to talk about Obama than to talk about this HUGELY important fact.

5. Given point (2) above, and despite (4): I think BHO has not done as well as he might have at, in particular, keeping a focus on jobs.

So I kind of agree with Tom Sugrue….esp. on the Roosevelt point.

Alex Gourevitch: Josh, I think point 4, ‘the disarray of mass politics’ begins pointing this thread in a wider, and possibly more important direction. We can debate Obama’s ‘real’ politics all we want – FWIW I basically agree with Adolph/Doug/and Co. But Obama did not end up here alone. The Democratic Party has been decidedly weak during this whole affair. Moreover, especially under New Democrat leadership, it has spent the last decades setting the table for a budget debate in which deficit spending is seen as irresponsible, in which the argument for progressive taxation has severely waned, and in which the state is seen as having a much more limited role – basically correcting market failures. I think we fool ourselves if we think the major problems here are just a) right-wing Tea Party populists with an ideological backbone and b) an opportunistic President who is happy to be the respectable patsy of certain class fractions. It is also a so-called left wing party that has been itself the party of austerity for at least twenty years. They created the environment in which massive spending cuts when on the verge of a double-dip recession can seem like a reasonable thing to do. And we’re talking here just about the Democratic Party, never mind the other elements that go into the ‘disarray of mass politics.’

Interested in reading more? It’s all available at coreyrobin.com.

Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His forthcoming book is The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.

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By Mark Peters

I’ve been seeing gods everywhere lately.

Not gods like Thor, Ganesha, and God. My cinnamon rolls have been deity-free, if not gluten-free. It’s lexical gods I can’t seem to escape. Everywhere I look someone is thanking, cursing, or begging some specific group of supreme beings.

For example, I’ve recently spotted the following religious invocations:

• In her funny book, My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me, a nervous, sweaty, date-bound Hilary Winston wrote, “I alternated the air vents of the VW Jetta at my armpits and temples. I drove slow and prayed to the dating gods for help.”

• On ESPN.com, NBA maven Marc Stein noted that it was “interesting, after Game 4 and Game 5, to hear both (Dwayne) Wade and Mavs coach Rick Carlisle make a ‘basketball gods’ reference, proving that it’s not just us media types who spout this stuff.”

• On Twitter, my friend (and awesome author) Judy McGuire wrote, “Let us pray that the check gods will smile on me today.”

• During some awful luck at billiards, I even noticed myself falling into the trend, whining, “I wonder what I’ve done to anger the pool gods and the ball community.”

I’ve been around long enough to know when the column gods are sending me a sign, so I decided to plumb the depths of Twitter for examples of the “X gods” formula. I’ve been searching for a month, but I could’ve probably written an article based on the examples from a single day. It turns out the sky is filled with a lot more than Heaven, Asgard, Mars, and the Klingon homeworld: there are pantheons of happiness gods, hippo gods, bagel gods, dog-healing gods, moped gods, taco gods, registration gods, and even perm gods for the hair-focused. Though monotheism dominates the world, polytheism still reigns over our vocabulary.

One of the major topics for such prayers is sports. As a resident of Buffalo, NY, I am well aware of how cruel the sports gods can be, particularly the football gods who caused the Buffalo Bills to lose four straight Super Bowls in the nineties, not that I’m still bitter. Speaking of the football gods, they’ve been a highlight of Gregg Easterbrook’s columns for years, including this mention back in 2001: “Cronus tormented Uranus, Zeus tormented Cronus, Hera tormented Hercules, Paris tormented Hera, Hades tormented Persephone, Aphrodite tormented Helen, and now the football gods have chosen to torment the Tennessee Titans.” In the past month, I spotted numerous references to the baseball gods, bowling gods, hockey gods, racing gods, tennis gods, and pro wrestling gods. Given the bounced balls, pulled groins, and other unpredictable events in the world of sports, ESPN might be the network that generates the most prayer.

We all like to believe we’re the quarterback or point guard of our life, so we call on similar gods in any situation that troubles us. The employment gods are frequently beseeched and cursed, as are the lottery gods. I saw many pleas to the travel gods and the weather gods, which is fitting since those pantheons tend to team up to make our lives miserable. Since technology is up there with the weather as a powerful, mindless force shaping our world, people praise and curse the Twitter gods, Google gods, iPhone gods, DVR gods, YouTube gods, Apple gods, laptop gods, social media gods, Blackberry gods, data center gods, Internet gods, satellite radio gods, iPod album shuffle gods, email gods, autosave gods, and the ultra-vague technology gods. Here, a frighteningly stereotypical texter makes a prayer that would make St. Paul roll over in his basilica: “thank the txt gods for unlimited txtn!lol!;)”

While some people pray to “the gods of employment,” “the gods of medicine,” or “the Gods of cross-browser compatibility,” that form doesn’t seem as common, at least on Twitter, where brevity is king. Speaking of brevity, some prayers are tiny even by tweet standards: they make the Hail Mary seem like War and Peace. This shows great respect for the busy schedules of the gods, if not the gravitas of the gods, as seen in this sleepy hornball’s request: “boobies please, dream gods”. I’m copying this one into my prayerbook for the next time I make an involuntary protein spill: “Screw you barf gods”.  You have to appreciate the fist-shaking anger behind “Dear Words With Friends gods, I hate you” and “I’m trapped. DAMN you tic tac toe gods!!!”

These tweets are a testimonial to how egocentric yet humorous we can be. No matter what we’re doing, we want to believe a divine force is helping and hindering us, that our Google searches and shopping binges are written in the cosmos. Fortunately, we’re too self-aware to believe that malarkey. Even more fortunately, we can’t totally fight the feeling, so we compose preposterous prayers: “Credit card gods please keep me out of TJ Maxx.”

I’m thankful to the book gods for putting this quote by David Mamet (from Writing in Restaurants) in my path while writing this column: “Our tenuous monotheism disappears in the face of our great insecurities, and we live once again overtly in an animistic universe surrounded by superbeings.”

To close, here are some of the most eloquent prayers to ad hoc deities I spotted in the last month or so. Thank you, tweet gods. Amen.



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Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, language columnist for Visual Thesaurus, and the blogger behind The Rosa Parks of Blogs and The Pancake Proverbs.

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

As my friends know, it doesn’t take much to make me think of Mark Twain. And even people I’ve never met who have followed my writings on China know about my obsession with Twain, since I’ve managed to bring him into discussions of a wide range of China-related topics, from Shanghai history (he never went there but has a San Francisco-bound fictional character set sail from that treaty port) to the Boxers (with whose cause he expressed sympathy in 1900). So, it’s no surprise that, when rumors about Jiang Zemin’s death flew and then were squashed recently, I found myself thinking of Twain.

Mostly because I thought that Jiang could now make use of the famous line attributed to Twain: reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. But also because, in one of his novels, Twain had two characters listening to people deliver eulogies about them — and if Jiang had had access to Hong Kong television, he could have had a similar experience.

I’m not as obsessed with Shakespeare as I am with Twain, but the Bard is another favorite author who came to mind after the Chinese government, which had taken its time providing any information about Jiang, finally issued a statement dismissing as baseless rumors the by-then widely circulating and much discussed online reports of the former leader’s demise. More specifically, I thought of Much Ado About Nothing, the title of a Shakespeare comedy. This phrase came to mind particularly easily, I suppose, because I was traveling by train through a part of England not far from Stratford when the is-he-or-isn’t-he-dead rumor mill was churning fastest. The phrase also has a special link to Jiang, since he infamously referred to the 1989 protests and massacre as “much ado about nothing” during a television interview with Barbara Walters.

In fact, though, while it would be foolish to make too much of the significance of a rumor that proved false, the flurry of speculation about Jiang’s fate and the Chinese government’s response to this speculation is not completely without interest. This incident — or rather non-incident — is one from which some meaning can be wrung.

One thing that the non-incident shows or really just underlines is simply the capacity of the internet, and especially microblogging platforms such as Sina Weibo and Twitter, to magnify the significance of rumors about any place and increase the speed with which they spread. Rumors flew fast and furiously within China and around the world, first claiming that Jiang was very ill and then that he was dead, from the moment that Jiang, the man who succeeded Deng Xiaoping and preceded Hu Jintao as China’s paramount leader, failed to attend the main July 1 ceremony held to mark the 90th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party.

Another thing, more specific to China, that the non-incident reveals is that the Party continues to be fixated with controlling the flow of information and putting a carefully thought out spin on events. And that this can make it much slower to respond to news than other organizations, which in turn helps create a vacuum in which rumors can gather momentum.

The Chinese authorities are good at moving swiftly to try to stop people from expressing certain kinds of opinions or even using certain kinds of words — as shown by internet censors blocking the use of any character in Jiang’s name and the most common term for “heart attack” in posts. What they are not good at doing is offering up even very simple statements of fact, until they have weighed the pros and cons of presenting it in different ways.

These recent developments  also reminded us of how skeptical international news organizations, and at least equally importantly Hong Kong media, are when it comes to assuming that if something important has happened in China, Beijing will let them know. No one thought, in other words, that if Jiang had died, the Chinese government would be as quick to announce this fact as, say, the American government would be when a former president passes away. There is justification for this skepticism, if we think not just about past deaths of Chinese leaders but also about how slowly news about SARS was allowed to circulate and, more recently, the effort to prevent word of the tainted milk scandal from spreading until the Olympics were over.

All of this is noteworthy, but neither the unusual nature of the current moment in history nor the peculiar handling of the media by the Party should be overstated. There were widely believed rumors about China that gained traction long before the internet was around and long before the Communist Party was founded — let alone came to power. And here, we can go back to the days of Twain. During the Boxer crisis of 1900, the international press reported in July that all of the foreigners held hostage in Beijing had been killed. In fact, they had not. When foreign troops stormed into the city in August, nearly all the foreigners who had been captive were freed alive — and some of those who were freed later commented on their ability to read their own obituaries in old copies of newspapers.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chair of the History Department at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know. His reviews and commentaries have appeared in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and a wide range of magazines and journals of opinion, including New Left Review, the TLS, the Nation, the Huffington Post, Time and Newsweek. He is the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies and co-founder of the UCI-based China Beat blog/electronic magazine.

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China has long been criticized for its limits on press freedom; one journalist, He Qinglian, has even described Chinese journalists as “dancing in shackles.” In the collection of essays, Changing Media, Changing China, China experts weigh in on the state of Chinese journalism today and discuss the transformation it has undergone in recent years. In this excerpt from the book, editor Susan L. Shirk sheds some light on the factors that have brought about these changes.

Beginning in the early 1980s, the structure of Chinese media changed. Newspapers, magazines, and television stations received cuts in their government subsidies and were driven to enter the market and to earn revenue. In 1979 they were permitted to sell advertising, and in 1983 they were allowed to retain the profits from the sale of ads. Because people were eager for information and businesses wanted to advertise their products, profits were good and the number of publications grew rapidly. As Qian Gang and David Bandurski note in chapter 2, the commercialization of the media accelerated after 2000 as the government sought to strengthen Chinese media organizations to withstand competition from foreign media companies.

By 2005, China published more than two thousand newspapers and nine thousand magazines. In 2003, the CCP eliminated mandatory subscriptions to official newspapers and ended subsidies to all but a few such papers in every province. Even nationally circulated, official papers like People’s Daily, Guangming Daily, and Economics Daily are now sold at retail stalls and compete for audiences. According to their editors, Guangming Daily sells itself as “a spiritual homeland for intellectuals”; Economics Daily markets its timely economic reports; and the People’s Daily promotes its authoritativeness.

About a dozen commercial newspapers with national circulations of over 1 million readers are printed in multiple locations throughout the country. The southern province Guangdong is the headquarters of the cutting-edge commercial media, with three newspaper groups fiercely competing for audiences. Nanjing now has five newspapers competing for the evening readership. People buy the new tabloids and magazines on the newsstands and read them at home in the evening.

Though almost all of these commercial publications are part of media groups led by party or government newspapers, they look and sound completely different. In contrast to the stilted and formulaic language of official publications, the language of the commercial press is lively and colloquial. Because of this difference in style, people are more apt to believe that the content of commercial media is true. Daniela Stockmann’s research shows that consumers seek out commercial publications because they consider them more credible than their counterparts from the official media. According to her research, even in Beijing, which has a particularly large proportion of government employees, only about 36 percent of residents read official papers such as the People’s Daily; the rest read only semiofficial or commercialized papers.

Advertisers and many of the commercial media groups target young and middle-aged urbanites who are well-educated, affluent consumers. But publications also seek to differentiate themselves and appeal to specific audiences. The Guangdong-based publications use domestic muckraking to attract a business-oriented, cosmopolitan audience. Because they push the limits on domestic political reporting — their editors are fired and replaced frequently — they have built an audience of liberal-minded readers outside Guangdong Province. According to its editors, Southern Weekend (Nanfang Zhoumo), published by the Nanfang Daily group under the Guangdong Communist Party Committee, considered one of the most critical and politically influential commercial newspapers, has a larger news bureau and greater circulation in politically charged Beijing than it does in southern China. The Communist Youth League’s popular national newspaper, China Youth Journal, has been a commercial success because it appeals to China’s yuppies, the style-conscious younger generation with money to spend. The national foreign affairs newspaper, Global Times, tries to attract the same demographic by its often sensational nationalistic reporting of international affairs, as I discuss in chapter 10.

Media based out of Shanghai, the journalistic capital of China before the communist victory in 1949, are comparatively “very dull and quiet,” according to Chinese media critics. The cause they cite is that the city’s government has been slow to relinquish control. Shanghai audiences prefer Southern Weekend, Global Times, and Nanjing’s Yangtze Evening News to Shanghai-based papers, and Hunan television to their local stations.

Journalists now think of themselves as professionals instead of as agents of the government. Along with all the other changes referred to above, this role change began in the late 1970s. Chinese journalists started to travel, study abroad, and encounter “real” journalists. The crusading former editor in chief of the magazine Caijing (Finance and Economy) and author of chapter 3, Hu Shuli, recalls that before commercialization, “the news media were regarded as a government organization rather than a watchdog, and those who worked with news organizations sounded more like officials than professional journalists. [But] our teachers…encouraged us to pursue careers as professional journalists.” Media organizations now compete for the best young talent, and outstanding journalists have been able to bid up their salaries by changing jobs frequently. Newspapers and magazines are also recruiting  and offering high salaries to bloggers who have attracted large followings. Yet most journalists still receive low base salaries and are paid by the article, which makes them susceptible to corruption. Corruption ranges from small transportation subsidies and “honoraria” provided to reporters for coverage of government and corporate news conferences to outright corporate bribery for positive reporting and extortion of corporations by journalists threatening to write damaging exposés (see chapter 3). Establishing professional journalistic ethics is as difficult in China’s Wild West version of early capitalism as it was in other countries at a similar stage of development.

Some journalists also have crossed over to political advocacy. In one unprecedented collective act, the national Economic Observer and twelve regional newspapers in March 2010 published a sharply worded joint editorial calling on China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, to abolish the system of household residential permits (hukou) that forces migrants from the countryside to live as second-class citizens in the cities. The authorities banned dissemination and discussion of the editorial but only after it had received wide distribution. At the legislative session, government leaders proposed some reforms of the hukou system, but not its abolition as demanded by the editorial.

Susan L. Shirk is Director of the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and Professor at UC-San Diego. A leading authority on China, she has written numerous books, including China: Fragile Superpower (2008) and articles that have appeared in the Washington Post, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

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By Dennis Baron

There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.

But two new digital developments, ebook spam and content farms, now threaten the survival of writing as we know it.

According to the Guardian, growing numbers of “authors” are churning out meaningless ebooks by harvesting sections of text from the web, licensing it for a small fee from online rights aggregators, or copying it for free from an open source like Project Gutenberg. These authors—we could call them text engineers—contribute nothing to the writing process beyond selecting passages to copy and stringing them together, or if that seems too much like work, just cutting out the original author’s name and pasting in their own. The spam ebooks that result are composed entirely of prose designed, not to convey information or send a message, but to churn profits.

The other new source of empty text is content farms, internet sweatshops where part-timers generate prose whose sole purpose is to use keywords that attract the attention of search engines. The goal of content farms is not to get relevant text in front of you, but to get you to view the paid advertising in which the otherwise meaningless words are nested.

Ebook spam and content farms may sound like the antitheses of traditional writing, in that they don’t inform, stimulate thought, or comment on the human condition. They’re certainly not the kind of repurposed writing that Wired Magazine’s Kevin Kelly foresaw back in 2006 when he wrote that we’d soon be doing with online prose what we were already doing with music: sampling, copying, remixing, and mashing up other people’s words to create our own personal textual playlists.

Kelly, who was paid for his essay, also predicted that in the brave new world of digital text the value we once assigned to words would shift to links, tags, and annotations, and that authors, no longer paid for producing content, would once again become amateurs motivated by the burning need to share, as they now do with such abandon on Facebook and Twitter.

But if we mash up Kelly’s futuristic vision with the harsh reality that strings of keywords may bring in more dollars than connected prose, then it’s possible that tomorrow’s writers won’t be bloggers, Tweeters, or even taggers, they’ll be scrapbookers, motivated by the burning need to cut and paste. The web may be making authors of us all, but the growing number of content-free links threatens to put writing as we know it out of business.

A cynic might argue that far too many writers have already mastered the art of saying absolutely nothing, so we shouldn’t be surprised if our feverish quest to capitalize on the internet, combined with the vast expansion of the author pool that the net makes possible, have created the monster of contentless prose. We get the writing we deserve.

Plus, things online having the attraction that they do, instead of damning these new genres, soon we may be teaching students how to master them. After all, no writing course is considered complete without a unit on how to write effective email. So it won’t be long before some start-up offers a course in text-mashing instaprose. Or an app. I can just see the copy now:

Forget about the five-paragraph theme, the inverted pyramid, and write-revise-publish. The Digital Writers School has a foolproof formula for the digital age: cut, paste, upload. It may not get you a Pulitzer or the Mann Booker, but if you give up the search for the right word and learn instead to game the search algorithm, you could find your writing bringing in a lot of cash per click. No experience necessary! Text today for a free online talent test.

It may seem paradoxical to make money by selling something that is meaningless, but it turns out that today’s most-successful marketing is based on this very paradox. So content-free prose will either be the death of writing, or the next big thing.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared. Until next time, keep up with Professor Baron on Twitter: @DrGrammar.

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With the rise of the Internet and, more recently, social media, the discipline of marketing has undergone huge changes. In the excerpt from the preface of the Oxford Dictionary of Marketing below, Charles Doyle explains what marketing means in the 21st century. You can find out more about the dictionary in the video at the end of the post.

Despite the criticism leveled at marketing, why has marketing continued its inexorable march into every aspect of life? Since the end of World War II, two major trends have been affecting the practice of marketing: customer power and self-service. Both trends have been accelerated by the Internet. Increasingly, customers are smarter, better informed, better protected and have a much greater range of choices. Greater choice and information have increased customer sophistication and buying power. Customers can better exploit a world of over-supply to hold down prices. This new power enables customers to negotiate better deals across a vast range of producers. The ways in which customers want to buy goods and services are also changing. Self-service, where companies enable customers to do things for themselves in the name of greater convenience, has been a powerful factor in the rise of consumer empowerment, particularly in services. We now pour our own petrol, become our own bank teller, pick and pack our own groceries, arrange our own holidays, process and print our own photographs, review books, publish ourselves, broadcast ourselves, analyse markets, buy and sell our own investments directly, and electronically deliver our own mail—activities that previously required a skilled assistant.

The consequence of these changes is that many of the ‘classic’ functions of marketing—such as mass advertising—are in decline in the West, and their effectiveness is questioned. In the industrial past, the mass market was served by a few mass media that could grab general attention and create demand for mass-produced products. The mass market was characterized by a common culture, a single geographical location and served by few but familiar types of media. No longer. The apparent decline in effectiveness of many of the classic marketing techniques is partly attributable to the changes in the market and to the vast range of media now available. With the proliferation of multimedia outlets and channels, there simply is no one medium that can any longer reach a mass audience on a continuous basis in the way that the press, radio, or public broadcaster could have done in the past. For example, as well as the mass media that boomed in the 20th century (such as radio, cinema, telephone, video, satellite and cable television, billboards, the popular printed press, and magazines) there is now the Internet, multimedia, interactive television, iPods and iPads, search engines, and personal mobile communications devices with advanced imaging combined with communications capability. Moreover, digitalization of content enables marketers to use media channels in different ways. Digital content can be distributed faster and wider than its physical counterpart. It can also be updated more rapidly and can be both corrected and replicated endlessly.

Not only are media and content proliferating, markets are simultaneously fragmenting and globalizing. This fragmentation of markets into smaller and smaller segments, but with wider and wider geographical reach, has caused the inexorable decline of what used to be known as the mass audience, or mass market. Within the world of proliferating media channels, the viewers’ control and ability to be their own programmers, to create their own viewing choices, and to pause live television has diminished the direct influence of media advertising. The use of the media has also been transformed in the process: people no longer obtain their breaking news from newspaper headlines or radio as they did in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. Now breaking news comes from 24-hour broadcasting channels and websites accessed on mobile devices. Newspapers are now read for analysis and commentary about news that has already been distributed through other more interactive and immediate media. Therefore, the fundamentals of ‘classic’ marketing in the 20th century—that it served the producer interest and that marketers could, through various ‘mixes’, control the market—are now of questionable validity. In the early 21st century we have entered a time when marketing has moved from the ‘production’ or ‘sales’ era to the ‘customer’ era and now to the ‘interactive era’. Customers can no longer be talked at, or sold to, or be told what is good for them, which was the essential marketing characteristic of the industrial production era.

Today, it is the retailers, online and offline, and the customers, individually and in aggregate, and not the producers and their middlemen, who control the market. Consequentially, the old ways of classifying and segmenting the market into producers and buyers are now strained and inadequate to the task of focusing and allocating market resources to a cornucopia of fragmented niches and customer groupings. Philip Kotler, one of the leading thinkers in marketing since the 1960s, summed up very succinctly the two most important changes in marketing in the last 30 years. ‘First, marketers have moved from thinking their job is to sell whatever the company makes to thinking that their job is to influence what the company makes. Second, marketers now have tools to focus their efforts on reaching and satisfying niches and individuals.’

Consequently, marketing is now the religion that instructs on how to worship at the altar of the glorified, and ever changing, capricious, global customer. It has helped to extend the concept of customer service beyond the simple commercial selling; now governments talk of citizens as customers, hospitals call patients customers, employees call each other internal customers, churches are even encouraged to think of their parishioners as consumers of religious services, and it has even been known for breadwinners to think of their own families as their ‘major customers’. All enterprises and organizations are expected to adopt a marketing orientation in order to understand, then to serve, customers more efficiently, effectively, and even, in some cases, to delight them. What is this much sought-after marketing orientation? In simplest terms, it means that companies now have to develop a much deeper insight into their customers’ wants, needs, and desires and seek to deliver satisfaction beyond their expectations in effective ways. Insight is more than analysing market data or conducting individual and group customer research. It is a deep desire to serve, and willingness to listen to, the marketplace, then to enable customers to define the products and services that they want and need, and then to let them determine how they wish to interact with the company. The customer moves to the centre of everything the company does and makes and determines how it allocates its human and capital resources.

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Charles Doyle is a successful and accomplished Chief Marketing Officer with 25 years of experience working for world-class companies in the USA, Europe and Asia. He is currently Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Research at Jones Lang LaSalle in London (a financial and professional services firm specializing in commercial real estate). He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford.

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Who, we sometimes ask, at the dinners and debates of the intelligentsia, was the 20th century’s more insightful prophet — Aldous Huxley or George Orwell? Each is best known for his dystopian fantasy — Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984 — and both feared where modern technology might lead, for authorities and individuals alike. But while Huxley anticipated a world of empty pleasures and excessive convenience, Orwell predicted ubiquitous surveillance and the eradication of freedom. Who was right?     —William Davies, New Statesman, August 1, 2005

Image: Lisa Jane Persky

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

The long-standing Huxley vs. Orwell debate got a 21st century New Media makeover in 2009, courtesy of cartoonist Stuart McMillen. In May of that year, he published an online comic entitled “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that quickly went viral. At the top of this strip, which has been tweeted and re-tweeted many times and can now be found posted on scores of websites, we see caricatures of the two authors above their names and the respective titles of their best-known novels. Below that comes a series of couplet-like contrastive statements, accompanied by illustrations. The top couplet reads: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books; What Huxley feared was that there would be no need to ban a book, for there would be no one who would want to read one.” The first statement is paired with a picture of a censorship committee behind a desk, with a one-man “Internet Filter Department” off to one side, a wastebasket for banned books off to the other. The illustration for the second statement shows a family of couch potatoes waiting for The Biggest Loser to return after a word from its sponsors.

McMillen’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” might best be called an homage, or perhaps a reboot, for the lines in it all come straight from media theorist Neil Postman’s influential 1985 book of the same title, which made the case for Huxley’s famous 1932 novel being a superior guide to the era of television than Orwell’s from 1949. But Postman himself was far from the first to play the Huxley vs. Orwell game. The tradition of comparing and contrasting Huxley and Orwell goes back to, well, Huxley and Orwell, two writers who — though this is not mentioned as often as one might expect — knew one another from Eton, where Orwell was Huxley’s pupil in the 1910s.

Orwell had not yet written 1984 when he first questioned his former teacher’s prescience. In the early 1940s, a reader of his newspaper column solicited Orwell’s opinion of the danger that consumerism and the pursuit of pleasure posed to society. Orwell replied that, in his view, the time to worry about Brave New World scenarios had passed, for hedonism and “vulgar materialism” were no longer the great threat they once had been.

In October 1949, just a few months after Orwell published 1984 (a work that presumably spelled out the more pressing threats he had in mind), Huxley wrote to his former pupil to make the opposite point. Orwell’s book impressed him, he said, but he did not find it completely convincing, because he continued to think, as he had when crafting Brave New Word, that the elites of the future would find “less arduous” strategies for satisfying their “lust for power” than the “boot-on-the-face” technique described in 1984.

Huxley wrote that letter in Britain during a month that began with a momentous event taking place at the opposite end of Eurasia: the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The author did not mention this to Orwell, nor indeed did he bring up any specific country to illustrate his claim. Rather, he contented himself with ruminating in a general way about the contrast between what we now sometimes describe as the divide between “hard” authoritarianism (the kind associated with, say, present-day Burma) and “soft” authoritarianism (for which present-day Singapore, which science fiction author William Gibson memorably described in Wired as “Disneyland with the Death Penalty,” is often considered the poster child).

Over time, though, the PRC, the country I teach and write about for a living, would start to be brought into the Huxley-Orwell debate quite regularly — nearly always to make the point that 1984 was a more prophetic text than Brave New World. This is hardly surprising, given that Orwell’s book is usually taken as an allegory of Stalinist Communism, and the PRC was founded — and still is run — by a Communist Party. For though Orwell was a fierce critic of imperialism and Fascism as well as state socialism (and actually claimed to draw inspiration for some aspects of 1984 from his time working for the BBC), soon after the start of the Mao era (1949-1976) it became an article of faith of critics of Communism that countries run by Leninist parties were the quintessential “Big Brother” states.

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The idea that Orwell rather than Huxley was the one to turn to if one wanted a fictional lens through which to peer at China went virtually unchallenged throughout the Cold War — except, it is worth noting, by Huxley himself. In Brave New World Revisited (Harper, 1958), he argued that Mao had created a system that synthesized elements of Brave New World and 1984. Most foreign analysts, though, would have none of this. They took it for granted that Communist Party leaders, including those in Beijing, offered the classic examples of rulers who made everyone accept (or at least pretend to accept) that 2 + 2 equaled 5. And dissidents in various Communist countries who managed to lay their hands on and read forbidden editions of 1984 generally agreed with this assessment.

In this regard, things have not changed all that much. The prologue to Charles Horner’s recent book, Rising China & Its Postmodern Fate (University of Georgia Press, 2009), evokes this Cold War common sense about the PRC. Looking back to his school years, Horne, who would go on to become a longtime student of PRC politics, claims that “actually existing China” — as opposed to the mythic pre-1949 locale conjured up in Pearl Buck novels and stories told by widely traveled family members — “first appeared to me in an English class, where we read George Orwell’s 1984.” He recounts a teacher showing members of his class a “long article that had appeared in Newsweek describing a vast government-engineered upheaval in China called the Great Leap Forward.” In this magazine piece, according to Horne, “Chairman Mao’s campaign was described … as an ur-nightmare of totalitarianism, right down to the naming of it with a perfectly Orwellian phrase.”

1984 remains a common reference point in discussions of contemporary China. This is true even though the PRC has become, as Cold War era Soviet bloc countries never were (except right before their periods of Communist rule ended), a place where translations of the book can be purchased openly and dramatizations of Orwell’s shorter fictional critique of totalitarianism, Animal Farm, can even be staged. The clearest sign of the continued hold of the PRC-as-Big-Brother-state line of thinking is what happens annually when the anniversary of the June 4th Massacre arrives: the international press can be counted on to bring up Orwell — and no wonder, since Beijing’s denial that soldiers killed large numbers of civilians in 1989 is a classic illustration of “2 + 2 = 5” style Newspeak.

Similarly, the adjective “Orwellian” is used regularly in stories about Beijing’s efforts to control the kinds of information people can access online in the PRC and monitor what people do in Internet cafés. Allusions to 1984 also appear regularly when the authorities get tough with dissenters. Recently, for example, when the Chinese authorities, made skittish in part no doubt by the specter of events in the Middle East, launched a crackdown on political gadfly figures, this was described as a turn toward Big Brother modes of control. And a contributor to the Guardian called the April arrest of iconoclastic artist Ai Weiwei a reminder that Chinese dissidents can still find themselves “blackguarded and bullied with total impunity by a system that takes Orwell’s 1984 as a handbook.”

The continued allure of 1984 analogies has also been underscored lately in coverage of two specific topics: the very large number of state-controlled video cameras that are keeping tabs on what is done in China’s public spaces (a New York Times piece from last summer noted that the new technologies of surveillance “raise the specter of genuinely Orwellian control”) and the publication in Hong Kong of Chan Koon-chung’s Shengshi Zhongguo 2013, a dystopian novel set in the PRC of 2013, which has been hailed as a rare Chinese work of social science fiction. Chan’s novel, which is banned in mainland China, has been dubbed a “Chinese 1984” in many reports, partly due, perhaps, to its title containing the name of a year, but mostly to its portrayal of a tightly controlled China of the future. Shengshi Zhongguo 2013 (a title whose first two characters have been rendered into English different ways, as “The Fat Years,” “The Gilded Age,” “Prosperous Times,” etc.) refers to all memory of a recent outburst of protest being expunged from the minds of China’s citizens.

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Even though ruminations on China’s Orwellian features have not gone away, a countervailing trend toward looking at the PRC through the lens provided by Brave New World has gained steam in recent years. For example, Rana Mitter, an Oxford don, ends Modern China: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2007) with a nod to Huxley. And in a 2009 assessment of the Chinese Internet (published at the invaluable Danwei.org website he runs), media analyst Jeremy Goldkorn pointed out that most “Chinese net users, who go online primarily for entertainment, don’t notice and don’t particularly care about censorship, as long as they can chat to their friends, play games, listen to music and watch videos.” He then concluded: “Their dystopia is more Brave New World than 1984.”

I first became interested in Brave New World’s relevance for China almost ten years ago, when asked to give a talk about the June 4th Massacre to a group of college freshmen who had all just read Huxley’s famous novel. Later, I highlighted the idea that Huxley might be as good a guide or better to the PRC as Orwell in my book China’s Brave New World – and Other Tales for Modern Times, which came out in 2007. I’ve returned to the subject a couple of times since, exploring from different angles the question of whether the PRC is best seen as a “Big Brother” state or, instead, a country of “vulgar materialism” like the one Huxley imagined.

In considering the contrast, I’ve tended to stress two basic distinctions. One is the contrast between Orwell’s focus on the way governments watch people and Huxley’s emphasis on how order is maintained in part by the things that people watch. The other is the need to keep in mind that different modes of control are in place in different parts of China. For example, the “hard authoritarianism” Orwell imagined is often the rule in frontier zones such as Tibet and Xinjiang, just as it is in North Korea, the country that is now most often described as the ideal, typical Big Brother state. In the booming cities of China’s eastern seaboard, however, the “soft authoritarianism” of Brave New World, which brings to mind Singapore more than Pyongyang, is frequently the order of the day.

Last summer, I spent a month in Shanghai, the best known and most spectacle-driven of Chinese boomtowns. My time in the city came when it was mid-way through hosting the 2010 World Expo, which ran from May to October and was at once the most expensive, the largest, and the most visited World’s Fair in history. It was also, alas, the one with the longest lines (more than three hours wait for the most popular national pavilions) and surely some of the worst weather (with record-breaking high temperatures recorded on a massive thermometer, of record-breaking height, made out of an old factory smokestack). Since Brave New World is a novel that has much to say about high-tech forms of entertainment (such as the pornographic “feelies” that help keep denizens of that dystopia distracted), the 2010 World Expo with its many (admittedly G-rated) state-of-the-art cinematic works seemed at first custom made for an analysis that drew heavily on Huxley. My stay in Shanghai — a city I lived in for a year in the mid-1980s and have visited regularly since — also coincided, though, with reports of stepped up surveillance methods in Xinjiang, as the first anniversary of a series of 2009 riots in that northwestern section of the PRC came and went. Reading stories about what was happening in that frontier area brought Orwell to mind.

It might seem from this précis that my summertime in China would have simply confirmed my previous sense of the PRC being divided up into Brave New World and 1984 zones. But things are not so simple, and elements of Huxley’s and Orwell’s dueling dystopias often co-exist in the same space. The Shanghai Expo was just such a space. The Brave New World aspects of the World’s Fair genre — and the Disney theme parks that should be seen as part of the same lineage of spectacle — are obvious enough: these mega-events, from the first one held in London’s Crystal Palace in 1851 on, have always been largely about two things. One is consumption: this is why cultural critic Walter Benjamin famously referred to them as sites of “pilgrimage to the commodity fetish.” The other is escapist entertainment: the first Ferris Wheel was a hit at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, as were performances by Buffalo Bill and company. The Shanghai Expo was not lacking in either of these features.

In addition, in line with Brave New World’s focus on pleasure rather than fear, World’s Fair and World Expo displays tend to be as upbeat as the Main Street and Tomorrowland ones at Disneyland. They typically stress the growing comforts of modern life and the prospect of a better world to come, and when looking backward, do so with nostalgia and a focus on how the past has prepared us to live better lives now. Their exhibits typically contain few mentions of the anxieties of war and the concern with enemies that Orwell imagined being a central part of our future. True, early World’s Fairs often displayed state-of-the-art military hardware (one of the longest lines in Chicago in 1893 was made up of people waiting to see a massive piece of artillery) and a famous work of art showing war’s devastation made its debut at the World of Tomorrow Exposition held in New York in 1939 (Picasso’s Guernica). Still, the overall thrust has generally been (and remains), as the old song has it, to accentuate the positive.

The specific focus of the Shanghai Expo was the challenge to the world posed by rapid urbanization. This does not, however, mean that the displays lingered on dark environmental issues. Rather, the event’s mission was to focus on how problems can be solved by people working together to achieve common goals. International cooperation was celebrated just as resolutely at the Shanghai Expo as it was in the “It’s a Small World” ride that Walt Disney designed for New York’s 1964/65 World’s Fair — a ride that went on to serve as an emblematic attraction at the theme parks that bear its creator’s name.

There was an optimistic feel to most of the national pavilions that were the main attraction of the Pudong (East Shanghai) side of the 2010 fairgrounds, which gave the setting an “Epcot-on-steroids” feel, with more than 200 countries being represented. The same went for most of the pavilions across the river in Puxi (West Shanghai). These were devoted not to nations but to corporations (GM had one), cities (the Liverpool one, in which the Beatles made a virtual cameo, was a great crowd pleaser) and such topics as imagining the urban future.

The exhibits in all of these pavilions were designed to be distracting and immersive, like Brave New World’s erotic “feelies,” sans the sexuality. Some of the exhibits had elements that were interactive (you could ride a chair lift in the Swiss Pavilion, for instance, and get a panoramic view of a faux Europe made up of nearby national pavilions when it reached its greatest height), but most were designed for passive viewing (many countries, including the United States, relied heavily upon films to tell the story of their nations). Nearly all displays downplayed explicitly political subjects, and history was generally brought into the picture, as it was in a special pavilion devoted to history of World’s Fairs and World Expos, in a tidy fashion, as great things that happened in the past that had paved the way for even better things to come.

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All this may seem far removed from 1984, but there were many specific points during my visit when Orwell’s novel came to mind. One of the most significant things about any World’s Fair is that it affords visitors the opportunity to make imaginary forays to places they may never see in person. That — and the fact that lines to enter them were so short — made stopping in at the Iranian, Cuban, and North Korea pavilions a must for me. At the last of these I found, not surprisingly, a rosy presentation of the land of Kim Jong-Il. In her justly-acclaimed Nothing to Envy: Everyday Life in North Korea, which makes creative and effective use of extensive interviews with North Korean defectors, Los Angeles Times reporter Barbara Demick portrays the country as a starkly Orwellian place. And late in the book she mentions that one of her interviewees, upon reading 1984 after relocating to Seoul, “marveled that George Orwell could have so understood the North Korean brand of totalitarianism.”

The virtual North Korea that I entered at the fairground, by contrast, was anything but dystopian, filled as it was with video loops of well-fed people (no evidence of the famines Demick and others have detailed) and skies with rainbows. This simulation of North Korean life (artifical even by Expo, or Disneyland, standards) failed to convince me that Kim Il-Sung and his successor son have created a people’s “paradise” (a term used in the exhibit). Still, watching the videos there did make me wonder whether I have been too hasty to embrace the idea that only Orwell has relevance; one piece of footage in particular jumped out to me, for it showed an amusement park, suggesting that even in generally Orwellian North Korea a “less arduous” bread-and-circuses approach can sometimes play a role in subduing the population (at least a very privileged segment of it).

The strongest sense of Big Brother’s presence I felt while at the Fair came after I had left the North Korean exhibit. Walking toward my next stop in the Pudong section of the Expo, I got a text message on my cell phone (a Chinese one linked to the country’s sole provider of mobile service), which listed some shows that would be starting soon in pavilions near me. Later that day, when I crossed the river, a new message came, which informed me, in Chinese of course, that, now that I was in Puxi, I should know about the special events taking place in that part of the fairground. It’s fine to see a contrast between Huxley’s focus on what we watch and Orwell’s on who watches us, but as these unbidden texts reminded me, Big Brother can make his presence known in many ways, by giving entertainment advice as well as by issuing warnings. (Mass text messaging is sometimes used by the Chinese state to convey darker messages: initially tolerated nationalistic protesters have sometimes been told by China Mobile that the government’s patience with them is getting strained, so that they would do well to get off the streets, unless they want to take the chance of being arrested.)

A final Orwellian experience I had at the Expo reminded me that there are many ways inconvenient bits of history can be airbrushed away. When I went to the pavilion devoted to past World’s Fairs and Expos, I was especially interested to see how one great international exhibition in particular was dealt with: the 1964/65 one held in Flushing, New York, that had provided me with my only previous World’s Fair experience. Inside the pavilion there were visual reminders of many other World’s Fairs (I walked beneath a mock Eiffel Tower, saw posters featuring Seattle’s Space Needle, read about the ice cream cone being invented in St. Louis in 1904, and so on), but I came across no mention or visual allusion to the one I had gone to as a tot. Why? Because the 1964/65 World’s Fair was not officially recognized by the Bureau International des Expositions, the official body that is to World Expos what the IOC is to the Olympics. It was held too soon after another American event, the Seattle World Expo, for the BIE’s liking. Due to this, and the fact that Cold War politics led to only a smattering of countries participating in it, New York’s last fair is sometimes seen as standing apart from the Expo lineage.

I’m not sure what role, if any, the BIE played in ensuring that I’d see no evidence of the one World’s Fair I remembered while at the 2010 Expo. It would certainly not surprise me to learn that the Chinese organizers were asked to keep their officially recognized Expo free of all reminders of that earlier unofficial one — and complied happily. For there would be no novelty for them about pretending that a famous event had never happened.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chair of the History Department at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know. His reviews and commentaries have appeared in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and a wide range of magazines and journals of opinion, including New Left Review, the TLS, the Nation, the Huffington Post, Time and Newsweek. He is the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies and co-founder of the UCI-based China Beat blog/electronic magazine.

This article appears courtesy of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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By Elvin Lim

If Congressman Anthony Weiner loses his job because of a few lewd pictures, he would probably have lost the most among a long line of unfaithful politicians for having sinned the least. Bill Clinton’s encounters happened in the Oval Office (among other places). At least Larry Craig managed to graze another foot at a bathroom stall. But Anthony Weiner didn’t even go much beyond Twitter. There is a chance that Weiner would endure the political storm (as Senator David Vitter and President Bill Clinton did), by waiting the scandal out and hoping that the uproar subsides. But two things stand in the way.

First, Anthony Weiner has no friends. He hasn’t been around long enough, as Charlie Rangel had when he faced his own scandal, to have built up friendships and loyalties in the House. Actually, many Democrats privately believe that Weiner’s an upstart who has adopted a combative style not to further the collective cause of the party but simply to side-step the rules of seniority in the party and to attract media attention to himself. This is why no one has stood up for Weiner; indeed they have done the reverse. Harry Reid was as only as quick to call for Weiner’s resignation as Nancy Pelosi was to call for a formal ethics investigation.

Second, Weiner didn’t go far enough to actually have, at least no evidence is yet forthcoming to the effect, a full-blown affair. And this may count against him because it increases the sleaze factor in his scandal. If Weiner had had an actual affair, he may actually look more like your typical cheating politician. But instead, he now looks like some wierdo who sends pictures of himself to strangers but did nothing to follow up, suggesting that the sexual pleasure consisted purely in the puerile act of sending lewd photos to unsuspecting victims. (I’m not endorsing a hierarchy of sins here, merely pointing out the arbitrariness of what counts as a damning political sin and what is not.)

The sleaze factor infecting Weiner’s scandal was not aided by the fact that his wife did not join him at his confessional press conference. One reason why David Vitter and Larry Craig survived their scandals is that their wives stood by them, literally. For if the wives could forgive their husbands’ indiscretions, who are we to judge?

Put another way, sexual misconduct does not have to become politically damaging. It was for Gary Hart and Eliot Spitzer, but it wasn’t for John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. The lesson for the politicians is not that they should be faithful to their spouses or even that they shouldn’t get caught; but that if they’re going to cheat, they should do it sans the sleaze. D.C. Madam, anyone?

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears here each week.

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By David Banks

 
When I began training as a journalist in 1987 and bought the requisite copy of McNae it was a slim volume that could be folded into your pocket on visits to court. The last edition, the 20th came in a shade under 700 pages, despite the best efforts of Mark Hanna and myself to slim it down. As well as successive governments’  enthusiasm for legislation that impinges on the media, one of the other reasons for its growth in size has been the emergence of new legal threats like privacy.

This has never been in the news as much as it has in recent months, with barely a week going by without claims of celebrities hiding behind so-called ‘superinjunctions.’ I say so-called because some of the reporting of privacy and injunctions has made the mistake of labeling any injunction a superinjunction.

For clarity, a superinjunction is an order which prevents details of the claimant being discussed, but also prevents publication of the existence of the injunction itself.

Many of the orders described in the media as ‘superinjunctions; were, in fact, anonymised orders – ie the media were freee to say an order had been obtained by, for instance, ‘a Premiership footballer’, but they could not say who he was or give any details that might identify him or others involved in the case.

In fact since 2010 only two superinjunctions have been granted, so they are not perhaps, as common a threat as some might perceive.

Nevertheless, the effect of a superinjunction, when granted, can be severe. This was demonstrated by the Trafigura case in 2009, when the Guardian was injuncted by the oil trading company over allegations concerning the dumping of toxic waste off the Ivory Coast in 2006.

When the Guardian was prevented from reporting a parliamentary question on the affair, editor Alan Rusbridger used Twitter to alert readers to the gagging order. There followed a ‘Twitterstorm’ as followers quickly found the question in parliamentary order papers and so revealed Trafigura’s name.

It is this ability of social media to effectively frustrate injunctions that has led to the recent spate of publicity surrounding privacy. The latest case involved the Manchester United footballer, Ryan Giggs, who was the subject of an anonymised order. However, his name was tweeted by 75,000-plus Twitter users and he was also named during parliamentary debate by MP, John Hemming.

This has led to some, rather foolish calls for Twitter to introduce a delay function so that tweets can be checked before publication – with 175 million users and counting that would be some moderation task.

The courts have made an interesting distinction though between social media exposure and coverage in the traditional press. When tabloid newspapers asked that the injunction on Ryan Giggs be removed because of its widespread breach on Twitter and his naming in Parliament, the judge refused. Mr Justice Eady said that  the injunction still served a purpose in preventing harassment of the footballer by media, which was different to exposure on web media.

This sets up a very interesting confrontation between the courts, social media and the traditional press. The traditional press has been keen to preserve the sort of ‘kiss’n’tell’ story that has been their bread and butter  for so many years and which is now threatened by courts that take the view that sexual relationships, no matter how fleeting, are confidential and therefore private.

There may be some frustration on the part of traditional media that Twitter users are able to publish with apparent impunity the sort of material they cannot print because of an injunction.

There is some question as to how Twitter users got hold of the information originally though. The courts are aware that were they to allow injunctions to be lifted because of social media exposure, then it would be a simple matter for papers to use Twitter as an ‘injunction-buster’ simply by leaking injuncted material to users.

The other very interesting conflict that is being created is the clash between concepts of privacy that have grown out of the European Convention on Human Right and US beliefs in the fundamental right to freedom of speech.

How this conflict will be resolved is far from certain, but it the Giggs case is unlikely to be the last where social media flexes its muscles and leaves traditional media and the courts looking a little flat-footed.

David Banks is Senior Lecturer in Media Law at the University of Sunderland and a Member of the NCTJ Media Law Examinations Board. He is the co-author (with Mark Hanna) of McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists.

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The media are full of news items featuring colour photographs of the brain, showing us the precise location in which a certain thought or emotion, or even love itself, occurs. This leads us to believe that we can directly observe the brain at work, and we have ultimately been seduced into believing that any article accompanied by a brain image or two is more reliable and more scientific than one featuring more mundane images. The below excerpt from Neuromania: On the limits of brain science by Paolo Legrenzi and Carlo Umlitá (and translated by Frances Anderson), explains.

Increasingly often, the press offers explanations of human behaviour by drawings, photographs, and graphic descriptions of sections of the brain which show that part of our grey matter that is activated when we think about something or plan an action. We are told that how we behave depends on the functioning of certain neurons. We hear about new disciplines such as neuroeconomics, neuroaesthetics, neuroethics, neuropolitics, neuromarketing, and even neurotheology (over 20,000 results on Google!).

In our opinion this is not a transitory fashion. On the contrary, it may well be just the tip of an iceberg, of which it would be wise to judge the dimensions to avoid a collision and, more specifically, to avoid it opening a huge hole in our boat. The heart of the iceberg was formed long ago, in the eighteenth century, but, as we shall soon see, at that time it was a breath of fresh air.

In the 1950s, it started to assume significant dimensions. In those days, physics dominated the scientific panorama, or at least the imagination of the educated. The discoveries made by physicists revealed that matter is constituted of relatively few elementary particles which combine in many different ways, liberating previously unimaginable sources of energy. It was then that the other sciences, attracted by a paradigm that reduced the complex to the very simple, attempted to find the lowest possible common denominator applicable to their discipline. At the same time, again following the lead of physics, there was a general attempt to compress knowledge into mathematical models. This meant introducing formal analyses, starting from stylized descriptions of each and every phenomenon. Mathematical models were constructed to represent human behaviour as well as the development of natural events.

When we consider the actions of individuals, whether performed in groups or alone – which is in fact the object of psychology – we have a low-level description of what happens, a level we could almost define as material. This is not the level we normally use when considering everyday life – goals, emotions, actions, thoughts – but it is the simplest, as it corresponds to the functioning of our organism, our body.

Looking at the question from this point of view, man (in the sense of human bodies) is without doubt part of nature. This gives substance to the hope that if in the future we are able to conduct a detailed analysis of every part of the human body, we will have a match between the discoveries of experimental psychologists and the results of our investigations of elementary biological mechanisms. Then we will be able to demolish the complexities of daily life behind its myriad appearances, reducing it to an underlying biological reality (whether dealing with heredity, genetics, or the functioning of the brain).

And so the dream from the past would come true: psychology would become part of that mixture of physics and biology which in the modern world provides an explanation of the human body and its natural history. In this light psychology, and probably the social disciplines as well, would at best be ‘provisional’ sciences. The lexicon of everyday life would be quite another matter altogether; probably we will never be completely rid of that ingenuous psychology formed from descriptions of thoughts, wishes, needs. After all, this is also the language adopted by ‘psychological scientists’ outside the walls of their laboratories.

The old dream cherished by a number of psychologists of rescuing the mind from the dominion of the scientific lexicon is a very attractive simplification, and is extremely powerful in its general organization. Today, with the evolution of novel sophisticated technologies and the consequent advances made in the realm of mind-brain relationships, it seems within reach once more, so we should not be surprised that it has managed to invade the media and show business in various ways (for example, the recent rash of films about robots).

Summing up, a single-language, physics-chemistry and biology, will form the key to revealing the mechanisms of all known phenomena, from the movement of the heavenly bodies to the elementary particles, from the world of nature to the social whirl.

Although this is very attractive in its elegance and simplicity, it is in fact an illusion. It just doesn’t work. Why?

Nowadays when everyone has a mobile phone or a computer, or one of these hybrids that are so much the fashion, there is no dearth of examples that explain why reductionism doesn’t work.

You need to make a call from a mobile phone. Unfortunately you don’t have the instruction manual to hand. You try to conjure up a detailed description of how all the elements that make up the mobile phone function, keeping in mind that they are mostly sand, metals, and plastics (i.e. oil). Would this help you to make that phone call? The fact is that there are various levels of description applicable to machines, artefacts, and organisms, some of which are appropriate for certain purposes but not for others.

If you want to make mobile phones you have to know every single detail of the composite parts of the products parts of the product. However, if you just want to make a call from the telephone which is already assembled and ready for use, then all you need to know are the basics of its software, which are explained in the instruction manual. This is the level that psychology is now able to explain after a century of study of the ‘software’ supplied by the process of natural evolution. This software has been laboriously reconstructed, step by step, inventing experiments to supply clues as to how the human mind works. It was, and is, a complex task.

There is of course a significant difference between mobile phones and humans. Man designs and produces mobile phones but he did not design himself. We build robots, claiming that they run on software similar to the human mind, and that we can interact with them through the same programs that determine thoughts and emotions. However, the robotic hardware was constructed by man, manipulating the inert substances of a computer’s component parts. Man, on the contrary, is the product of natural evolution, developing almost imperceptibly over millions of years, a fact which makes it difficult to reconstruct his natural history a priori as this would require working backwards. Having said that, however, amazing steps forward (or should we say backwards?) have been made in recent years using biological techniques. It is like trying to understand what has happened in an epic movie from the final scenes. The beginning and the central part of the plot are lost. Have you seen Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), a forerunner of the cyberpunk genre, or Steven Spielberg’s ET (1982), a film that established a box-office record? The success of these films ought to have facilitated the assimilation of the concept that the ‘software’ of life is independent of the material of which the living body is composed, but actually they probably produced the opposite effect. In fact, the idea of man as a machine has taken root in the social imagination, based on the concept that even bodies constructed in the most diverse ways can love and be loved.

Paolo Legranzi is Profesor of Cognitive Psychology at Ca’Foscari University, Venice, Italy. Carlo Umlitá teachs neuropsychology at the University of Padua, Italy, where he directs the Galilean School of Higher Studies.

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By Gayle Sulik

A blogger who goes by the name of The Accidental Amazon recently asked: “When did breast cancer awareness become more focused on our breasts than on cancer? Is it because our culture is so obsessed with breasts that it slides right past the C word?”

The Amazon’s questions are important — but they are inconvenient; blasphemous to the pink consumption machine, disruptive to the strong societal focus on pink entertainment, and anti-climactic for the feel-good festivities that have swallowed up popularized versions of breast cancer awareness and advocacy. Her questions are sobering — but sobriety is the last thing that a society drunk on pink wants. We’ve been binging on boobies campaigns and pink M&Ms for too long, and we’ve grown accustomed to the buzz.

After a federal judge in Pennsylvania declared that the “I ♥ Boobies!” bracelets worn in schools represented free speech protected under the 1st Amendment, an interesting debate broke out about language as well as the legitimacy and usefulness of the boobies campaigns. The judicial system, focusing on the former, upheld the tradition that people are free to express themselves unless what they communicate is lewd or vulgar. To them, “boobies” did not fit this category because they were worn in the context of breast cancer “awareness.”

Much of the ongoing debate, and I use this term loosely, has been about discerning whether the Pennsylvania judgment was sound. Is “boobies” an offensive word when used on bracelets or t-shirts in schools? For the most part the discussion has been a polarized virtual shouting match about prudishness versus progressiveness. The commentary quickly “slid right past the C word” to focus on the B word. Boobies is far more titillating to the public than CANCER.

And why not? Sex sells. Playboy, Hooters, Pin-Up girls, pink-up girls. What’s the difference? Women’s sexiness is for sale to the highest bidder, or for $4.99. We’re not too fussy. It’s all about “the girls” getting attention from the boys. Of course, the undercurrent remains that all this nonsense really is about breast cancer. Boys wrote on facebook pages and in editorial posts that they “LOVE BOOBIES” and – in the spirit of breast exam – they’d love to “feel your boobies for you.” Some snickered at anyone who expressed concern about the accuracy of the campaigns, the fact that they diverted money from more useful endeavors such as research, or that they focused on women’s breasts to the exclusion of women’s lives. “Get a life,” one boy said. “Don’t be so angry,” chimed another. Women and men alike chided those who felt differently. After all, who are we to rain on the happy boobies parades?

Peggy Orenstein has tried to place the issue in a larger context, that these “ubiquitous rubber bracelets” are part of a new trend called “sexy breast cancer” that “tends to focus on the youth market, but beyond that, its agenda is, at best, mushy.”

“Rather than being playful, which is what these campaigns are after, sexy cancer suppresses discussion of real cancer, rendering its sufferers — the ones whom all this is supposed to be for — invisible. It also reinforces the idea that breasts are the fundamental, defining aspect of femininity.”

It was clear in the dialogue surrounding the boobies bracelets that it was difficult for many people to hear from diagnosed women who felt offended, unsettled, or angry that they were being forgotten in the pink fanfare. How dare a woman with stage 4 breast cancer, no breasts, no ovaries, and tumors pressing on key nerves and organs suggest that she is not amused with boobies brigades or pink parties that claim to promote awareness but do nothing portray the realities of the disease? Why should anyone consider the perspective of a one-breasted woman with scar tissue on her lungs from radiation treatment who asks why the breast is given more attention than the people who are diagnosed? What about the previously diagnosed women who cannot bear to hear that another woman’s cancer came back, that what she believed was early detection wasn’t? What about the men diagnosed with breast cancer?

In a recent editorial on “The Trouble with Those Boobies Bracelets” in the LA Times, Peggy Orenstein also commented that,

“There is “breast cancer awareness” of course, but given that each October everything from toilet paper to buckets of fried chicken to the chin straps of NFL players look as if they have been steeped in Pepto-Bismol, I think that goal has long since been met.”

I agree. People are “aware” that breast cancer exists. Beyond that, the level of awareness is pretty sketchy. There are more than 1400 not-for-profit organizations in the country dedicated to breast cancer compared to 139 for ovarian cancer, 151 for lung cancer, and 231 for prostate cancer. The number of nonprofits using corporate partnerships and cause-marketing campaigns to spread the message of “awareness” through considerable advertising of products and services (beginning in the 1990s) is also responsible for heightened visibility and attention to breast cancer compared to other illnesses. Breast cancer has been popularized not only through the nonprofits but also through the products. Many, many products. Pink ribbons are plastered on goods in grocery stores, malls, billboards, and there is no real equivalent for the other cancers or diseases.

Billions of dollars spent every year in the name of breast cancer. No cure. Insufficient diagnostic tools. Little understanding of how to prevent the disease or prevent it from recurring. 40,000 deaths per year. Yet the sexy pink consumption machine drones on with breast cancer awareness stores, paint the town pink campaigns, and charity bikini contests.

Sobriety is difficult. Uncomfortable. Strenuous. It may even leave us suffering from withdrawal. But pink culture has taken a toll. The social body can no longer handle this abuse without self-destructing. Pink culture needs an intervention. It won’t be pretty. But it is necessary.

As a start, consider some of these fun new slogans from the blog, I Hate Breast Cancer.

-Let Me Tell You About My Side Effects
-Neuropathy: It’s Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be
-What Part of Incurable Disease Don’t You Understand?
-Thank Goodnesss I Have Chemo Brain, Because You Look Pretty Forgettable
-Screw Research, I’d Rather Buy Pink Crap from a Shallow & Useless Group
-Wear Black & Save the Rack!

Then, check out Breast Cancer Action, Breast Cancer Fund, National Breast Cancer Coalition, Metavivor, Dr. Susan Love’s Army of Women, and other organizations working toward fundamental efforts to identify the causes of breast cancer and the evidence-based knowledge about how to find it and treat it successfully. There are other ways to learn about breast cancer, motivate people to take action, support the diagnosed, change the conversation, and get money to projects and research that will have a chance of making a difference.

— For more information on the boobies campaigns, see my previous essay: “Boobies.” I said it. Now, May I have Your Attention Please?

Gayle A. Sulik, Ph.D. is a medical sociologist and was a 2008 Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities for her research on breast cancer culture. She is author of Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women’s Health. You can read her previous OUPblog posts here and learn more on her website, where this article originally appeared.

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By Karen Greenberg

The most amazing fact about the more than 700 previously unseen classified Guantánamo documents released by WikiLeaks and several unaffiliated news organizations the night of Sunday, April 24, is how little in them is new. The information in these documents — admittedly not classified “top secret” but merely “secret” — spells out details that buttress what we already knew, which is this: From day one at Guantánamo, the U.S. national security apparatus has known very little about the detainees in custody. The United States does not know who they are, how to assess what they say, and what threat they ultimately pose.

Given this vacuum of ignorance, U.S. officials decided at the outset that it was better to be safe than sorry. Therefore, any imaginable way in which behavior or statements could be deemed dangerous led to individual detainees being classified as “high risk.” The result was the policy we have seen since 2002 — a policy of assessing potential danger based on details like what kind of watches the detainees wore, the way they drew on the dirt floors of their cages, and whether they had travel documents on them. In addition, the just-released documents reaffirm the fact that much of the material on the detainees apparently came from hearsay derived from what seems to have been a limited number of interrogations, some performed under circumstances amounting to torture.

It is not just the conclusions of Guantánamo critics like myself that are being verified by these newly found documents. The conclusions of the judges who have sifted through available information to determine just who deserves to be at Guantánamo and who is being held on the basis of insufficient evidence have also been reinforced. In 58 habeas cases spanning both George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s administrations, federal judges have determined that in 36 of the cases there is insufficient evidence to hold these individuals and that often the detention was based on information obtained through hearsay, frequently the result of torture. In other words, the little evidence that existed was largely unreliable.

The sad fact is that these documents tell us more about ourselves than about the detainees. They tell us that U.S. officials to this day know very little based on hard evidence about the majority of those who have been held at Guantánamo, that assessments of risk have all too often been based on flights of imagination that tend to enhance the sense of power and capability of al Qaeda, and that the criteria for determining risk are at best murky. Those deemed to pose a risk ranged from individual detainees who proclaimed angry threats against their guards to those who were believed to have been actively involved in terrorism.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once pointed out, in reference to the failure to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Although the quip may seem facile, it is actually a candid assessment of what has gone wrong at Guantánamo from the time it opened in January 2002. It continues to go wrong to this day. The proper, lawful, most security-minded restatement of Rumsfeld’s maxim would be this: Absence of evidence requires better intelligence, more careful judgments, and more savvy realism. Without facts, it is not only the just treatment of detainees that is at issue — it is the security of the United States itself.

Karen Greenberg is executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law and author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days.

This article is reposted with permission from Foreign Policy.

In the name of giving credit where it’s due, I’d like to do something a little different today and highlight some quality content on other university press blogs. Long live academic publishing!

From Columbia University Press: Judith Butler – Implicated and Enraged

From Harvard University Press: Killing for Coal, in Prime-Time

From MIT Press: And it’s root, root, root for the vector!

From New York University Press: Finding Faith on the Internet

From Princeton University Press: Birding in the City

From University of North Carolina Press: Hummus and Bugles

From Yale University Press: Cartooning is an Art

From University of California Press: How Climate Change Damages Our Health

Want more of The Oxford Comment? Subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes!
You can also look back at past episodes on the archive page.

Featured in this Episode:

Lauren Skypes with Gordon Thompson, Professor of Music at Skidmore College and author of Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out. You can read Thompson’s OUPblog column here.

*     *     *     *     *

Michelle visits the Strand Book Store in New York City and speaks with John McMillian*, author of Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America,

and Jesse Kornbluth, founder of HeadButler.com.

*     *     *     *     *

The Ben Daniels Band

*Read an additional Q&A with John McMillian here.

]]> http://blog.oup.com/2011/04/oxford-comment-8/feed/ 0 0:00:01 Visit us at blog.oup.com The Oxford Comment asks: are we living in the anti-60s? Bieber vs. Beatles! Hipsters vs. Hippies! Let the showdown begin... *Featured, History, Media, Music, UK, US OUPblog clean no http://blog.oup.com/2011/04/linked-up-41/ http://blog.oup.com/2011/04/linked-up-41/#comments Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:33:54 +0000 Kirsty sebmontaz fools 3eanuts lightbox techcrunch peanuts vatican urlesque http://blog.oup.com/?p=15298 Tweet

DISCLAIMER: None of these links are in the spirit of April Fools, so worry not. You’re not going to click anything that will cause a startling pop-up or download something you don’t want on your computer. We wouldn’t do that to you. (Or would we?) (No, we would not.)     -Lauren & Kirsty

This machine is running on magic. [Urlesque]

I’m not much of a cats-on-the-internet person, but you have to see this. [Next Web]

10 stories that could be April Fools Pranks, but aren’t. [BBC]

Here’s a breakdown of April Fools jokes you might fall for today. [TechCrunch]

Have a lot of reading to do? Then learn to speed read. [Column 5]

The escaped Bronx Zoo cobra’s twitter? It was great while it lasted. [City Room]

When pop-ups attack: Muppets edition [YouTube]

Who says twins don’t have a secret language? [YouTube]

Time Magazine has a new photo feature, LightBox. [Time]

This kid can pop-and-lock like…someone who is very talented at it. [Daily What]

The existential despair of Peanuts cartoons when you excise the last panel. [3eanuts]

Take a mental vacation to the Sistine Chapel. [Vatican]

This is terrifying, but also incredible. [Sebmontaz]

By Philip Howard

Political discontent has cascaded across North Africa and the Middle East. Entrenched dictators with decades of experience controlling political life have fallen or had to make major concessions. In the West, some observers discount the role of digital media in political change, others give it too much emphasis.

Digitally enabled protesters in Tunisia and Egypt tossed out their dictator. The protests in Libya have posed the first serious challenge to Gaddafi’s rule in decades and the crisis in that country is not over. Several regimes have had to dismiss their cabinets and offer major concessions to their citizens. Discontent has cascaded over transnational networks of family and friends to Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Ben Ali ruled Tunisia for 20 years, Mubarak reigned in Egypt for 30 years, and Gaddafi has held Libya in a tight grip for 40 years. Yet their bravest challengers are 20- and 30-year-olds without ideological baggage, violent intentions or clear leaders.

The answer, for the most part, is online. And it is not just that digital media provided new tools for organizing protest and inspiring stories of success from Tunisia and Egypt. The important structural change in Mideast political life is not so much about digital ties between the West and the Arab street, but about connections between Arab streets.

But a reasonable foreign policy question remains. If digital media changes the political game in countries run by tough dictators, who will fall next?

The Algerian government has had to lift an incongruous 19-year “state of emergency” and are gearing for more demonstrations. Even in the constitutional monarchies there has been significant turnover in government Ministers and Cabinets in the effort to respond–or placate–citizens. In Bahrain, Jordan and Yemen, regimes have had to make concessions to activists with the newly found gall to protest openly. Last week, the Day of Rage in Saudi Arabia drew modest crowds, and Gaddafi began to retake ground. Still, women from a dozen Arab nations coordinated events to mark International Women’s Day, using digital media to call out record numbers of participants and advance a tech-savvy strategy for capturing news headlines.

It is pretty clear that digital media has had an important role in changing the system of political communication during sensitive moments in regime transition. Images of jubilant protesters in Tunisia inspired others across the region. Facebook provided an invaluable logistical infrastructure for the initial stages of protest in each country. Twitter fed people in country and outside with information about where the action was, where the abuses were, and what the next step would be.

From the point of view of social movement theory, digital media helped a peculiar group of people organize in a peculiar way. For the most part, the early days of protest in each country involved a disaffected, middle class of government workers, students, lawyers and entrepreneurs (not unions, urban poor, and radical Islamists). They organized relatively peacefully, and without clear leaders.

For some observers, the Arab Spring was an inevitable surprise. The rapid diffusion of digital media has been shown to have mostly positive consequences in many parts of the world, though often for different reasons. Both Egypt and Tunisia have more tech-savvy citizens then one would expect given their level of income. The other countries with an educated population and a small but tech-savvy community of student and civil society groups include many of the countries are still “in play”.

The modern recipe for democratization includes several key ingredients. Wired civil society groups have proven particularly agile at sensitive moments for regimes, particularly during rigged elections. Only the regimes made wealthy through oil and natural gas reserves have had the resources to keep civil society actors at bay in these critical moments. Several significant political transitions over the last 15 years fit this recipe, as do recent cases of Egypt and Tunisia.

Social scientists are loathe to predict, and rightly so. So instead of predicting political upheaval, it may be better to think about countries with the kinds of ingredients that go into the modern recipe for democratization. Jordan, Morocco, and Syria all have complex political histories and unique domestic profiles. They also have sophisticated, tech-savvy publics, economies not dependent on fuel exports, and regimes that may try to rig elections in the next two years.

Dr. Philip N. Howard is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. He directs the World Information Access Project and the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam, and is author of The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam.

On medical progress and stage 4 breast cancer

By Gayle A. Sulik

Elizabeth Edwards died from stage 4 breast cancer (also known as metastatic breast cancer) on December 7th, 2010 at the age of 61. Ms. Edwards was a well-known public figure, notably the wife of former Senator John Edwards, and an accomplished lawyer, author, and health advocate. Her death inspired new discussions of Stage 4 breast cancer, finally shining a light on what has been a relatively invisible segment of the breast cancer community: the diagnosed who live from scan to scan, treatment to treatment, with the knowledge that neither medical progress nor positive attitude will likely keep them from dying from breast cancer.

Following Ms. Edwards’ breast cancer diagnosis in 2004, she quickly became a celebrity survivor. She expressed optimism about cure and continued to pursue an active personal and professional life. After learning in 2007 that she had a recurrence which had already spread to her bones, Ms. Edwards still looked for a “silver lining” despite the fact that her breast cancer was no longer considered to be curable. At that point, doctors called her breast cancer “treatable” – meaning that she would be in some kind of therapy for the rest of her life.

Ms. Edwards knew that she might not live to see her children grow up. Yet  public discussions were hesitant to acknowledge this reality. I remember the PBS news report that featured clips from a press conference in which Edwards’ medical doctor, Lisa Carey of the University of North Carolina Breast Center, stated that many women with stage 4 breast cancer “do very well for a number of years.”

In the interview that followed with Dr. Julie Gralow of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the discussion of prognosis was similarly vague. Dr. Gralow rightly revealed that doctors have “no crystal ball” to see the future and that average survival rates cannot be used to predict an individual’s life span. However, she also circumvented the prognosis issue by using phrases such as “years of survival” and living out “long lives.” We heard about “terrific new therapies,” “great treatments…that don’t cause a lot of symptoms,” and and a new “era of personalized cancer therapy.” Dr. Gralow stressed that Ms. Edwards gives hope to those who are fighting metastatic breast cancer and that “her biggest issue is that she has a couple of young kids to raise.”

Immediately following Ms. Edwards’ death, Dr. Barron Lerner wrote a warm, thoughtful, and informative essay in The New York Times about the lessons society can learn from Ms. Edwards, including the limits of current treatments and the dubiousness of the term “survivor” that, while empowering in some ways can be misleading in others. For the 49,000 new people each year who develop what amounts to be a terminal breast cancer condition, the term can be empty if not infuriating. He acknowledged further that, “there was no way to sugarcoat the latest news.” Finally, some of the truths about metastatic disease were revealed without the sweetness and hype.

The Times continued its reporting of metastatic breast cancer a month later in “A Pink-Ribbon Race, Years Long,” which spoke about the limitations of medical progress for this segment of the diagnosed. Statements from notable medical doctors acknowledged that, despite the fact that stage 4 patients “enjoy a higher quality of life than patients did in the past, because treatments are better focused and have fewer side effects,” these treatments add only an “incremental amount to the length of life.” Likewise, according to Dr. Susan Love, “The average survival of women with metastatic breast cancer from the time of the first appearance of the metastasis is between two to three and a half years.” Although no one knows where an individual prognosis fits within average survival statistics, Ms. Edwards’ passage from breast cancer diagnosis (2004) to recurrence (2007) to death (2010) reveals this timeline with unsettling clarity.

Elizabeth Edwards’ journey with breast cancer tells a story of survivorship that is complicated and tragic. Except for its public character, it is not unlike those of the 40,000 women and hundreds of men who die from breast cancer every year. Though she could have been an outlier like the occasional woman who has metastases throughout her bones and is alive 20 years later, outliers do not negate the patterns. Stage 4 cancers of all types are the silent killers and, surprisingly, the least funded categories of cancer in terms of research.

Despite the lessons we can learn from Elizabeth Edwards, there is a strong societal push to see the cancer glass as half full, particularly when focusing on survivorship statistics as indicators of medical progress. Although there has been a 20 percent rise in cancer survivorship overall from 2001 to 2007, The New York Times reports that “the death rate from cancer…has stayed virtually the same as it was in 1950.” Yes, 65 percent of cancer survivors have lived at least five years since diagnosis, 40 percent have lived 10 years or more, and nearly 10 percent have lived 25 years or longer. In turn, 35 percent will have died in five years, 60 percent will have died in ten, and, for 65 percent of the diagnosed, cancer will be the eventual cause of death. A glass that is half full is also half empty.

I want to have hope for my friends and family members who are dealing with aggressive and late stage cancers. I even wish for miracles. But hope for a society wrestling with cancer wrests upon the clear acknowledgment that the only true indicator of medical progress overall would be a significant reduction in the number of deaths and vast improvements in quality of life. For the term survivor to have meaning in this situation there must be an understanding that at stage 4, the only way to “survive” breast cancer is to die from something else. As a society, we’ve got to do better than that.

Gayle A. Sulik, Ph.D. is a medical sociologist and was a 2008 Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities for her research on breast cancer culture. She is author of Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women’s Health. You can read her previous OUPblog posts here and learn more on her website, where this article originally appeared.