Abstract
The anonymous masses are no longer anonymous. They never were, of course, for the term invariably carried pejorative overtones and performed a range of ideological functions. These aside, the sense of many people remaining unknown is no longer as easy to sustain, and a major reason for this is the varied set of developments that have occurred in the shift to digital media. Homing in on just one of the many examples one could cite, today any image or video can, without the person involved knowing, be uploaded onto the Internet and, perhaps, go viral, making the person attain a massive form of visibility and turning them overnight into an unwilling celebrity of sorts. Where the widespread dissemination of such context-escaped images or videos is not only unsolicited but also deleterious to one’s reputation or self-integrity, leading to humiliation, shame, reproach or ridicule, the results can be shattering. This kind of Internet exposure is what Bernhard Poerksen and Hanne Detel refer to as the unleashed scandal.
Traditionally, scandals have always been unleashed, with the reins suddenly let loose on what was, prior to the revelation, relatively unknown, sending it out into the public realm with often devastating consequences. The form of scandalisation Poerksen and Detel call the unleashed scandal is quite different to the conventional scandal involving an already public figure who has been revealed in some wrongdoing or malfeasance, or, in what is strictly the commercialist side of scandal, simply caught on camera by some paparazzo in a ‘loverat’ situation. Financial fraud, corruption, abuse of power are worthy of our indignation, outrage and anger, even though we know that scandals are often fabricated and fuelled by sometimes ruthless forms of journalism, and that some of our responses to scandal (schadenfreude, voyeurism, rather callous amusement) are not very edifying. We might also ask whether continuous cycles of scandal bring about any effective social, political or cultural change. Scandals rise, peak, fall and are forgotten, having served their short-lived newsworthy purpose for both profit-motivated intent and moral proprieties. The wheel turns again. The world remains the same.
Against this familiar pattern, the argument advanced by Poerksen and Detel is that a new schema of scandal making and consuming is emerging. Scandal is no longer only initiated by professional journalists; it is far more dependent on digital technologies and social media; targets or victims now range from social and political elites to quite innocent people who have hitherto never been in the public eye; topics are not confined to matters of great import, as for example in the phone-hacking scandal in Britain; scandals are now fed and spread by general public involvement; and scandal management has become even more difficult, if not impossible, to execute. Disclosure and its consequences seem increasingly arbitrary and uncontrollable, involving a switch from norm violation to unstable attribution, and making the meaning of what constitutes a scandal more and more a matter of opinion. This argument is pursued by Poerksen and Detel through a series of case studies which show such loss of control as an everyday experience that is contingent on the collapse of contexts entailed by data movement and its net mutability, and as a disturbing consequence of media democratisation.
An initial chapter compares scandal in ‘old’ and ‘new’ media and looks at the relationship between them via two cases that are very much public knowledge (Wikileaks, and the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair), one that is only relatively well-known (the PhD plagiarism case involving the German Minister of Defence, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg), and one that has passed me by till now (involving the blog written by Jessica Cutler who worked in the office of a republican senator in Washington). This is followed by an examination of how, at least in diametrical terms, the powerless are now objects and victims of scandals to a much greater extent than in the pre-digital era. The cases here include the ill-considered rant, delivered by Gao Quianhui following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, while filming herself via the webcam on her computer, and the Wang Qianyuan intervention amid protesters during a student demonstration at Duke University. Many of the examples in the book demonstrate how easy it is to tripwire a scandal. The means of doing so are within most people’s reach. With some cases, it seems surprising that they have been so widely taken up. This is not always readily predictable, while with others it would have seemed obvious that they contained all, or at least many, of the classic ingredients of scandal from the start. The Abu Ghraib case, treated at some length here, is a notorious example.
In a short final chapter, Poerksen and Detel ask what is involved in the loss of control which is a sine qua non of the unleashed scandal. The answer includes negligence or incompetence, lack of imagination or awareness of what digital media can do, and maybe the conscious disclosure of secrets, maybe the overt desire for revenge, maybe the craving for fame. To this, they point to a meta-pattern underlying and connecting all the stories and cases they have dealt with. This is context damage. Here, the originating context of various utterances and actions has been blown open, and new meanings or new aspects of significance imparted to them. Their spatial and temporal nature changes, micro-publics become macro-publics, different cultural values may be applied and what was thought to be fleeting or transitory becomes permanent. What all this amounts to remains to be seen. Poerksen and Detel fully realise that it is simply too soon to offer any definitive assessment, and wisely note that optimism and pessimism, when elevated to principles and dogmas, ‘are equally dim-witted and but expressions of a sort of obsessive thinking that tends to react to different phenomena with essentially identical approaches’ (p. 28).
Usefully read alongside Julian Petley’s edited collection, Media and Public Shaming (reviewed in European Journal of Communication (EJC), 29: 3, June 2014, pp. 384–385), this is a valuable addition to the literature on scandal, and more broadly to work on the ubiquitous digital media that have so rapidly permeated our daily lives. The various shifts and patterns of movement involving loss of control which are traced and discussed by Poerksen and Detel may mean that the very semantics of the term ‘scandal’ are flooding over their usual boundaries and expanding into quite different terrain. This is something to which they could have given greater consideration, particularly in relation to the different forms of the phenomenon as these are now evident, along with a longer term perspective on the degree and configuration of any precedence that might be involved. They could also have attended more to the paradoxical situation in which loss of control coexists with an increasing tightening of control over online activities by state and interstate institutions. Nonetheless, Poerksen and Detel have produced a highly worthwhile intervention in public discussion and debate about the Internet and digital media and the ways in which they are developing. The evidence they adduce is carefully and insightfully analysed, and their failure to offer a rapid-fire remedy or absolute-sounding verdict is to be roundly applauded.