Tag Archives: Politics

Social Media, Protest and the Arab Spring

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Blogging about new research just published in the journal Media, Culture & Society, Dr Tim Markham asks whether, when it comes to social media and political uprisings, we’re just seeing what we want to see.

social-media-1430522_1920When I travelled to Cairo last April, one of the first things I did was to visit Tahrir Square, scene of some of the most evocative and stirring events of what came to be known as the Arab spring of 2011. Not much was happening, and the banners and flags I spied at the opposite corner turned out to be knock-off Manchester United merchandise. It’s not uncommon for visitors to be met with encounters of extraordinary serendipity (“You’re from Nottingham? My cousin is a student there!”) as an opening gambit in the tourist trade, and I was quickly identified as yet another politics junkie and deftly plied with implausible yet seductive tales of intrigue and pending drama to soften me up for the inevitable invitation to buy something or other. Much has happened in Egypt since, but it was a useful reminder that revolutions are rarely a matter of unstoppable momentum or constant mayhem, and that the politics we identify in them isn’t lofty and abstract but the stuff of everyday life and work. I was in town to interview journalists at the newspaper Al-Ahram, who displayed all the bravery, cynicism, determination and frustration you’d expect. For them too political principles were heartfelt but rooted in routine, and when I asked one reporter how much things had changed for her over the previous two years, she captured this nicely by responding “Oh, I’m still optimistic but mostly I’m just busier”.

An awful lot has been written about the Arab spring (it’s okay to use this phrase in Cairo – everyone does, though it’s lathered in irony) by journalists, activists and academics, and much of it has been freighted with a combination of ideology and wishful thinking. Yet my trip wasn’t an attempt to scythe through the fictions swirling through academia and the twittersphere to get at the real truth of the Arab spring. Not really. It was part of a broader project aiming to better understand how we think about protest, political change and the role that different kinds of media play. Most commentators, whether western or Arab, seemed to agree that something unique was building in the Middle East a few years ago, but the way we talked about it reveals as much about us as it does about events on the ground. Specifically, the problematic picture that emerges from my research is one of fragile political shoots that need to be protected – not only from new forms of political authoritarianism or extremism, but also from mainstream media in the form of western corporate behemoths and regional broadcasters such as Al Jazeera, collectively characterised as clumsy or conspiratorial depending on personal preference. And not only from media but from ivory tower political analysts – Arab and western alike – deemed naïve, patronising or arrogant. For me, this is where it really gets interesting.

As for the media, as hard as it is to credit these days most journalists are well-meaning, and few wake up with a burning desire to delegitimise political dissent or to portray citizens of distant nations as backward, uncivilised or simply ‘other’. But there’s a prominent and longstanding argument in academia that individual intentions count for little when the whole media industry is programmed to churn out certain truths. That’s without reckoning, however, with what quickly became the only game in town for pundits and profs alike: the irresistible rise of social media. Now, we know of course that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all played a part, and there’s certainly a great deal of interest in the possibilities that these platforms open up, going on the number of articles winging about on academia.edu and many of the PhD proposals we receive (not that I’m complaining – keep them coming!). But too often it’s assumed that there’s something about social media – their perceived structurelessness, their apparent lack of hierarchy – that is naturally geared towards generating a new, dynamic, weightless form of politics, one that is preferable to the familiar sclerotic, decadent kind we increasingly look on with contempt.

There is a danger here of seeing what we want to see, not helped by the tendency to use biological and ecological metaphors to encapsulate the essence of social media, and then to let these metaphors (waves, viruses, organisms, ecosystems) act as a substitute for methodical, dare I say dry, analysis. Likewise there’s a predilection in the academic literature for creative, imaginative acts of dissent, and for reading something radical into seemingly apolitical things like, in one instance, dressing scruffily. Here, there’s talk of protest cultures emerging like fragile life forms that need to be nurtured, and not smothered by the strictures of conventional politics.

As much as I like the idea of living in a world where these ways of thinking about social media and protest ring true, it’s a world based on a fantasy of structurelessness – the idea that a more progressive, more authentic politics will emerge organically and spontaneously once we’ve stripped away the tired institutions and paradigms of politics, media and academia. But that’s not how it seems to the journalists at Al-Ahram, nor to the unfashionable band of activists and academics, myself included, who maintain that politics is a slog, and it often lacks the poetry we’d like to find in it.

The original article was published in Media, Culture and Society vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 89-104. You can also read it on academia.edu. Dr Tim Markham is Reader in Journalism and Media in the department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies. You can follow him on Twitter at @TimMarkham.

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Mothers, murderers and mistresses: the empresses of ancient Rome

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Professor Catharine EdwardsProfessor Catharine Edwards, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, will be presenting Mothers, murderers and mistresses: the empresses of ancient Rome, on BBC4 from Wednesday 29 May, 9pm.

Female members of the imperial family, the wives, daughters – and particularly mothers – of Roman emperors are some of the most colourful characters in Tacitus’ and Suetonius’ accounts of Rome in the early imperial age.  Livia, wife of Rome’s first emperor Augustus, and mother of its second – Tiberius, emerges as the lynch-pin of the family – charming, politically adept, devious – and prepared to stop at nothing – including murder – to secure her son’s succession to the imperial throne. Agrippina, sister of the emperor Caligula, wife of Claudius and mother of Nero, outdoes even Livia in her outrageous plotting. She seduces the emperor Claudius, who happens to be her uncle, becomes his wife, then later murders him as soon as her son Nero is old enough to take over. Agrippina, it seems, longs to rule the empire herself. Nero cannot bear his mother’s domineering and eventually has her killed.

Other women, most strikingly Augustus’ only daughter, Julia, and Claudius’ first wife, Messalina, attract attention for their flagrant sexual excesses. One ancient writer describes Julia entertaining her lovers in public in the Roman forum, while Messalina is said to have taken part in a competition with Rome’s leading prostitute and won, satisfying 25 clients in 24 hours – if, that is, we are to believe the scandalized reports of Roman commentators.

Gender and Power in Ancient Rome

I’ve always been interested in the interrelationship between gender and power in ancient Rome. This was a key concern in my first book, The politics of immorality in ancient Rome (Cambridge 1993). It’s also something that drew me to publish a translation of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars (Oxford World’s Classics 2000), while Tacitus’ characterization of Agrippina features particularly in my more recent Death in ancient Rome (Yale 2007). When I was approached by Tom Webber of Hotsauce TV to research and present a three-part series on Roman imperial women I jumped at the chance.

Piecing together the stories of women

The stories of these women, though gripping, are often lost sight of, even when we focus on individual Roman emperors – let alone in studies of military or administrative history. Can we ever hope to recover something of their point of view? Tantalisingly, Agrippina herself wrote an account of her family’s history, which is now lost, though Tacitus drew on it in writing his Annals. What kind of a view of Roman history did this offer? Would it have given us a flavour of what it felt like to be almost at the pinnacle of Roman power, yet always ultimately dependent on the continuing favour of an erratic and perhaps not very bright young man obsessed with music and sex? Agrippina was probably fully justified if she thought she could do a much better job of running the empire than her teenage son.

Another question our series sets out to explore is how much influence these women really had. Fleeting references in ancient literature, as well as texts inscribed on stone, are pieced together to reveal Livia, for instance, getting involved in the affairs of subject communities in the eastern Roman empire, interceding with Augustus on behalf of the islanders of Samos or advising Salome, sister of Herod the Great, on whom she should marry.

Envy or admiration?

Agrippina and Nero

Agrippina and Nero

The ancient evidence relating to these women is often highly contradictory.  One particular challenge we face is explaining the striking mismatch between literary accounts, which so often highlight these women’s shocking excesses, whether of ambition, avarice or sexual desire and, on the other hand, the coins and works of sculpture (such as the relief shown above, in which Agrippina places a wreath on Nero’s head) which seem to recognize their position and influence as completely legitimate. Did Romans  – and the inhabitants of the empire more generally – resent these imperial women or admire them – or is the picture more complex? Venerated, envied, viewed with suspicion, feared and sometimes hated they certainly provoked strong emotions.

Above all we need to be cautious about taking ancient accounts of their scandalous misbehavior, all those stories of adultery and poisoning, at face value. The Romans often prided themselves on their rugged masculinity; political power in Roman antiquity is characterized as something that is – or ought to be – a masculine preserve. The advent of the principate (as ancient historians term the monarchical regime which succeeded the Roman republic) brought significant political change. In a system where power was transmitted through the family, female members of that family came to have enormous importance. Many of the traditional Roman ruling class, the senatorial elite, resented the rule of one family and focused their resentment on the influence of its women. And what better way to undermine the authority of an emperor than to ridicule him for being under a woman’s thumb, whether scheming wife or domineering mother?

Watch a trailer for the documentary, starting on 29 May 2013, 9pm, BBC4:

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Why and how the EU’s Working Time Directive matters

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This post was contributed by Dr Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Director of the MSc programme in European Politics and Policy. In this blog post he reports part of his ESRC-funded (grant RES-000-22-2510) research on the implementation of the Working Time Directive in Britain and France by governments of the Left and the Right.

The renewed attention to the European Union’s Working Time Directive in the UK is not undeserved. This directive exemplifies the conflict between a neo-liberal vision (of the UK and the EU as a whole) couched in unfettered markets and a centre-left alternative that acknowledges that effective rules and institutions are necessary if market power is to be harnessed for the benefit of the many.

The history of the regulation of working time is permeated by a struggle between those who initially sought to ‘humanize’ work or, later, regulate working time so as to boost employment by sharing the proceeds of productivity gains, and their opponents who have long argued that regulating time increases production costs and endangers jobs. In addition to the point of principle that, as François Mitterrand put it, ‘life is not a mere appendix to work’, those on the Left often point out the well-documented negative consequences of long working hours on health. They also argue that, since the distribution of bargaining power between employers and employees is unequal, especially in conditions of mass unemployment, governments and/or trade unions should strive to deal with it as a collective issue. Their neo-liberal opponents argue that it is a matter for ‘the market’, i.e. individual employees and their employers.

The European Union’s Working Time Directive was enacted in 1993 and it is part of the legislative measures that exemplify the determination of Jacques Delors (backed by several national governments) to add a social dimension to the single market, a strategic decision which played a major role in the British trade union movement’s pro-European turn in the late 1980s. The directive creates statutory rights that millions of workers now take for granted, including a limit to the amount of time an employee can be required to work (48 hours per week on average, including overtime, calculated usually over four months), weekly and daily rest periods, rest breaks and a right to four weeks’ paid annual leave that cannot be replaced by an allowance.

These were rather radical measures for an economy (such as the UK’s) that relied extensively on low pay and its sibling, i.e. a culture of very long working hours. In 1996 the Conservative government estimated that, prior to the introduction of the directive into UK law, some 2.1 million employees did not conform with the daily and weekly rest provisions, 2.7 million regularly worked more than 48 hours per week and about 200,000 exceeded the directive’s night work limit. Moreover, up to 3.8 million workers stood to benefit from the directive’s provisions on paid annual holidays since there was no statutory right to paid annual holidays in this country, until the introduction of directive into UK law by the New Labour government. In 1998 the New Labour government also estimated that 3.5 million night workers in Britain stood to benefit from the regular health checks stipulated by the directive.

The British Conservatives love to hate this directive though not because of its provenance. On the surface, their argument focuses on the need for flexibility. This ignores flexibility-promoting clauses such as (a) derogations that are possible if agreed by the two sides of industry but on condition of the provision of equivalent rest periods, (b) the exclusion of entire groups of workers (e.g., initially, doctors in training) but also (c) the famous opt-out clause which allows individual workers (not entire countries) to choose to exceed the 48-hour limit whilst complying with the remainder of the directive.  Given these clauses and the fact that this and several other EU directives in the socio-economic domain allow individual countries to pursue higher standards, one can conclude that Conservative politicians’ references to flexibility only mean one thing: the dilution of standards and a race to the bottom, i.e. the problem that directives such as this are meant to resolve.

When the New Labour government transposed this directive into UK legislation, it did so in a manner that clearly distinguished itself from the declared intentions of its Conservative predecessor that had fought and lost a legal battle to have the directive annulled by the European Court of Justice. The scope of the UK regulations is much broader, thus protecting more workers. The regulations also establish a shorter qualification period for paid annual leave, introduce more generous provisions in the agricultural sector and employ a more generous formula for the calculation of holiday pay than the method used even in the engineering industry where pay rates were not problematic, establish a longer in-work rest break and a mechanism so that ‘workforce agreements’ can be reached where there is no recognised independent trade union. However, the New Labour government also chose to transpose the opt-out clause in line with its ‘business-friendly’ image.

As regards the day-to-day implementation of the directive in the UK, evidence (such as the involvement – however imperfect – of the Health and Safety Executive) indicates that the New Labour government intended to make it work in practice but the effect of its efforts has been mitigated by the determination to remain as faithful as possible to its business-friendly profile. As a result, first, there is evidence of abuse of the opt-out by some unscrupulous employers in Britain’s flexible labour market, with individual workers being asked to sign up to the opt-out alongside their work contract, thus effectively turning the former into an (illegal) condition for the latter. This is one of the reasons why centre-left politicians across Europe have tried to abolish the opt-out clause but were defeated by a blocking coalition led by the New Labour government. Second, both in Britain and elsewhere, there are many more problems in sectors of the economy (such as catering, cleaning, restaurants, hotels) that are dominated by low skills, low pay and low levels of trade union membership.

The conflict between a neo-liberal vision (of the UK and the EU as a whole) and a centre-left alternative (regulated capitalism) is ongoing. That is the choice facing citizens across Europe today and one that makes a compelling case for participation in the European elections of May 2014.

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The West Wing

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This post was contributed by Dr Janet McCabe, a lecturer in Media and Creative Industries in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies.

Credit: The Obama-Biden Transition Project

‘America’s possibilities are limitless … My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it so long as we seize it together.’ President Barack Obama used these words at his second-term inaugural address. His oratory resuscitated the language of the US Constitution and its ambition spoke of an unabashed liberal agenda, and reveals once more how Obama understands only too well how words and texts have the force to reform politics, even change government—something President Josiah ‘Jed’ Bartlett (Martin Sheen) from NBC’s award-winning political drama, The West Wing, also appreciated.

Back in 2006, however, when The West Wing ended its seven-year run, the political landscape looked rather different. The beltway series concluded with the inauguration of America’s first Hispanic president—the youthful, charismatic, but unseasoned coalition-building newcomer who talked impassionedly of change and hope, which, at the time, looked idealistic at best and awkwardly contrived at worse.

I started writing the TV Milestone book on the show two years later, at the very moment when the 2008 presidential campaign started to ignite genuine excitement—and suddenly The West Wing began to seem rather prophetic. The show prefigured with remarkable accuracy the real presidential campaign: the long and bitterly fought contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Obama, a Republican ticket mired in entrenched ideological schism, and a ‘pro-choice’ nominee with appeal beyond his conservative base (only to be held back by it). Somehow The West Wing looked pertinent, as having something vitally important to tell us about contemporary US politics, history and culture. Time in fact had served to skew our sense of this show as somehow significant, and it was this sense of relevancy and import that I set out to explore in the book.

Judging the achievement of any show is a precarious business and it was a question I certainly I struggled with as I wrote the monograph. The West Wing began in the closing days of the last Democrat to occupy the White House, a post-Monica Lewinsky era of political scandal and partisan vitriol. Aspiring to turn around the deep cynicism pervading American political life, the NBC beltway drama combined the representation of the quotidian with high-minded governance and debated weighty political questions alongside stories of its all-too-fallible characters. Its visual pace was kinetic, its dialogue smart and witty, and its weekly civics lesson delivered with the help of the latest television image-making technology. And then there was Aaron Sorkin. Bringing new levels of stylish wit and intelligence to primetime defined The West Wing as exceptional; and credit for that went, more often than not, to this very modern of television auteurs.

At its height The West Wing was the hottest show on American network television. Big cast, big ideas, big financial investment, big profits—the series proved a powerful asset to its broadcaster as well as the company that produced it, Warner Bros. Television. Studying the media history reveals that the multi-Emmy-award-winning political series mattered because it mattered to those who mattered. The West Wing may have ushered in new ways of representing politics in television drama, but it also contributed to NBC’s distinctive channel brand as well as delivered one of the most elite audiences of any primetime show, which made its commercial time an exceedingly attractive buy. Interviews I conducted with buyers and schedulers from Europe confirmed a similar demographic profile. So while The West Wing may not have scored high in the ratings, it remained a prestigious and important acquisition, attracting a select yet loyal audience among ABC1 adults living in metropolitan areas.

Just as President Bartlet, and later Representative Matthew Santos (Jimmy Smits), seduced viewers with oratory of uplift, urgency and unity, so did a young mixed-race senator from Illinois with promise to heal a divided, post-civil rights, post-9/11 America—a commitment he, as president, recently renewed. Of course, the Obama victories took decades to cultivate, beginning with the legacy of civil rights. But somehow The West Wing paved the way for how we have come to read the machinations of political power, as well as how we expect our politics to ‘look’ and sound. In and through oratory, politics, and aesthetics, the series kept alive the history and destiny of the American experience. Obama may tap into that side of the nation that sees itself as idealistic and inspirational, but as I argue in the book it is a side that for seven years The West Wing never stopped talking about.

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