Paul Chambers was in the High Court yesterday, appealing his conviction for ‘menacing communications’ after posting a tweet in frustration. His lawyer David Allen Green has written a great summary of the case over at the New Statesman.
Here’s an Al-Jazeera news report on the appeal.
Amazingly, Al Jazeera asked yrstrly onto the programme after they transmitted this package, to speak for English PEN on the issue of twitter censorship. Sadly, my 3 minutes of International Fame are not appended to the clip above. (UPDATE: My interview is now online here). The discussion was less about the Chambers case in particular, and more about where one draws the line and censors what one can say on social networks.
My aide memoir, listing people who have been censored for social media postings, was very useful. To the three cases I cited there, we should also add Liam Stacey, who posted gleeful, racist tweets after Fabrice Muamba had a heart attack, and Josh Cryer who sent racist abuse to Stan Collymore. On a releated list, we might consider Leigh Van Bryan, who was detained by the US authorities after posting tweets saying he was going to “destroy America” and “dig up Marylin Monroe” on a forthcoming trip.
Leading into my interview, presenter Felicity Barr also mentioned the case of Hamza Kashgari, who is being prosecuted in Saudi Arabia for blasphemy (which could carry the death penalty) after posting a poem on Twitter.
The key question I had to answer was whether we should allow racist tweeting. My answer was that criminalising such vile and obnoxious messages does not challenge the root cause of racism, but simply sends such sentiments underground where they become more insidious. Furthermore, criminalising offensive messages gives a green light to countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran and China to prosecute people for tweets that they deem ‘offensive’, which naturally includes those that criticise the Government! When the censorship of Twitter was discussed last year during The Riots, the Chinese government were quick to use that as justification for their own draconian policies.
I was also able to make the point that allowing people to say abhorrent things does not mean we allow them to go unchallenged. In fact, we have a moral obligation to condemn them and argue with them, in the hope that these horrible views do not spread further. Kenan Malik has the set text on this point.
Let us not forget that there was nothing racist in Paul Chambers’ tweet. It was obviously a joke and common sense should have prevailed. The fact that the Crown Prosecution Service and the Magistrates who heard the case could not tell the difference between a genuine bomb threat and a joke shows that the people hearing the case are neither digital natives nor digital immigrants, but digital xenophobes who have no idea of how ordinary people speak and communicate. The judiciary should understand and relate to the people over whom they preside. One tweet I read said that, during the hearing yesterday, one judge smiled when the offending tweet was read out… So let us hope the Judges in the High Court are a little more savvy than their colleagues in the lower courts.
More importantly: The fact that Chambers was prosecuted at all is testament to the way in which our legal processes have been warped by the fear of a terrorist attack. The entire purpose of terrorism is to sow such fear that the society breaks down. In the prosecution of Chambers, we see that process in action.
Category: Diary (Page 116 of 301)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
I thought this image posted by Anthony Painter was emblematic of… something.
@anthonypainter: will.he.is #hackneyweekend http://t.co/NUM95DTg
As an aside, it is amusing that Twitter thinks will.i.am is a URL, but that’s not what set my mental cogs in motion.
Instead, I was struck by the fact that Antony was at the Hackney concert over the weekend, but was still reduced to watching the events on a screen. I am sure that anyone who has ever been to one of the big summer festivals (Glastonbury, &ct) will have experienced the same phenomenon, that of watching an ostensibly ‘live’ event on screen, because the actual performers are too far away.
I was reminded of a scene in The Simpsons (Season 7, Episode 9, Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming, thanks Google, thanks Wikipedia) where Homer refuses to crane his neck to watch the jets at an air show, preferring to let the TV decide what he watches.
One might say that there is no conceptual difference between the a festival-goer watching the concert from the back of the crowd, and a viewer tuning in to coverage of the same festival on a TV set. In both cases, the cameras and the broadcast technology magnify the performer. However, this discounts the value of the atmosphere, the sense of communal experience, one gets from being at the event. This explains why people will stand for hours in order to see the Queen’s white coat in the far distance for a few seconds, rather than simply allow the BBC to give us constant, glorious close-ups of the wDuke of Edinburgh developing a bladder problem.
On a lesser scale, it explains why people choose to watch Euro 2012 (and all the other tournaments) in pubs. Communality counts. It also explains why others will actually travel to the tournament host country, merely to sit in a park and watch the match on a Jumbotron outside the stadium. Proximity counts too.
Nevertheless, I do think that it’s an odd sort of culture that prizes the live and the immediate over the transmitted, and yet those attending live, immediate events still find their experience of the show mediated through a square electronic screen. And we haven’t even discussed the second-order oddness of the TV stations broadcasting the sight of other people standing in a field (or on the Mall) watching a screen, as a form of entertainment in itself.
Related: That thing that happens during a lull in a live sporting broadcast, when the director cuts to a shot of the crowd, and the person spots themselves on the screen in the stadium, and waves at it, then realises that the camera is shooting them from another angle, and so they look around for the camera, and the director cuts back to the action…
Over the past year, I’ve been working on a creative publishing challenge I set myself. It’s time to blog about it here and draw a line under the project.
A few years ago, my parents showed me a faded typed manuscript of a memoir, The World of an Insignificant Woman. It was written in the mid 1980’s by my grandfather’s sister, Catherine Thackray, about their parents and family. It is based in a large part on the handwritten memoirs and letters of my great-grandmother, Hilda Marjory Sharp (born 1882).
In recent years I’ve taken a particular interest in new forms of publishing. I drink in the columns of Cory Doctorow and the experiments of James Bridle (two London-based thinkers I have had the pleasure of meeting a few times, through English PEN and Free Word Centre activities). The potential of print-on-demand and eBook publishing is huge, and I had begun to think seriously about getting in on the micro-publishing action.
Continue reading
Where Are You Going? is a poetic hoarding at Farringdon Station, commissioned by All Change Arts. It was created by artists Sarah Butler and Yemisi Blake.
Yours truly is acknowledged on the artwork as one of the ‘local people’ who inspired the project, after I sent them a copy of my story, Northern Line Lovers.
Let’s have a think about this report by the Church of England, warning that gay marriage will ruin its ability to perform marriage.
First, the church says that marriage has/will become a “hollowed out” shell of its former glory. Personally, I do not think that allowing people who love each other to have access to the stability and security that marriage brings is a “hollowing out”. As I have argued before, in refusing to countenance gay marriage, religions forget their core mission. Instead of fostering community, inclusion and family stability as they claim, they instead promote ostracism, division and exclusion.
The Church also says that new proposals will mean that they will end up not performing any marriages. Campaigners dismiss this will actually happen, but I wonder whether principle says that it should. The conundrum arises because Churches are technically state institutions… And our modern principles of equality demand that everyone be allowed access to them. If priests are adamant that they will not marry some (gay) people, the only way to achieve that consistently is to not marry anyone in a Church.
The Church raise this point because they think the logic points to the absurdity of gay marriage. It does not. Instead, it points to the absurdity of an established Church. In this multi-faith era, how can any particular faith have the backing of the state? Issues of equality and conscience and tradition are bound to collide, with people compelled to take part in situations they would rather not, due to their personal faith. The answer is disestablishment. An unfettered Church of England would be free to persue its conscience into the same marginalised corner of society as the Catholic Church. Of course, that would mean renouncing the Bishop’s seats in the House of Lords, and presumably a lot of the power, property and prestige that comes with being Established. But I think it would be for the best.