MEDIA, POWER, FAMILY AND SOCIETY 

The media is a connection platform in every society, argues Rufai Oseni

From the earliest times there has always been a dichotomy between information flow from areas of higher concentration to lower concentration. 

The Russian involvement in the American elections through the use of Facebook raises a lot of dust as regards the hegemony of information against global power.

Throughout history societal changes has always been hinged on crusades, History teaches us about the crusade for the Holy land in 1095; we can’t all forget the hard work of Bernard of Clairvaux in upholding his faith through various crusades. We live in an era where the media must be a crusader for societal balance and development.

The media is a connection platform in every society. It connects the habits, behaviors, antecedent, societal evolution and strata of societal fabric. Every expressive form is media. The biggest media platform is the family. The parents are the great television sets in the eye of the children before they come in contact with the wider world. The prospect of a society is the sum total of its media interactions and anything that a society becomes is reflective of its media.

The media has a powerful appeal to every generation, technology has just its cascading impact. The discovery and the evolution of the printing press by Johanne Gutenberg is an indication of the rapid movement and developmental impact media has on society. Every media will bring about a shift, a shift will bring about oscillations, oscillations will make a revolution. It is sad that the media has also been a tool in destroying the society, and this is not just the social media but the traditional media is also suspect in moral decadence.

The Radio and Television platforms that are supposed to help in shaping society are now a tool for hate speech and all sorts of nefarious vices. We have to say, the society is always on the journey of fine tuning and balancing out but with the journey of balancing comes many twists and turns albeit a ferocious gyration in some cases, but caution is of great importance in a bid not to lose equilibrium.

In understanding this function is the war leaders have used media for – good and evil. We must constantly ensure that good trumps evil and that is why it is good to X-ray the harmful play of information using Donald Trump as a study. More shocking is the habit and trends of President Trump.

An article in The Economist states this about the former President:

The president’s dearest supporters and bitterest opponents are united in their wish that less attention be paid to his social-media habit. Stephen Miller, a policy adviser, and Sarah Sanders, the press secretary, have tried valiant defences, but many Republicans prefer to feign ignorance. Some of Mr Trump’s critics detect a more insidious motive, “a weapon to control the news cycle”, as George Lakoff, a professor emeritus at Berkeley, puts it. In this reading, the president is a puppet-master whose tweets distract from scandal and divert attention from substantive issues. These critics have it backwards: Mr Trump is actually taking cues from the media, specifically Fox News, an entertainment channel, rather than attempting to lead them.

Matthew Gertz of Media Matters, a progressive watchdog, has documented nearly 60 cases in the past three months where Mr Trump appears to be tweeting in response to Fox News segments. The alarming North Korea tweet came 12 minutes after a report on the channel about Mr Kim’s “nuclear button”. Michael Wolff’s new book says the president has three television screens installed in his bedroom; the New York Times reports that he has a “Super TiVo” device, allowing him to record cable news and watch it later; private schedules obtained by Axios show the president takes hours of “executive time”—a delightful euphemism for telly, tweeting and telephoning. The bulk of Mr Trump’s tweets as president have come in the early morning when “Fox & Friends”, a fawning programme, airs .

Information has always been a buffer to the proliferation of various forms of power.

In Rousseau’s social contract a compelling argument is made.

The public force therefore needs an agent of its own to bind it together and set it to work under the direction of the general will, to serve as a means of communication between the State and the Sovereign, and to do for the collective person more or less what the union of soul and body does for man. Here we have what is, in the State, the basis of government, often wrongly confused with the Sovereign, whose minister it is. What then is government? An intermediate body set up between the subjects and the Sovereign, to secure their mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of liberty, both civil and political. The members of this body are called magistrates or kings, that is to say governors, and the whole body bears the name prince. Thus those who hold that the act, by which a people puts itself under a prince, is not a contract, are certainly right. It is simply and solely a commission, an employment, in which the rulers, mere officials of the Sovereign, exercise in their own name the power of which it makes them depositaries. This power it can limit, modify or recover at pleasure; for the alienation of such a right is incompatible with the nature of the social body, and contrary to the end of association. I call then government, or supreme administration, the legitimate exercise of the executive power, and prince or magistrate the man or the body entrusted with that administration. In government reside the intermediate forces whose relations make up that of the whole to the whole, or of the Sovereign to the State. This last relation may be represented as that between the extreme terms of a continuous proportion, which has government as its mean proportional. The government gets from the Sovereign the orders it gives the people, and, for the State to be properly balanced, there must, when everything is reckoned in, be equality.

For this to be the effective model for society there is a need for synergy between information and reality.

We currently live in a world with pervasive disruption, information is now a figment of imagination. 

We now process data at the speed of light. Information exposure in the 17 years of the new millennium has been the greatest in human history. Today it would take thousands of years to watch all the videos on YouTube. Only to think as at 2003 we didn’t have YouTube.

We live in an era of the “alternative fact” as perpetrated by Kellyanne Conway of the Trump camp. The sad reality is that this would not change, today information polarization has become so rampant that a tweet from a President Trump is filled with misinformation bringing division and distraction.

Historically this has been the ignoble trend that has fanned to embers of populism and nationalism. This led to the rise of Napoleon, the French revolution, the First and Second World War, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, amongst others.

A notable story is that of Denis Kearney. Kearney was one of most important leaders of the anti-Chinese campaign in California. Kearney was born in Ireland in 1847 and spent his youth at sea. He arrived in San Francisco in 1868, entered the draying business in 1872, married and started a family. In 1877, he became active in the labor movement, and was known for his impassioned, vitriolic speeches. He attracted large crowds and his orations were reprinted in the daily papers. Kearney and others in the Workingmen’s associations blamed the owners of large businesses and factories (“Capitalists”) and Chinese immigrants for keeping jobs scarce and wages low. Kearney called for lynching the rich bosses and burning their property, and he began and ended every speech with the slogan “The Chinese Must Go!” 

In the summer of 1877, a workingman’s association was established in San Francisco, with Kearney elected secretary. It formed in response to high unemployment and in sympathy with the nation-wide railroad strike of that year. The meetings took place next to City Hall, in a spacious vacant area called the “Sand Lot.” At the first meeting, members passed resolutions supporting the striking railroad workers, calling for an end to government subsidies of railroad companies and to military intervention against strikers, insisting on an eight-hour day, a confiscatory tax on wealth, and other demands. The crowd became agitated against the Chinese immigrants and went on a rampage that lasted three nights, killing several Chinese, destroying Chinese laundries, and raiding the wharves of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which transported Chinese immigrants to America. The rioters burned adjacent lumberyards and hay barns, but were unable to burn the company’s steamships. 

Workingmen’s unions formed across the state, followed by the creation of the Workingmen’s party of California. Along with the labor planks, the new party endorsed the abrogation of the Burlingame Treaty. The Workingmen’s party soon became a major force in California politics, replacing the Democratic party as the prime challenger to the Republican party. 

Kearney continued delivering his anti-capitalist, anti-Chinese speeches, and was elected president of the Workingmen’s Union. He warned that “bullets would replace ballots” if the labor situation did not improve, and threatened a conflagration of the entire city. He was finally arrested on November 3, 1877, for using incendiary language and inciting a riot. The charges against Kearney were dropped after he claimed to have been misquoted and promised to tone down his rhetoric. He was jailed again, however, on January 16, 1878, for inciting a riot, but was acquitted five days later. 

Denis Kearney incursions finally led to the expulsion of the Chinese from America. His orchestrated toxic information constantly polarized the populace and led to the expulsion of a group of people.

The trend these days is even more staggering as the proliferation of hate speech on social media has opened up an avenue for mistrust. The concept of fact is no longer in existence as everyone is making their own fact just as Hitler and Benito Mussolini did that led to the proliferation of the fascist movement and Nazism that ruined Europe.

The Arab spring, Occupy Wall Street, #Metoo campaign and other campaigns are stark reminders that information these days have gone on steroids and its constantly rearing its head and looking for platforms and if not properly managed it would lead to an hegemony.

The concept of global power is been threatened by the hegemony of information. A tweet today can raise nuclear tensions and all stakeholders need to be on deck. The interesting angle to global power is that it also permeates into society and family as we all know that every dictator or not came from a family. The family plays an important role in the formation of society. The deprivation Hitler faced was a cardinal factor in his behavior. Even Donald trump’s character can be linked to his family and the society that permitted his constant act. Most of the hate in society is emboldened by various socio factors that lead to chaos.

It is incumbent on custodians of our society to educate the family on the role that media can play in the destabilization of the societal structure if not nipped in the bud.

In rounding up I will like to reiterate some insights as regards the media and how it disrupts society to build this awareness as it’s key in this project.

 The invention of the Gutenberg press in the 1500s, changed the face of media and information dissemination. Martin Luther could start his revolution in the Church because information became available through the Bible. Everybody had access to the Bible which was a rarity then. The history of disruption keeps evolving. Lenin also harnessed the power of disruption in seizing power from the monarchy in Russia leading to the Russian revolution.

Benito Mussolini and other world leaders did harness the prowess of media and its disruptive capacity. In fact, I dare say, media is like dynamite and properly crafting a narrative is like a detonator to start any revolution. The media revolution now finds various forms of innovation with technology.

Dabiq (Arabic: دابق, romanized: Dābiq) was an online magazine used by the Islamic State (IS) for Islamic radicalisation and recruitment purposes.  It was first published in July 2014 in a number of different languages (including English). Dabiq itself states the magazine is for the purposes of unitarianism, truth-seeking, migration, holy war and community (tawhid, manhaj, hijrah, jihad and jama’ah respectively). Dabiq was published by IS via the deep web, although it was widely available online through other sources. The first issue carried the date “Ramadan 1435” in the Islamic Hijri calendar. According to the magazine, its name was taken from the town of Dabiq in northern Syria, which is mentioned in a hadith about Armageddon. IS believes Dabiq is where Muslim and infidel forces will eventually face each other,] and that after the crusaders’ forces are defeated, the apocalypse will begin. Every issue of Dabiq contained a quote attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify — by Allah’s permission — until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq”.

Harleen K. Gambhir of the Institute for the Study of War considered that while al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s magazine Inspire focuses on encouraging its readers to carry out lone-wolf attacks on the West, Dabiq was more concerned with establishing the religious legitimacy of IS and its self-proclaimed caliphate, and encouraging Muslims to emigrate there.] In its October 2014 issue, an article outlined religious justifications for slavery and praised its revival. I put an insight into Dabiq because of the role it played in the chaos in the world. It is shocking to imagine how many young people were inspired by Dabiq to commit various crimes against humanity due to its messaging.

DARPA. Originally known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the agency was created on February 7, 1958 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik 1 in 1957. By collaborating with academia, industry, and government partners, DARPA formulates and executes research and development projects to expand the frontiers of technology and science, often beyond immediate U.S. military requirements.

DARPA-funded projects have provided significant technologies that influenced many non-military fields, such as computer networking and the basis for the modern Internet, and graphical user interfaces in information technology.

DARPA is independent of other military research and development and reports directly to senior Department of Defense management. DARPA comprises approximately 220 government employees in six technical offices, including nearly 100 program managers, who together oversee about 250 research and development programs.

This scheme helped greatly with the advent of the internet. It was the precursor to the internet.

A British Engineer at CERN had been working on the hyperlink protocol. Tim Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989 and, in 1990, redistributed it. It then was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall, who called his proposals ‘vague, but exciting’. He used similar ideas to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser. His software also functioned as an editor (called WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon). This invention led to the World Wide Web and the internet greatly revolutionized the world

The advent of the internet led to quicker information dissemination at the speed of a click, like Bill Gates called it “business at the speed of thought.”

In 1999, the dot com bubble did burst, and the aftershocks led to Social Networking sites and other forms of expression on line known as SOCIAL MEDIA.

The series of protests and demonstrations across the Middle East and North Africa that commenced in 2010 became known as the “Arab Spring” and sometimes as the “Arab Spring and Winter” “Arab Awakening”, or “Arab Uprisings”, even though not all the participants in the protests were Arab. It was sparked by the first protests that occurred in Tunisia on 18 December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, following Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in protest of police corruption and ill treatment. With the success of the protests in Tunisia, a wave of unrest sparked by the “Burning Man” struck Algeria, Jordan, Egypt, and Yemen, then spread to other countries. The largest, most organized demonstrations often occurred on a “day of rage”, usually Friday afternoon prayers. The protests also triggered similar unrest outside the region. The organization of this protest was largely on Facebook and other social media platform. 

I believe this understanding should be ingrained in every family at a tender age. This will bring a buffer to the numerous challenges of societal misalignment through global power, family and information. I have posited some debatable insights as solutions.

In a bid to bring solutions to these challenges we must do four things: Risk tolerance: We must create mechanics of tolerating the challenges and grow immunity to it. We must also engage the family structure in society and educate our family members.

We must inform the populace more on manipulation tools of the Social media. We must create safe spaces for societal debates devoid of hate.

Risk treatment: We must learn to treat the risks by the use of regulations and cyber scrutiny.

Risk transfer: We must transfer the risk by shaming faceless actors of social disarray. The present steps taken by Twitter in fighting cyber bullying should be encouraged. Risk termination: In the event of worse case scenario principal protection mechanism have to been put in place to advert various information manipulation.

It has to be said this trend would not abate and more revolutions would arise from the hegemony of information but global power must build walls of sanity and the not walls of enmity like those on the Mexican border.

Excerpts from a paper delivered by Rufai Oseni of Arise News