Italian cartoonist Paolo Lombardi comments on the impact of social media on the efforts of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan to control reporting on the protests there.
According to a Globe & Mail article linked at Cartoon Movement, Erdogan said, "Now we have a menace that is called Twitter ... The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society," adding, "People are being misled by outright lies."
This is an important and interesting statement on all sorts of levels, starting with a situation that I find much more common than I would like, in which someone you like and mostly agree with does or says things you really can't stand behind.
And I include both Turkey and the social media in that.
Turkey overlaps Europe and Asia in more than simply its geography, and its attempts to be accepted into the EU in recent years have demonstrated a kind of hybrid of modernism and medievalism that makes it an oddity, alternately acceptable in Western and Middle Eastern circles or cast out of each, and almost never at the same time on the same grounds.
Maybe the clearest symbol of this is the government's relationship with its sizeable and restless Kurdish minority: One day the headline is that all the Kurdish prisoners are being freed and reforms are on the way and everything is going to be just fine and two weeks later there's another crackdown or another outburst.
And this back-and-forth syndrome seems also to apply to secularists and Islamists, as well as to human rights advocates versus control freaks and those who favor a civilian government versus those who want the military to take charge.
It probably all seems quite coherent if you live there, but I can tell you, it's damned confusing from out here.
Which would be an amusing curiosity if Turkey were some tiny, tucked away duchy in the mountains somewhere, but it's not. Turkey is a major nation and it matters in all sorts of ways at all sorts of times.
Whether or not you can figure it out, you sure can't ignore it.
Lombardi first addressed the current unrest two days ago, with a cartoon that was more of an observation than a statement of position, something more along the lines of the Stephen Stills lyric, "Something's happening here, but what it is ain't exactly clear."
The trouble in the streets began with a development plan that included removing a number of trees in what had been a city park. I read an article which,while clearly pro-government, noted that Turkey has protests all the time and that this one didn't seem particularly different at the start.
And I can't find that article to link to it because it's buried in a huge mass of coverage over at Google News -- over 1200 stories just on the latest developments, with more sections below from the previous few days.
Which brings us back to Twitter and Facebook, which, like the Turkish government, spark some well-deserved ambivalence.
I really get tired of social media whining about how the MSM and the corporate-owned media and the dead trees and all those other Big Bad Villains are suppressing the news and "refusing to cover" popular movements.
This is nothing against the left in particular. Both Occupy and the Tea Party have played identical victim cards, sometimes because 200 people with picket signs didn't merit breathless stop-the-presses international coverage, and sometimes because they had enough going on to make the news but ...
... but I don't know.
Either they were mad that the news coverage wasn't sympathetic enough, or they were simply playing the victim card and hoping everyone would just re-Tweet and share their sad story of oppression and not bother to check and see if they were actually being ignored by the media.
I wish I knew how much of this was honest, naive ignorance and how much was purposeful, cynical deception.
Yesterday, there were posts appearing on Facebook whining about the lack of coverage, and so I went to Google News and, at that point, there were more than a thousand stories listed and the Turkish protests were the #2 story, second only to the storm chasers who got killed.
As I write this at about 7 a.m. Monday, the topic is #4 on the American Google News page, trailing Darryl Issa's conspiracy theories, the storms that went through last night and the fire in the Chinese poultry plant.
That's not "ignoring" it or "refusing to cover it."
It may be that people aren't clicking on the stories enough to boost the topic all the way to the top, but that's not the MSM's fault. They've led the horse to water, and it's a damned lie to say they haven't.
All in all, I feel like the kid who goes up to his room but can still hear the rest of the family screaming at each other downstairs.
I like the fact that the Turkish government seems to try to make nice with their minorities, both ethnic and political. I hate the fact that they fail to follow through on all the promises and announcements.
And using firehoses against protestors brings up some really bad associations in my mind.
I like the fact that Turkish people are so willing to take to the streets. I hate whenever it begins to feel like a spontaneous outpouring of popular feeling is being co-opted by professional malcontents.
And I hate how often that happens.
And I'm glad I never actually went through my Facebook list and unfriended everybody who rarely posts in English, because my Turkish Facebook friends have been posting some pretty interesting stuff, either from their media or straight from the streets.
But I hate when I have to concede that Erdogan is probably right that a good deal of all the stuff on social media is cynical bullshit. And I really, really hate not knowing if that cynical bullshit accounts for 20 percent or 50 percent or 10 percent of the total.
Here's what I do know: It's good we've got all this reporting from the street, and, if it makes the authorities nervous, well, transparency is the antidote for that.
But the explosion of social media makes knowing what's going on harder, not easier.
If you trust what you see on Twitter or Facebook, you're no better than someone who trusts what they see on Fox or MSNBC.
We are our own gatekeepers, and, if we're being fooled, it's not the fault of somebody else.
And that matters, because, no matter how distant or objective or dispassionate you think you are, Turkey is just around the next corner in this hyper-connected world.
There ain't none of us really safe in our gardens today.
In college, I took a class that surveyed Utopian novels, from More's to the present. One of them, Edward Bellamy's* I believe, was titled "Erehwon" and every time I heard the Prime Minister of Turkey's name, it made me think of this book. Oddly enough, it's been eerily prescient.
(*Bellamy's grandson wrote a magnificent series of books on true crime in Cleveland, such as "They Died Crawling", "The Maniac in the Bushes" and several more before he moved to New England. "Erewhon" is "nowhere" spelled backwards.)
Posted by: Mary in Ohio | 06/03/2013 at 06:07 PM
"Erewhon" is Samuel Butler; Bellamy was "Looking Backward" -- which I think was made into a movie.
I loved Utopia -- as with Jane Austen, I was surprised to find out how funny a "great author" could be. Which reminds me that I have to give my granddaughter a copy of "Candide" now that she's old enough to get the jokes and young enough to be delightfully shocked.
Posted by: Mike Peterson | 06/03/2013 at 08:13 PM