LITERATURE PODCAST: WRITERS IN CONVERSATION

Georgina Godwin in conversation with Jon Ronson and Alexandra Heminsley

This is a transcript of a podcast recorded and produced by Georgina Godwin on behalf of British Council Literature in November 2015.

Jon Ronson and Alexandra Heminsley are part of a delegation of UK writers attending the Guadalajara International Book Fair in Mexico in November and December 2015, curated by the British Council as part of the UK Mexico Year of Cultural Exchange.

Georgina Godwin: As of August 2015, one in seven people were using Facebook to communicate. As of September, there were 400 million Instagram users. Nine thousand one hundred Tweets happen every second. Hello, I'm Georgina Godwin, or @GeorginaGodwin, if you like. I have with me @JonRonson and @Hemmo.

I'm introducing my guests by their Twitter handles because many of their fans, or followers, on social media, may only know of them that way, and that's what I'd like to discuss. Social media has both a positive and a negative force. As well as having a large online presence, each of my guests has also published works the traditional way.

Jon Ronson is a nonfiction author, he's a documentary maker and a screenwriter. For his latest book So You've Been Publicly Shamed he spent three years traveling the world and talking to people who'd been subjected to high profile public shaming online.

And @Hemmo is Alexandra Heminsley, a journalist, broadcaster, and author. Her memoir Running Like a Girl is a bestseller, and she has a large Twitter presence. Alexandra, do you feel that you have a separate online personality from your real life existence?

Alexandra Heminsley: I don't think it's fair to say that it's separate. Because I don't think there's anything, sort of, disingenuous about what I do post. But I do think that it's not all of my personality. I think that there can be that sense that what somebody posts is entirely what they are. And I think that can't ever be true, even if that's what you're attempting. And I quite specifically try for it not to be true and it's not what I'm attempting. I want to talk about my work and ideas and kind of elements of sport, women in sport, and fitness and things like that. It doesn't mean that those are things that I don't really care about and I'm pretending to care about. It just means that there's a whole load of other stuff going on too.

GG: Jon, your latest book grew out of the spam-bot impersonating the real you on Twitter. And you filmed your confrontation with the people behind it and you put it on YouTube. They said that you were just trying to protect the brand, Jon Ronson. Is there a brand, or are you what you tweet?

Jon Ronson: When I first joined Twitter, I was really idealistic about it. What I noticed was that all these different people's Twitter feeds were clashing up against each other in my timeline. And it was almost as if I was creating my own kind of Robert Altman movie. It's like one of those kind of ensemble movies. And I really loved the unselfconsciousness of it. I loved that fact that people didn't seem to be people performing. It was just people saying any old crap that came into their heads. And I just loved it. I thought it was novel, de-stigmatising, de-shaming. It was like a window into other people’s lives. And you could be curious and empathetic.

And so that's what I was like on social media. I thought, okay, when I'm publishing a piece of writing, I have to really think about every sentence and I have to make every word count, but I don't need to be that self- conscious on Twitter. I can just let anything splurge out. But that idealism didn't last very long because people started saying, "My God, you know, you're such a good writer but you're so shit on Twitter." People didn't really sort of buy into that idealism when Twitter started to grow and so I had to become a little bit more self-conscious. And if being a little bit more self-conscious is being a brand, then I guess so.

GG: Alex, in your book, Running Like a Girl, you talk about using social media as a tool for social good. For instance, raising money for charity. How else do you feel, that it's not just Twitter, but other platforms are life enhancing?

AH: I think they can be massively, because they're such huge connectors. You can, even more so now with Twitter, the kind of algorithms that are even more advanced than they were when I was just beginning my kind of running journey, as it were. You're steered in the direction of other runners who are like you, who are following the same kinds of things and talking about the same kinds of things.

That's fantastic, and I think it's really, really powerful. It's shown, kind of, to be hugely effective with feminism. That kind of whole youthful generation that just are completely articulate and quite complicated ideas around gender identity as well. They've found each other online and there's massive, massive positivity in that. Running Like a Girl was written nearly four years ago. And I do think I'm with Jon on that...it was a more idealistic age.

It used to be that curiosity was rewarded, so fast you could ask something and people would send you links and want to chat about it, be patient and talk you through something over a number of tweets. But now, the conversation can instantly turn into, "Oh my God, that's so embarrassing that you don't already know that." Especially with communities where, if you're not absolutely slick on your terminology of absolutely everything to do with gender politics, you're too afraid to ask because you'll get re-tweeted and 5,000 people will harangue you for 48 hours.

GG: And of course, this is what Jon's talked about in his book. If social media is a cohesive force, there is a danger, as he points out, that actually, we're more frequently united in attacking people just as much as we come together for the public good.

So Jon, your book So You've been Publicly Shamed obviously looks at that in some detail.

JR: Yes. And again, it's such a shame that curiosity has given way to instant condemnation. I saw it happen. It came from an idealistic place, we could right wrongs, we could level the playing field, we could do good. But then, a kind of zeal to do good turned into creating this kind of condemning, judgmental, cold, conservative, conformist place which chills free speech.

And in fact, when Hemmo was talking, I remembered something that happened the other day with the whole David Cameron pig business. So the day that Lord Ashcroft did what was essentially, I think, revenge porn. He wasn't offered a good job, so he reveals what may or may not be true, that David Cameron, as part of some sort of ritual at Oxford sodomised a dead pig's head. So he revealed this and it struck me as kind of revenge porn. And, of course, everybody was mocking David Cameron, and not what I felt was the right target for attack; Lord Ashcroft.

One person stood up in the midst of all of this and said: I think David Cameron's going to come out of this unscathed and I think the real villain here is Lord Ashcroft. That was the conservative writer Toby Young. That day, Toby Young was just brutally attacked. He was trending all day on Twitter and everything was like, just these kind of, you know, furious attacks, like a hurricane against him.

And I felt that hurricane against me in the past and I didn't say a thing. I thought, you know what, I'll let Toby Young take this one. I've had my own terrible days on Twitter. But you know, I sat there and watched it happen, and I thought, actually, you know what? I know Toby Young isn't a particularly likable presence, but he's right, and he'll be proved right. And indeed he was right and he was proved right.

GG: You've gone into some detail about how these, what you call collective outrage circles, work.

JR: We surround ourselves in social media with people who feel the same way we do and we agree with each other. It's like a kind of mutual approval machine, where we just approve of each other frantically. And if somebody gets in the way of that good feeling, we just kind of scream them out.

And as my friend Adam Curtis said, tech Utopians like to see social media as a new form of democracy. But that instinct to just scream out anybody who disagrees with you is actually the opposite of democracy. In a democracy, you hear other voices, and you listen to people. And it's really chilling free speech. I mean, as much as we all benefit personally and professionally from social media, it can also, I think, harm what I think journalists need to do more of than anything else, which is write in an unafraid way.

GG: So, does that mean, do you think, that we need more regulations governing social media? And if so, Alexandra, how could they be enforced?

AH: Instagram is an interesting one for this. Because, it became, in its early days, a kind of horrendous hot bed for pro-anorexia stuff. And there was a hashtag of #proana, which meant that there was, for a time, a lot of, usually, young girls taking pictures of themselves getting ever slimmer, or photographs of models, or people they admired looking particularly thin. A really "sharp-intake-of-breath" thin, and not just, "my- granny-would-be-worried-about-you-on-a-cold-day thin." And hashtagging #proana and things like that.

And now, if you use those hashtags and if you try to click on them, Instagram just kind of closes down on you. And sends you to a link about eating disorders. Which, I think, is probably a positive thing, because I was really genuinely horrified at some of the images were being posted. Not because they were particularly, sort of sexual in any way at all. It was much more to do with, "Oh wow, this really looks like this has become a gathering place for some quite enabling behaviours."

When someone said, "Have you seen what happens now?" and I clicked on the link, I was initially bristled and thought, "I want to look at this, I'm a journalist. I want to examine these images as a phenomenon." And then I thought, well actually, if I had a 12-year-old daughter, I think I'd be quite glad that I was being directed there. I'm sure that people are going to find endless ways to do this, but Twitter seems, as a company – and I don't know enough about the kind of CEO end of Twitter – either very reluctant to go down that path, despite being asked, indeed begged, by several women who've been on the end of extremely violent messages, or unable technologically, and I don't know which it is…

Instagram seems to have found a way to, kind of, just close down something that seemed to be moving towards a sort of nasty, kind of instincts in people. They weren't kind of aggressive, but they were more self-harming. Twitter, on the other hand, I don't know. I can't quite work out what they could do because I don't know enough about the technology, but I find them ignoring it very hard to stomach.

GG: Jon, would one way, perhaps, be removing anonymity if you had to post in your own name?

JR: I mean there's different types of abuses on Twitter. There's obviously misogynistic abuse perpetrated by trolls. It's easier to regulate against people like that. And I agree with @Hemmo that not enough of that's going on. But then there's other sorts of abuse. There's a kind of self righteous abuse where somebody like Rachel Dolezal for instance, or Justine Sacco, who I write about in my public shaming book, is just destroyed instantly for the crime of some joke that comes out badly. You can't regulate against that, because that's nice people like us doing it. And it's really hard to regulate against nice people like us.

AH: It's not always directed at them. It’s just that thing of being discussed loudly and consistently for a long time can have the same amount... You know, you can put your name into a search term and feel your blood run cold. It's not always addressed at you. It doesn't always need to be what's making it harmful.

JR: Saying all of that, I got, a few months ago, somebody on Twitter was impersonating me, and praising Dylann Roof, the man who killed, the racist who killed nine people in Charleston. So pretending to be me, writing, "Dylann Roof is good." So for the first time ever, I complained to Twitter, and I got a form letter back from Twitter saying: we have determined that this is not a contravention of our impersonation policy. When I got that, I just thought, Twitter is a doomed company.

Because when we kind of go around shaming every body on Twitter, it's like we're kind of unpaid shaming interns for Twitter. Twitter makes money, but those of us doing the actual grunt work get nothing. And when I got that letter from Twitter, I thought, you know what, we're unpaid shaming interns for a company that doesn't actually care about us. My prediction, which probably seems crazy now, is that Twitter is gonna become less and less important, and may even fizzle away to MySpace levels.

Because, if it's not fun, what's the point? And right now, I can't find many people who would say that being on Twitter is fun. You know, now we feel like Princess Diana in a minefield. We're like some kind of amateur bomb disposal unit with a red wire and a green wire. Everything we tweet, is this the thing that's going to make it explode for me?

I tweeted something, actually, a few months ago where everything did explode, and I've got to say, it was horrific.

GG: Has it happened to you, Alexandra?

AH: Not really. Only on a very minor level. I was misquoted about something. And it's really deeply nerdy about running. I reviewed a book by Richard Asquith which was about how running has become more of an industry. It's become heavily commercialised. And I kind of, probably quite badly, tried to condense a central theme that takes up a couple of chapters in his book. And I lumped a lot of stuff together and put Park Run, which is a free local 5K run that happens all around the country, and it's huge now, and it's absolutely huge. And I said that it was part of this, because it's very heavily sponsored, but it is still free. And I just had three days of the biggest running event in the country and all of it, people telling me that I was stupid and I hated running and I didn't want anyone to run. That I was trying to keep everyone unfit. There's actually several pages in my book eulogising about how wonderful Park Run is. And you can't fight when it's that many people. It's like a kind of madness.

That was a really geeky running technicality that was what happened to me. So if it had been really aggressively worded rape threats, and things like that, or something really more fundamental about my being, rather than what was essentially a slightly misunderstood quote, I don't know how I would have coped with it.

GG: Jon, what about it being really very dangerous? I'm thinking here about Islamic State. Very digitally aware, very active on social media. Do you think that IS would be much less effective without these platforms? Does IS need the, sort of, oxygen of social media to survive?

JR: You know, I haven't really done any research on that, so I don't feel really qualified to answer that question. I think it's dangerous in other ways. I think there's this really corrosive, symbiotic relationship going on between social media and the mainstream media at the moment. And in fact, it happened the other day with the aunt who apparently sued her nephew for jumping into her arms and saying, "I love you," and then hurting her wrist.

So what happened in that situation is that it just wasn't true. It was all to do with suing the insurance company, and they needed to word the claim in a certain way and this was all very standard. So it wasn't a true story. So what happened there was a couple of bad journalists reported this as fact, and then social media just went insane, and just destroyed this woman. Then the mainstream media reported on how this woman has incurred the wrath of social media. Then a couple of days later, some good journalists, including, I think, Nicky Woolf and the Guardian, came along and said, "Whoa, wait, this is what actually happened." Everyone was like, "Oh, okay." But of course, actually what happened on Twitter then, Twitter didn't say, "Oh, we shouldn't have rushed to judgement." Twitter said, "Well, it's all the fault of those terrible journalists who gave us wrong information to begin with. Let's get them." Because, all we can think to do is slap more shame onto shame. I think it's terrible.

One of the most shocking social media shamings of the last few years was Justine Sacco, who I know and I'm friends with and write about in my book. She tweeted, "Going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding, I'm white." And then she got on a plane and was destroyed in her sleep. She had no idea.

Now the joke, I think most people realised, many people realised, the joke wasn't her gleefully flaunting her privilege. She was trying in, what was admittedly, a kind of a cack-handed way, to mock privilege by doing an exaggerated...She was acknowledging her privilege and mocking it. Yet, nobody stood behind her. I think she was mistreated. But they were just washed away in a tidal wave of outrage.

And it's like the mainstream media. You know, we are raised to speak truth to power. But when the people abusing their power are social media, we are too scared to speak truth to it. And I think that's a deeply worrying twist in modern communication.

GG: And in your book, you look at how you come back from that. I mean, you need pretty serious reputational damage consultants. It's a very hard thing for an ordinary person to do on their own.

JR: You know, you can hire a reputation management firm for like hundreds of thousands of dollars. So again, it's the rich. For all the levelling of the playing field on social media, it's still the rich who can survive it.

GG: Alexandra, do you police your own digital footprint? Are you very aware of that?

AH: I am now. I don't like to spend too much time thinking about what I put on Twitter in the first couple of years. Partly because of what Jon was talking about, that complete lack of self-consciousness. And partly because there was a lot less that I knew about stuff then. So I would ask more questions, and probably phrase them badly, and in ways that would upset people.

I mean, I met my husband through Twitter. So I can never truly hate Twitter. But policing is so much a part of my life now, particularly, I think, with Instagram. Because I've written one of the strongest points I wanted to make with Running Like a Girl was that I was exhausted, and just ground down by the way that everything to do with female sport and fitness was presented – it was “pink-ified” – but it was also presented as a way to change how you look. Not as a way to change what you see.

So it was that shift in gaze that was the most important thing that I wanted to do with Running Like a Girl. To say, "If you take up running, or engage in any kind of meaningful sporting relationship with your body, the important thing isn't the change that will happen externally to you. It's not what people will see when they see you, it's what you will see. You'll see your neighbourhood differently.” No one was saying that at all, at that point.

And then there was this little golden period, where I was saying this and people were listening, and then came Instagram. And the universe of selfies that it begat. And now, to be a sporty girl, is now to kind of go on these outlandish runs, very often in order to get the best picture.

And that's great, I do love scrolling through my Instagram feed and thinking, "Wow, there are all these people going all over the country and finding all these new and exciting locations." But again, the gaze is slightly shifting back now that I see so many images that you can tell are of somebody who spent hours trying to line up an iPhone and maintain a yoga headstand in order to bring the two together in one glorious click. And it exhausts me. I find that really difficult to absorb, because it then sets off all of my kind of...I'm quite anti-selfie. I will always choose to do the goofball selfie rather than me looking serene on a yoga mat or stretching or something like that. Not because I don't really do those things – although I can't really count for my levels of serenity while I'm doing them – but because I think just feeding that constant loop of what you look like is, particularly for women, just reinforcing this idea that what you look like is the most important thing about you. This is what I see, this is what I saw today on my own, this is what I did, instead of this is what I look like. And that's really come back with Instagram.

GG: Jon, do you think that using social media reduces our ability to interact in a real as opposed to a virtual situation? In other words, is our sensitivity to emotional cues reduced?

JR: I doubt that it makes us, kind of, really turns it into, kind of Casper houses, where when we finally leave the house after decades inside on Twitter, we're like this sort of twitchy, socially awkward people. I doubt that happens.

And, in fact, one of the great things about social media, and there's many great things about social media, is how people who are socially awkward in real life, to the extent...I mean, I've met people on Twitter in real life, and on Twitter they are kind of eloquent and funny. And then you meet them in real life and they're so anxious, they've got like selective muters in them. I've met a couple of people like that. So that's the wonderful thing about social media; giving a voice to people who are too awkward to use that voice at parties and so on.

So I don't think the opposite happens, like if you spend too long on social media, you then can't cope with real life. But I do think, undoubtedly, one of the reasons why we behave so awfully on social media is because there are no physical cues. Everything seems more black and white, and as a result, we make everything more black and white. We turn every human being into either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. We kind of relinquish the grey area. We judge people horrendously on some kind of bad phraseology in a tweet. And I think a lot of that is because we're not picking up on vocal inflections and so on, because there are no vocal inflections.

GG: And as a writer, and a reader, Alexandra, does the 140-character rule have an impact on your concentration?

AH: Yeah, I was about to say. The concentration, yes, slightly, but I've kind of...that's everyone's responsibility. There is a wealth of internet blocking software, much of which I've made good use of over the years. You don't have to be always checking Twitter. I really feel like you can have a day when you feel bad about yourself and you can just be in little spirals of reading every corner of the internet. But I don't think that that's necessarily Twitter's fault. I think that we would all be doing something else equally unproductive. But I do think that the character, the limit on Twitter, the black and white-ification that Jon was talking about, is made much more extreme by that. Because you will just take out any nuance of a sentence to make it fit.

I see endlessly on my Facebook feed, people saying, "I just don't have the strength to ask this on Twitter, but can anybody explain this?" Or, "Does anybody know if this is a thing in this community, or whatever?" Those sorts of conversations are killed dead by Twitter's word count.

JR: What @Hemmo just describes, that used to be what Twitter was so great at. Like I would say, "I'm in Alexandria, Virginia," or "I'm in some small town in Ohio, and I've got a night off. What should I do?" And then I'd immediately get, "Oh, you should go here. Go to this bar and order this beer." And I'd do it, and it was great. And I never used Twitter for that anymore because it just kind of opens you up for abuse.

GG: Jon, you've been a writer since before the whole digital explosion. How have you seen the traditional publishing industry adapt to incorporate these new ways of communicating?

JR: The mainstream media, who I work for, is kind of insecure now. It's running out of money because you get everything for free on the internet, and so on. Personally I've been really fortunate. It hasn't massively affected me. If I've got a story that I really want to do, I can find somebody who can trust me to do the story, even if it's like old style investigative journalism which is quite expensive. There's plane fares involved, and so on. I can usually find people. But I also understand that I'm quite rare in that. I think, just because of the wealth disparity now. All of the money's going to the internet corporations who are then providing everything for free, which means that all the newspapers and magazines are getting poorer and poorer, which means investigative journalism, or just proper long-form journalism is under siege.

GG: Alexandra, some last words from you about how you see the future of social media? Jon thinks Twitter may well implode, it may well be no more, quite soon. Would you agree with that?

AH: I do fear for Twitter's future. But I also think that so many of the pitfalls that we, as a generation, have fallen into over the last maybe five, six years, they just won’t exist for the next generation. A 9-year-old now understands their teacher can see if they're on Facebook in the evenings when they're saying they're doing their homework. Or, a 15- year old knows that they need to be building a Twitter feed that indicates some kind of enthusiasm about the sorts of jobs they're going to want to apply for. That absolute carefreeness is gone. So I think it will survive. I think the glory of Twitter, back in 2009, is long gone, and Twitter itself might be, too.

GG: Well, this conversation will continue, either over social media, or live in Mexico. Both guests here today, Jon Ronson, Alexandra Heminsley, will be at the Guadalajara Festival in November. That's the Feria Internacional del Libro 2015, the international book fair in Mexico, where the UK is this year's guest of honour in the country as part of the UK/Mexico dual year of culture. Both writers are part of a larger delegation of British authors taking part in a program of talks and events at the fair, alongside Mexican writers. It's all been curated by the British Council, and you can find more details on the British Council site. That's BritishCouncil.org/literature.

Well that's all from me, Georgina Godwin. You can keep in touch with me, and any of the guests here today, on social media.