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.