In the past seven days two media personalities have been left eating some humble pie. First to put their foot in it was serial-offender Kyle Sandilands taking a cheap shot at Magda Szubanski, suggesting a concentration camp would take care of her weight loss issues. The second slip up was by someone a little less obvious. When Mia Freedman posted a “seven word tweet” to the twitterverse last week urging people to watch a “funny” Youtube clip of a dog with narcolepsy, the last thing she expected was to be reading her name in the big bold letters of a headline in The Australian newspaper.
To be fair, the two incidences do differ – Kyle makes his money waving the flag of controversy, whereas Mia prides herself on her sensitivity and acts as a positive voice in the media on women’s bodies, motherhood, and other family-friendly issues. Kyle’s comment was meant to be inflammatory, Mia’s tweet most certainly was not.
Why the comparison? Because the way we are holding our media figures accountable for their slip-ups says a lot about the blurring of the public/private divide.
First off, Kyle. True to style, his on air apology was forced and sounded like he was squeezing it out between his teeth, his management tut-tutting in the background. Austereo, inundated with complaints by a public and media getting a little tired of Sandilands and his slippery lips, have suspended him. For some it’s one step too far in a string of stunts culminating in the Lie Detector Incident, and capped off by a careless comment meant to humiliate.
And then there’s Freedman’s response to Suzanne Mostyn’s opinion piece in The Australian. Mostyn, a fellow journalist, has a son who suffers from Narcolepsy, a condition which sends its sufferers to sleep at the onset of intense emotion. It is easy to see why Mostyn took offense to Mia’s tweet. As a mother, it must be heartbreaking to watch a child suffer, and infuriating when people do not take their condition seriously. Mostyn left nothing in the bag when going after Freedman, choosing to protest publicly, on a national scale, demanding that the media take responsibility for their actions considering their role as leaders in the community.
Less than twenty-four hours later, Freedman published an open apology on her website and on twitter, and removed the clip from her website. In her apology she acknowledged her tweet was insensitive, juvenile even, and her sincerity is as palpable as Mostyn’s hostility. While she challenges the very public approach Mostyn took in her methods of demanding an apology, you know Freedman means it when she says she never meant to do any harm.
All this in a week when our politicians have been caught making gaffes on social media sites, it is hard to understand why anyone would take the twitter risk. Twitter, with it’s short, 140 character limit, seems fairly innocuous. Like an SMS that doesn’t cost you a thing, tweets force users to be succinct, be masters of the contraction, and think in soundbites.
Tweets are, by nature, immediate. Initially intended as an answer to the question “What are you doing?” Twitter allows you to have conversations with all the people who follow you at the press of a few buttons, via technology most of us carry on us all the time. This doesn’t exactly encourage self-censorship, and one can imagine PR people wringing their hands with worry as their clients sign up in droves to a medium they can’t control.
Of course, this is part of Twitter‘s appeal. In an era when people with a high public profile are being watched, recorded, quoted, and monitored in more ways than ever before – it must feel pretty stifling. And we’re not talking about wallflowers here. We’re talking about people who have a high profile because they have a lot to say in the first place.
Whether they are politicians (Kevin Rudd, Joe Hockey), media personalities (Mia Freedman, Rove McManus), Hollywood stars (Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Spacey), or the who’s who of the art, music or cultural scene (Sydney Writer’s Festival, Australian Edge) Twitter is being used as one giant playground where we can each ‘follow’ the people, genres, causes, news, stories and more that we are interested in, all in the one place.
Better than that, people can actually have a conversation, multiple, simultaneous conversations even across many different genres, in real time. For those whose professions require them to be at the cutting edge of information, Twitter is like the holy grail of information hubs. Quick, instant, with linking and search capabilities, it acts as a sort of public contact book open to everyone curious enough to join.
And therein lies the rub. The very thing that fuels Twitter – its simplicity and its accessibility – are likely to be the very things that secure its demise. As we hold those who benefit from making noise in the media, like Kyle and Mia, to be held accountable for what they say across all forums, whether it be on radio, in print, or on social media platforms, it will be a tough test balancing the public persona with the things that are better kept private.
Until then, everyone should sign up to Twitter and follow your leaders while you can. I doubt it will be long before the likes of Freedman will be taking their casual communications elsewhere, to a forum where you’re not invited.
Image of Mia Freedman taken from her Facebook; Kyle Sandilands from bigbrother.com.au; Kevin Rudd from here
Really good article, Lyrian. I really enjoyed it. I was a little bewildered by Mostyn’s article, reminding Freedman that her flippant tweets (as most of our tweets are) were read by real human beings with their own sensitivities, whilst simultaneously forgetting that Freedman is also a human being with her own sensitivities and foibles.
I don’t agree that this kind of response means we’ll soon see an end to Twitter and similar social media sites, though. It may be true of politicians, by someone like Freedman is a communicator by trade, and the new mediasphere means it’s essentially her job to communicate those ideas directly with the public. Being relatively accessible is part of what keeps her relevant.
The same goes for celebrities – they make their living as much from their personalities as from their art, and being able to communicate directly with their fans is a powerful tool for them.
I have hope that by the time our generation becomes politicians (or certainly the people 10-15 years younger than us, at least), these kinds of gaffes won’t be as big a deal. In 15-20 years, after all, most powerful people will have something embarrassing on the public record, whether it’s a drunken picture or an ill-advised blog post.
Agree with you Rachel, the next gen of pollies might all be a great deal more open – simply because they’ve already bared all online in their youth!
While I agree that celebrities and other public figures are currently struggling to walk a fine line with emergent digital media like Twitter, I don’t think their turmoil will kill the oeuvre. On the contrary, there’s few things our rubbernecking media machine enjoys more than a good old-fashioned gaffe, and in a culture where the cult of celebrity requires an almost non-stop stream of updates about its beloved stars, there’s nothing quite like Twitter for providing insight into the daily lives of the rich and famous. Those are both fairly cynical examples, but in broader terms, I’d contend that all the current spotlighting of public figures who dare to express a personal opinion are part of a bigger, currently unanswered question, viz: where do we draw the line between public and private in an age of instant media, and under what circumstances?
It’s not just about celebrities and Twitter; it’s about employees being fired because of content on their social networking pages, cyberbullying in schools, videos on YouTube – even the debate over the street-level images of private homes in Google Maps. These are all disparate examples, each of which has different quirks, different potential solutions, but what they all have in common is our need to establish etiquette for the use technology whose rate of developmental progress has far outstripped the speed at which we are constructing rules for using it. Twitter will eventually be superceded by something new, yes, but only because the next leap forward in virtual communication will replace it as a matter of course, and not because its existence has contributed to an already ongoing debate about public vs. private in the digital landscape.
Quite simply, I’d be extraordinarily worried if we, as a society, saw Twitter collapse simply because it forced us to reexamine our behaviour. The issues it’s raised – or rather, which have arisen as a result of its use – aren’t bad questions to be asking. With or without Twitter, need to know how to live with technology. The Freedman case is a good example of this, whereas I’d argue that Kyle Sandilands acting like Kyle Sandilands is less an issue of his choice of media than it is a question of his being obnoxious tool who perhaps shouldn’t be paid obscene amounts of money to abuse people on air.
Should public figures have the luxury of private opinions in a public forum, or not – that’s the real question underlying these examples. Conventional wisdom seem to say ‘Yes, but ony for so long as they don’t say something offensive.’ However, given the level of media scrutiny currently attached to any gaffe, regardless of its objective severity – Freedman deserves no heat compared to Sandilands – I’d suggest a case-by-case policy of caveat orator. Let the speaker, whoever they are, beware. Because if they weren’t before, the world and his wife are certainly watching now.