A great tradition died recently. The fellowship exam for All Souls College, supposedly the “hardest exam in the world”, no longer includes the infamous “one word question” – a one word question demanding an essay length answer.  I find myself wondering if they ever selected the word “Protest” – because that’s a word I think I could write an essay length answer to at the moment.

On the other hand, I’ve never been much of a protester.

I went to a Peace Protest while I was in Wellington last year, the first I can remember going to since university days. The turnout wasn’t huge. New Zealand is the most peaceful nation on Earth (according to a recent global audit), and in that context one might think a peace protest makes no sense here anyway, but it was the start of a year long “global peace march”, and in that context, starting in NZ makes perfect sense. They’d also chosen to start on Ghandi’s birthday – which means it was my birthday as well, albeit many years later. The other reason I was going along was because I’d heard Richard Stallman was going to be there, and I wanted to ask if he remembered me from a certain 48 hour party we were at in Christchurch about a decade earlier (random factoid: the dude can dance). Anyway, as I said, there wasn’t a huge turnout at this protest. Maybe a couple hundred people. It was a workday, and they hadn’t done much advertising (it even took me some time to google the details of the march once I’d figured out it was happening)

Yesterday I went to a much larger protest – over 3 thousand, according to National Radio (vs “hundreds” as reported  elsewhere, a good example of how the media coverage of a protest impacts its impact!), in our local Cathedral Square, to protest the recent disbanding of Ecan (our regional government) by the national (National) government. I turned up late (this isn’t exactly unusual) but somehow ended up being the representative “protester” quoted in the press (The Press) this morning.

“Protester Seth Wagoner, of Christchurch, said he was shocked at how quickly democracy was taken away and he was showing solidarity with the environment.” (link)

Which I figured would sound better than “Well, my friend was going, it was only a couple blocks away, and I wanted to see how many people turned up“, when the reporter asked me “Why are you here?”

But thinking about it in retrospect, I’m glad I was there, and I shouldn’t have been so ambivalent it. People should protest more often, even those of us who arguably have “more important things to do”.

I could ramble on about this for quite a while, but the truth is I do have quite a lot of important things to do, so I might come back to this later. After all, I’m not trying to get into All Souls College here. But if I was, here are a few threads I might try to weave into my narrative:

1) The reasons people choose names like “National” for their political party, or “The Press” for their newspaper, and whether we should let them do that.

2) The nature of ECan, a “regional council” that many people barely knew, and how the rights of hundreds of thousands can be appropriated by a few people who actually care, and understand what they need to do.

3) How the power change at Ecan – swapping out an elected “council” for an appointed “commission” may or may not effect the civil servants who actually do the real work – with a somewhat dubious analogy to the recent power changeover in Britain, particularly with respect to:

3.1) transitions of power in a democracy, and how the week long decision making process from the LibDems caused the media to condemn them for leaving Britain without leadership, even suggesting that the Queen should step in and do something about it, how the reporters from Europe laughed at this notion given the occasional 6 month coalition forming process they have to put up with, potentially diverging into a discussion of

3.1.1) the role of the Monarch in (a) Britain and/or (b) New Zealand, past, present, and or future.

3.1.2) advantages and disadvantages of different types of “representation”, with respect to:

(a)  in the case of ECan, replacing a “democratic” council elected mostly by local landowners, with a technocratic “commission” appointed by a government that was chosen nationally by everyone – both in general and in this specific case.

(b) in the case of Britain, the upcoming referendum on the AV “Additional Vote” , how the various stakeholders appear to feel about it, how the question of (more) proportional representation affected the coalition forming process, and why the referendum will (probably) be a historic moment in the world’s oldest surviving democracy.

(c)  in the case New Zealand, our upcoming referendum on the retention of the MMP electoral system

4) How Local Government ‘parties’ have formed in some cities that have only a loose affiliation with parties at the national level. In the legislatures of the USA, it is republican vs democrat all the way down, so far as I know. In NZ it is much more diverse. How affiliations between National, Regional, and Local government parties, and the movement of personal between the ranks may or may not affect how the votes go and the policies we end up with as a result.

5) “Headlines”, with respect to:

5.1) how this post started out with the title “Protest”, switched to “Democracy. Use it or lose it”, and then “Democracy. It’s complicated.”

5.2) the rarely mentioned role of newspaper sub-editors (who write the headlines, among other things) in the democratic process.

6) The media and their role in reporting on protests, other ways they affect public opinion, and their resulting power over both elections and sitting governments.

6.1) How the ownership of newspapers and other mass media affects the editorial positions taken, delving into the relationships between the owner(s), the owner(s) other media and non-media companies, the editor(s), sub-editors and reporters, giving examples such as:

6.1.1) Fox News, and their supposed disconnect between “News” content, which is supposedly fair and balanced, and “Talkshow” content, which clearly isn’t.

6.1.1.1) The phrase “Fair and Balanced”, how Fox tried to trademark it, what that would have meant, and how the EFF  stopped them.

6.1.1.1.1) A potentially lengthy diversion into the relationship between intellectual property law and representative democracy, by which time the essay markers would I’m sure have already decided to give me an “A” or an “F” depending on how they felt about indented intellectual diversions, but given that they’re expecting one to write an essay length response to a one word question, intellectual diversions are clearly something they are looking for.

6.1.1.1.1.1) Yet *another* potential diversion onto the subject of how one can clearly have “too much of a good thing”, for instance:

(a) “Freedom” in Market Economies, as demonstrated by the recent global financial maelstrom (with at least a footnote relating to the nature of the words “Free” and “Freedom” and how they are leveraged into new roles, eg by the “Free Software” movement started by Richard Stallman (mentioned in Paragraph 2 above) and also in respect to our new “Free (as in Speech) Beer” brand, which of course started out just as an opportunity to take the piss (hur, hur) but evolved into something approaching an actual business model, with it’s own domain name(s) and the beginnings of a new “open” licence  (but then I got distracted, which as you can see in my case, isn’t very hard) or;

(b) intellectual diversions, potentially enlightening but ultimately leading one further and further away from the original topic under discussion.

6.1.2) The venerable Wall Street Journal, recently purchased by the same media conglomerate that owns Fox News, has, as with most papers, different standards for the “News” parts of the paper, which tend to stick, roughly speaking, to reporting the known facts, versus the editorial pages, on which, particularly in the case of the Journal, the most absurd nonsense has often been printed, quite regardless of and often in direct opposition with the known facts.

6.1.2.1) This separation of policy as regards fact checking, at the world’s largest newspaper, is well known to sophisticated consumers of news content. However, to unsophisticated or inexperienced news readers, comprising perhaps 95%+ of registered voters, the imprimatur of the Journal, with it’s long history and imposing credentials, gives an undeserved advantage to said editorial content, no doubt fooling many readers into accepting as fact what is merely opinion…

6.1.2.1) Furthermore, when one considers the (relatively recent) co-ownership of Fox News and the WSJ…

6.2) A more general diversion into how consolidation of media companies, their ownership by other companies, or ownership by people who own other companies, may have an effect on their editorial policies, their news sourcing, etc, and by extension, have an effect on the “constituency” they share with the politicians.

6.3) Perhaps something about the fact that most printed news is sourced from only 3 big networks – the AP…(nuts, I’ve temporarily forgotten the other two…one is french…)  and suggest that editors should take a look at Allaboutthestory.com [disclaimer: owned by some Kiwifoo friends] and www.project-syndicate.org to freshen things up a bit.

6.4) And perhaps even attempt to drag in Chomsky & Herman, “Manufacturing Consent: The political economy of the mass media” which is really compulsory reading for anyone who’s serious about this sort of thing. I read it over a decade ago and was highly impressed. One key takeaway for me was that you really didn’t need some grand conspiracy to control the media and/or popular opinion, the economics of the situation pretty much ensured the ‘elites’ would stay in charge (these days I’m a bit more sanguine about that, and not in any hurry to try Chomsky’s desired experiments in Anarcho-syndicalism thank you very much). I haven’t seen the more recent documentary, which I expect was a bit less detailed. How relevant is it to the modern day media situation or countries other than the US? Not sure, but it’s worth reading anyway.

7) A personal connection. My friend’s dad lost his job when ECan was disbanded. He’s an interesting chap, as is my friend.

7.1) For instance, my friend put a footnote in his doctoral dissertation (on the geopolitics of the Patagonian toothfish, for what it’s worth), promising a bottle of scotch (I can’t recall if it was a malt or a blend) to any of his three examiners who actually read that footnote, for his feeling was that in general examiners rarely bother to read the footnotes, meaning they were likely to miss potentially vital details, such as the reason my friend had brought three bottles of scotch to his oral defence – none of which were claimed. Given the growing length of this outline of potential threads in a hypothetical answer to a demonstrative example of the question no longer being asked in a fellowship exam at a college I never plan to attend, I will attempt a similar wager. A pint of most excellent ale awaits the first three people who read this sentence and let me know they have done so.
Realising the end of the exam time period was drawing near, I would then valiantly attempt to draw several of the preceding (sub-)points into something approaching a conclusion.  Perhaps something along the lines of “In conclusion, protests perform a vital role in a representative democracy, a mechanism for the populace to display their displeasure with the actions of their leaders. Active suppression of street protests by police, or at worst, the military, is a sure sign of unhealthy democracy. However, the impact of a protest, its ability to spark ongoing debate, further protest action or to actually bring about the changes sought by the protesters relies crucially on the role of the media…

8.x) Democracy. It’s complicated.

————–

[1 week passes...]

Hmmm. Well in light of the fact that I haven’t managed to get back and actually finish this off, I think I’ll post it unfinished for your amusement. At least, I hope some of you will be amused. If there’s anything in there you’d like me to follow up on, let me know in the comments. I may come back and re-work this later, and add more links. I had at least a dozen more random threads to weave into the outline; here are the ones I’d actually started to write down:

The ongoing transition of power from Newspaper owners to aggregators, search engines, and now social media, why this matters

How I hadn’t seen so many people in the square since the funeral of Rod Donald, co-leader of the NZ Green party, a great man taken well before his time.  Of course, had he still been alive, Rod would have been a speaker at this event, and he ties into the themes of this blog post all the more greatly for his involvement with electoral reform and the nationwide MMP campaign, and also the transition to STV for our local government!

How a brilliant part of this particular protest was the cairn of rocks. What a great symbol. Top marks to whoever came up with that one.

The friend I came along with, who felt more strongly about the protest than I did, felt that she had let herself down by not wanting to go on the record (which is why I ended up on the record) out of (I think) concern for her current work in the public sector. Frankly I think she was doing more than her share  just by showing up, but there’s certainly a potential diversion there on the potentially chilling effects of a large public sector, and one might also be tempted to talk about the power of the public sector unions that are apparently now in negotiations around the entitlements that states in the USA can no longer afford…

Somewhere in the middle of writing this post I got a call from The Press’s tech reporter, clarifying a few details for an article mentioning my company’s products due to be published next week. So I was tempted to try and fit something in around chilling effects wrt work within the private sector as well – ie if a company director or CEO posts something that might be interpreted as critical a media organization (fortunately, in this case, The Press is a non-Murdoch owned newspaper!) , or any institution with the potential to affect the health of the company, are they in jeopardy of breaching legal or moral obligations to company stakeholders?

Social aspects of protest, why they’re important for reasons other than just the policy changes they seek to bring about…

Some other interesting protest examples:

* During the Bush years, whenever Bush spoke anywhere they set up “First Amendment Zones” - corrals where the police kept the protesters separated from the govt supporters and the media.

* Contrasted with: the people who showed up with guns to anti-Obama protests and were allowed to keep them because that’s the sort of state they were in.

* The protest Flotilla delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza suffered the tragic loss of 9 lives, but it caused a media storm world wide that might actually lead to the human rights being partially returned to 1.5m people living in poverty in the Gaza Strip

* The protests around the time of the Coalition negotiations where they were attempting to force Clegg to stay true to his word, how this may or may not have helped the LibDems get such a great deal in the negotiations, whether Sky News reporters berating the protestors in their interviews was appropriate….

* The photos of the Christian “million man march” that ended up being re-purposed by right wing blogs and media as supposed pictures of tea party protesters.

A rationale for protest:  Use it or lose it.

Representative Democracy has a lot of problems – the main one being that the public really only gets to hold their politicians accountable every 3 to 5 years.  In between elections, one of the few ways you can exercise your democratic rights is getting out on the street in a mass protest. Plenty of people will tell you that this is largely a waste of time – the media will downplay the incident and the government will ignore it. Millions of people out on the streets didn’t stop the Iraq War.

How important is being on the streets vs more modern forms of protest, eg, tweeting and blogging? You can of course, do both at the same time…just so long as they’re not jamming outgoing signals from the area as they tried to do with the #flotilla.

How the flotilla protest was an interesting case as it was international in nature and the resolution came in international waters, and without trying to get into the details of that particular case (which could be time consuming and potentially hazardous!), attempt to put in some points about how democracy is constrained or enhanced by international treaties, the role of the UN, and yada yada, and perhaps also mentioning Sir Geoffery Palmer, the rumour that he might be asked to head an international inquiry into the flotilla affair, and why he would be well qualified.