There is a long piece on Murdoch’s wavering empire by Paul Mason over at the BBC. It is called “Murdoch: the network defeats the hierarchy“
Mason makes some nice points. I loved hearing about Gillian Tett‘s “social silence”. This is
the subject that everybody at high-class cocktail parties wants to avoid.
After Lehman Brothers collapsed, we realised that the unasked question had been the most important: “on whose books do the increasingly toxic debts of the housing market stand?” The answer was “in the shadow banking system”, but we only knew it existed when it collapsed.
And I was interested to learn about Chomsky and Herman’s “manufacturing of consent” theory.
But I did find myself frowning in a very grumpy old mannish way at the use of some of the network theory terms. Pertly, if I am honest, because I was probably excited to find out how it linked in and then disappointed in equal measure to find out the Mason doesn’t really understand it.
I can see that the Sun and the Daily mail may be power nodes in a system of distribution. Take the following though.
The most important fact is: not for the first time in 2011, the network has defeated the hierarchy.
It sounds good. It’s comforting even, in that it makes one think perhaps that there is some scientific basis in ‘the people’ beating ‘the entrenched power’, be that journalists and Murdoch or the Arab Spring.
However good it sounds, though, it is ultimately twaddle. It is a category mistake. A hierarchy is just another type of network.
Grumble and ho hum.