UPDATE: 12.36pm

Earlier the BBC announced that Ross and Brand are suspended. Is this a result for the web mob? And if a web mob can achieve this, what else might it achieve? 

Original post…

Just as I was beginning to think that Clay Shirky was stretching a point about the power of the web too far…along comes the ho-hah about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. Firstly, I will join in the chorus. I have never found either of them at all funny. I see them as part of the monopoly of ‘celebrities’ who dominate TV and radio and are kept in the spotlight by multi-national corporations and extraordinarily powerful media companies. (Note to self - careful not to sound like Dave Spart). It has been quite gratifying to discover so many other people don’t find them funny either. Sometimes the media bombardment and general head-fixing can make one feel isolated. It’s interesting (and encouraging) to see those dominant media messages are not as global as can be imagined. 

Are they popular? Well, television and radio are incredibly strictly controlled and a great deal of what’s on there is manufactured demand. We have *no* say on what programmes we get on either radio or TV. We got rid of Sky because of i) the costs ii) the endless advertising iii) the poor quality of most of the programmes. But so what; Sky still controls huge amounts of media, and you and I control none.

Plenty of people make unpleasant phone calls, lots of things are said we would never hear - but as Shirky says, they’re not meant to be heard. What we have hear is the collisions of media. Using a personal means of communication -the telephone - and then *broadcasting* this to large numbers of people. The effect is very different than if it were two silly school boys phoning a famous actor. That would have been one to one. This is one to (very) many.

And the content is puerile. Ross and Brand stand for the ‘anything goes’ approach. But this is an ‘anything goes’ for the rich elite, anything goes for those with money. If anyone else used the work phone to call someone with a sexist message and then broadcast that to the world they would be out of the door and probably have inspector Knacker feeling their collar. 

Now, the 20,000 complaints that the BBC has received. No one has mentioned the provenance of these but I bet the vast majority are by email, or have been posted to the BBC ‘Have Your Say’ website. Reading through these comments, there are a few people who have said ‘but only two people complained at the time - why all the fuss 9 days later?’ But what they fail to understand is what Shirky talks about; the power of the web, and what the definition of now is. In the new media, the tempo of a story is not dictated by a handful of newspapers; it can be dictated by the formation of a critical mass on the web; and that’s not dependent on the traditional time frames of newspaper publishing or television and radio broadcasting. The means of communication are altered and I suspect we are still in the very early days of this.

And finally; why all the fuss about this compared with the general economic meltdown? Well that’s interesting. I can remember being a very active socialist for many years and we had weekly meetings in the Trades Club at Dalston. What was one of the biggest arguments we had? Under-consumption or over production? Soviet Union - state capitalist or bureaucratic workers state? No - where to go on the annual outing. 

I don’t know why more people have commented on this story than the economic crisis and I shall refrain from any cod explanations. But it’s almost to do with the flash nature of some of what happens on the web - it’s almost like a web mob; a critical mass is created and then everyone jumps in. 

Or maybe it’s really true that many more people can’t stand celebrity culture than we are led to believe by the same media that has created it in the first place.