Where will ‘smear-gate’ end? In a letter to Shadow Cabinet Minister Francis Maude, Sir Gus O’Donnell, the head of the civil service, states that 35-year-old Damian McBride’s actions were a ‘clear and serious breach’ of Whitehall rules. Sir Gus insists that advisers who spread ‘inappropriate material’ in future will be automatically sacked under a new code of conduct.
Coincidentally, the publication of the letter comes as researchers prepare to warn of the damage that today’s fast-paced media culture is having on moral decision making. Using brain imaging, a team at the University of Southern California, have discovered that, although human beings can respond to signs of physical pain in others in only fractions of a second, it takes much longer to develop the social emotions of admiration and compassion. One of the researchers, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang notes that: ‘For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection.’ The study raises important questions about the emotional cost of relying on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.
In today’s fast-moving world of rapid-rebuttal politics and twenty-four hour news, a McBride incident was pretty much inevitable. I’m not blaming his actions on the internet, but the pressure on him to take control of the political agenda, given Gordon Brown’s poll ratings at the beginning of the year, was immense, creating an atmosphere where it was easy to slip across the line of what is either reasonable or ethical.
Certainly, the McBride-Draper episode should challenge bloggers and email users to ensure that their contributions enhance rather than diminish the quality of debate, discussion and human relationships. The blogosphere might just have made news and comment more democratic (although it’s perhaps simply that the power is now in the hands of different people, blog editors instead of newspaper proprietors) but it hasn’t made it more accurate or intelligent. Superficially, the number of typos on the web is evidence of the slippage. The really popular blogs are frequently the ones that appeal to the basest of human instincts, being overly negative and controversial, and containing the sort of prattle once reserved for the diary sections of the national press.
One of the ways we could help ensure that blogs and social networks like Twitter do raise the level of debate and conversation is to follow a Ten Commandments of blogging. Godblogs, an event organised by the Evangelical Alliance last year, aimed to encourage people to think through an ethical approach to blogging. Unlike the original Ten Commandments, the rules they came up with are virtual rather than set in stone, but they are intended to help bloggers avoid some of the mistakes that we’ve heard about during the past week.
I’m told that a few years ago digital giant Microsoft encouraged its employees to email less and converse more in person. It was good advice. IT is a great servant, but a poor master. The challenge is to use it constructively and sparingly, and to stop and think before pressing send.
Paul Woolley is Director of Theos.
