This year’s worst kept secret is finally out in the open as Ryan Giggs is named as the footballer who had an affair with a reality TV star.
It's slightly depressing that in the age where so many state secrets are being slowly revealed – including the truth about ‘wars for oil’, the true costs of the bank bailouts and the shift in economic and political power from the West to the East - this is the story that captivated people on Twitter.
While I’m not at all interested in the private life of an obscenely overpaid footballer and his showboating ex-girl friend, the story has at last opened up the debate on how new internet and social media technology can impact the privacy of individuals. It’s also started to reveal a battle line between internet users and elites, and herald a fight that may define the future of the internet.
Governments and states feel particularly threatened by online people power
Online people power
The power of ordinary people to post what they like on the internet, versus powerful elites who seek to curb internet media freedom highlights how far media power has changed in recent years.
Not so long ago we had a very rigid hierarchy of mass media and if you were a corporation or a political leader you knew that the established media could deliver a huge captive audience for your message. You could also be sure that the media were also broadly supportive of elites. Indeed, the media and journalists had certain codes and practices that supported elite power and that’s how the system worked for so long.
Most of all, certain stories were off limits especially legal injunctions and national security stories. So, for instance during the Cuban Missile Crisis when President Kennedy’s Chief of Staff phoned all the major US media and told them not to report the fact that most of the US military were preparing for a land invasion of Cuba, they didn’t break the story.
Modern elites and media control
Fast forward to 2011 the power of elites to control and direct the media is greatly diminished. New technology has empowered people to become publishers in their own right. This trend erodes the power of traditional media and places more media power in the hands of consumers, who definitely don’t subscribe to journalist codes and practices.
In effect the legal super-injunction against the media revealing the names on the Giggs case became ludicrous as the mainstream professional journalists were barred from reporting the details of a story that had been accessed and broadcast by hundreds of thousands of people online.
And it’s not just legal injunctions that are being broken online. Every day, businesses across the world battle against copyright infringement, online brandjacking and reputational damage from anonymous internet users.
Governments and states feel particularly threatened by online people power. The recent Wikileaks case showed that government secrets and issues of national security can be posted online and go viral very quickly. And once they do, it becomes very difficult for the traditional media not to publish the details. Just ask the former presidents of Arab states what they think of the new social media environment and the fading power of state television.
The backlash
The idea that empowering people to write and publish their own material online has always been seen a liberating and democratic evolution in free speech. But when you start to have state secrets go viral online and the smashing of super-injunctions at the touch of a button then you can bet your life that sooner or later the internet will start to be governed increasingly by laws and prosecutions.
Indeed, there is more evidence that governments, businesses and legal elites are preparing a backlash against the ‘wild west’ of online people power. We could easily arrive at a situation were businesses and governments start to prosecute people for posts online. In this regard, Ryan Giggs lasting claim to fame might be that he shared a common goal with the Chinese Politburo and Arab dictators in curbing free speech on the internet.
