Following a turbulent summer…

Jim Marshall says that while the Arab Spring seemed to be a righteous uprising, aided and abetted by a liberating social media network, events at home (in the riots and the hacking scandal) saw a potentially more unsavoury side to the use of some media channels… not so much an Arab Spring as an English Rusty Nail!

Summer is well and truly over and the run up to Christmas has begun. It is easy to tell because we’re all settling in to the new series of The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing, and panicking about how we’re going to catch both (results and extended highlights as well), along with the new Jonathon Ross Show on ITV – and of course Downton Abbey on Sunday evenings.

In the old days (admittedly very old) we’d be worrying about Christmas catalogues and desperately saving up for the festive period. Nowadays we are all slaves to the media age and Christmas day is entirely a question of ‘will I get the latest iPad?’, which in fairness would be a genuinely spiritual (media) experience.

But all seems well with the media world at the moment. The autumn market isn’t great but it is OK – and most of the media seem reasonably stable and trading comfortably, including the newish boys on the block like Facebook and Google, which is arguably somewhat surprising after the goings on across the summer.

Firstly, the newspaper market threatened to implode with the hacking scandal. Secondly, society threatened to implode with the riots and, just to ‘cap it off’, the stock market threatened to implode with the Eurozone economic problems and continued fears over French banking.

It looked as though it could prove to be a very troubled last few months of the year. But, in terms of settling our nerves, much credit should go to Richard Desmond for successfully re-launching Big Brother, the English cricket team (extensively covered by Sky) for becoming world number one and Simon Cowell for launching another successful Saturday night show.

However, as we contentedly socialise on Facebook, tweet on twitter, read the Times on our iPads and vote on our mobiles for our favourites on The X Factor and Strictly, we should reflect for a moment on the turbulent times across the summer.

For me, what became starkly apparent was that the role of the media has become so much more influential to the way that people assimilate news, communicate views/opinions and respond to that news. Of course scandals, riots and financial crisis are hardly a new or unique phenomena and they have always been reported and assessed by the media. But what happened this summer was that the speed and the universality of communications meant that the media were reporting, influencing and even making the news.

Hold on, you might argue, we already knew that with the Arab Spring earlier this year – where the media supported the civilian protests against repressive regimes. This continues in Libya, where the Gaddafi regime, built on oppression and censorship, has all but ended.

(As an interesting aside, a picture of Gaddafi’s son, Saif Al Islam, atop a tank with his bald plate and demonic beard, which appeared in the Guardian in August, shows a spooky resemblance to the Group M boss and my old colleague and friend Nick Theakstone. Clearly they are in fact very different characters – one is an aggressive politician, has slightly mad rolling eyes and has ambitions for world domination and the other one is Colonel Gaddafi’s son.)

But the Arab Spring seemed to us to be a righteous uprising, aided and abetted by a liberating social media network. In contrast, events at home (in the riots and the hacking scandal) saw a potentially more unsavoury side to the use of some media channels – not so much an Arab Spring as an English Rusty Nail!

It has also drawn a somewhat hysterical reaction in some quarters – jailing two men for four years for inciting riots on Facebook (which didn’t happen, the riots that is) was quite absurd and has no doubt led to some panic deleting of people’s comments on Facebook, when responding to the question: ‘How was your weekend?’ with ‘Great, I had a riot’.

Suggestions for introducing curfews, suppressing Blackberry communications and introducing restrictions on journalists, as well as jailing someone for six months for stealing a bottle of water (which did happen), really start to sound like we could be moving in the direction of Libya while Libya comes the other way.

Yes, we had a troubled summer and it has raised some quite taxing questions about the role and influence of modern media – they are no longer passive and in any way controllable. It seems alright now, as the media world seems to be concentrating on entertainment again – the Rugby World Cup, new football season, and lots of mobiling, tweeting, and facebooking our favourite shows, etc.

So it has calmed down and a more normal service has been resumed. But these issues about the role of media are not going to go away and I’m not sure that the social disquiet has gone away either.

There was a piece of news that didn’t get particularly wide coverage in the summer… it should have done and I think it will have very significant implications for media, social media and society in general. To quote the Independent from August 25: Number of ‘Neets’ aged 19 to 24 hits a new high Almost one million 16 to 24-year-olds don’t have a job and aren’t in training or education either, according to figures released yesterday.