What Google could do against the European Court’s blunder

Last week a Spanish lawyer won his case at the European Court against Google, while demanding removal of links that referred to old newspaper articles about his arrears of payment and property execution in the 1990s. He demanded to be “forgotten” since after all these years the articles still affect his reputation. Indeed, we know that it is easy to post information on the internet, but almost impossible to remove it: as an adult you may easily regret this embarrassing photo of your open drunkenness that you’ve posted as a youngster, especially when you’re up to an application interview and don’t want to be associated with your wild oats. Two years ago the European Commission announced this “right to be forgotten” as a new fundamental human right. Now the European Court has confirmed the validity of this right, forcing Google to remove links from their search results when individuals feel the data are outdated, irrelevant and harmful for their reputation.

Why is it a blunder?
In its verdict the European Court has clearly favoured privacy protection at the expense of free speech, requiring Google (as well as Yahoo, Bing and other search engines) to adjust the search results, which comes close to censorship. Google in turn rightly claims that a search engine should just show what information is available, without any bias of religious, ideological, political or personal nature. If people feel harmed by a newspaper article, they should blame the journalist or the publisher, not the search engine. Likewise, we don’t blame the postman for delivering the tax assessments. “Purifying” the search results is nothing less than a falsification of history. Imagine a sociologist or historian who wants to perform some social study, while many supposed unflattering sources wouldn’t show up anymore in the search engine. It should also be noted that this verdict is nothing like previous ones that fined Google for the ways it treated personal data. On the contrary: Europe is now blaming Google for referring to public data, e.g. from newspapers and websites! These are not even Google’s data. The data are legal data as such. Google may find the data, but isn’t allowed to tell where they are. Suppose that you would enter a library where you ask for some books about topic X, and the librarian would say “Yes we have various books about X, I know exactly where they are, but I will not tell you”.

Who to blame?
Probably we shouldn´t blame the judges of the European Court. The “right to be forgotten” is an invention of the European Commission. We should take into account the tremendous frustration of Europe with respect to the internet: first, all major internet companies are US-based, which means that loads of personal data are flooding across the ocean, informing the Americans, while the reverse doesn´t occur; second, we know that the American government and its security agencies greatly exploit these data and do not even refrain from spying on today’s European leaders. Now it seems that Europe, covered by the fashionable principle of privacy protection, revenges itself for its inferior performance on the internet. It bashes Google and the other search engines and forces these into the undemocratic role of European censor.

How may Google respond?
Of course they will have a team of lawyers identifying escape routes. They definitely want to bypass the verdict, because how could they ever handle the flood of requests that they will receive from individuals requiring removal of references to unflattering or outdated content? Although Google has the legal right to reject requests for removal in case the references involve journalistic or artistic value, the cheapest and easiest solution for them would be just to accept and grant all requests. In addition, I would suggest to Google to ostentatiously include the empty spaces in the search results while frequently explaining that “the European Court doesn’t allow Google to display this interesting internet reference that you may have been looking for”. Alternatively, Google may setup a cross-atlantic buddy service that would link European individuals with American individuals for  bypassing European restrictions: in contrast with European law, US law forbids to block any legally-obtained content. As a European I might thus ask my US buddy to do the Google search and forward the links to me. Google may also come up with some technical solutions, either using distributed peer-to-peer solutions or pretending security flaws that would allow the internet community to compensate for the information gaps that Google is forced to create.

What if Google started sending us bills?

The value of information is a difficult thing to assess, because information is a peculiar commodity: in many respects it doesn’t comply with the basic laws of economics. In the material economy things are pretty straightforward: if you sell your car to someone else it means that you don’t have it anymore: you’ve transferred the whole thing. But if you sell your information to someone else, you still have the information at your disposal and you may sell the same information over and over again to other people. Unlike cars and other products in the material economy, information can be duplicated and distributed at almost zero marginal costs.

It is tempting to conclude that from an economical perspective such free information is literally worthless. This is obviously not the case: we know that the web is extensively searched for information, which means that information is certainly valued. Still we’ve become greatly accustomed to the fact that most services on the Internet are free of charge. We buy into the original idealism of the Internet as a place of freedom and open access and reject commercial barriers. Imagine what would happen if Google charged us for each search, each photo upload, each video view, each email sent. What if Twitter charged us for each tweet? What if Facebook changed its strategy and started sending bills? The effect would probably be a worldwide revolt against these companies. The Internet community would quickly launch mirror sites and alternative services that would bypass the spoilsports, just as they do in countries where the authorities restrict freedom of speech by censoring Internet traffic. We simply don’t want to pay, which is peculiar. It demonstrates to what extent the digital economy is different from the material economy.
It is hard to define the value of a single bit. While the price of a single car is highly correlated with the efforts needed to produce it, the price of information is not necessarily linked with the production efforts. In principle, you may become a millionaire by spending 2 minutes to writing the lyrics of a song that happens to become a number one smash hit. Or, imagine that you’re lost in the boiling desert without food and water: you’d pay a million for any simple information that would guide you to civilisation (and a fresh beer). The value of information clearly depends on context and need.

This week technicians of the European Space Agency sent a signal to the remote Rosetta space probe, which was launched in 2004 to meet the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet in 2014. Right after its launch all Rosetta’s systems were purposely switched off to save energy. After many years of lifeless flying through space the probe was supposed to wake up. This week the technicians sent out their wake-up and anxiously waited for a reply. It took a while for the signal to reach the probe 800 millions of kilometres from earth, and for the probe to wake up and respond. But then after quite some anxious moments the technicians received this single “bleep”, indicating that the one billion project was still on its way. It’s very much like the simple but long-anticipated “I will” of a loving couple. The value of a single bit is priceless.

Why banks should fear for the Bitcoin

Lately, we have seen a growing popularity of the Bitcoin, a new digital currency for making payments on the internet. Over the last year the value of the Bitcoin has exploded. While in Januari 2013 one Bitcoin would cost $ 13, on December 4th the quotation tipped the level of $ 1200, which reflects a gain up to 10,000 per cent. Soon after, however, the quotation collapsed to $ 850, which in turn demonstrates the Bitcoin’s incapability of functioning as a stable currency.

I’m inclined to say that these are startup problems rather than fundamental problems. In my view the fluctuations of the Bitcoin quotation are to be attributed to the inconsistent and ambiguous responses of financial authorities, governments and representatives of the financial sector. They simply don’t seem to know how to cope with this new technology.

So what’s so special about the Bitcoin? In contrast with common electronic banking and credit card payments the Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer solution, which doesn’t require a third party to administer, to check and to confirm the transfer of money. Instead, the money is directly transferred from one account to the other. So, we don’t need banks anymore. Since these days many people are fed up with banks and their inferior products, their bonuses and the billions of tax dollars that were needed to prevent the financial sector from collapsing, the Bitcoin offers an attractive alternative. But if no banks are involved, who then administers the transactions? The answer is: the administration is covered by the network of participants, actually by their computers. Each time when a transaction is proposed it is broadcast in the network and checked by multiple other computers in the network. This is all done in an anonymous way: each of these computers receive a series of meaningless digits, which they have to process according to a standard processing algorithm. After a few minutes the results of all calculations are combined to decide about the correctness of the transfer, e.q. checking if the accounts are true accounts, if the digital signatures are okay, if the sender is the true owner of the bitcoins to be transferred, if these bitcoins haven’t been transferred before, and so on. If the calculation matches, the transaction is confirmed and effected. Altogether it means that the administration of the currency is fully distributed over the network, which thus acts as a self-organised system. It means that the administration is not at a particular location in the network but virtually everywhere.

The idea of self-organisation is an inherent difficult thing to grasp. It is very similar to what happens when many starlings group together to produce these fascinating dynamics patterns in the evening sky. No single starling is leading the flock, directing and synchronising it to produce the patterns. None of the starlings are even aware of the patterns they produce. Instead the patterns are the collective result of very simple individual behaviours that are guided by a simple rule: keep close to your neighbour.

It seems that financial authorities hardly understand what’s going on. The European Central Bank (ECB) wrote an interesting report about electronic currency, be it a bit defensive. Generally the ECB qualifies the Bitcoin as an interesting financial innovation, but it is worried about the lack of supervision. The FED, which is the Central Bank of the USA, likewise qualifies the Bitcoin as a remarquable and promising new technology; it even suggests that it could be used as an official currency by banks and governments. Chinese authorities first embraced the Bitcoin (which led to a strong increase of the quotation), but soon after the Central Bank of China as well as other countries banned it (which made the quotation collapse). The Dutch government explained that the Bitcoin is  neither a currency nor a financial service, because the law requires that there is a party that is responsible for the currency! Obviously, this party is lacking: the Bitcoin is a self-organised network system. It seems the authorities have a hard time, when they cannot see who is responsible. We’ve have seen this impotence before with the peer-to-peer music services of Napster, and more recently with Kazaa and Bittorrents. Today the Bitcoin currency is challenging the system. It seems that current legislation and financial institutions aren’t prepared for emerging 21st century technologies.

The Bitcoin has many characteristics that would make it a perfect currency: it is accepted as a means of exchange; there is a controlled and very limited influx of new new Bitcoins; all transactions are unambiguously checked; no banks are needed as intermediaries; no small print; transfers are fast, efficient and cheap; geografic boundaries become irrelevent; as the system is open source software, anyone can inspect the safety level of encryption. Also it warrants anonimity. Although governments claim to strengthen privacy regulations, the anonimity offered by the Bitcoin is perceived as one of its greatest threads, because it would greatly support criminals to do their arms trading, human and drug trafficking,  and money laundering without being tracked.

Just like other peer-to-peer solutions currencies like the Bitcoin will make there way to the market. Authorities should accept the idea of self-organised systems and create the conditions for its use rather than cling on to existing models.

Don´t you touch that button! A new stage of media literacy

Media literacy is among the most popular buzzwords. Many governments and other influential organisations such as Unesco and the European Union have embraced this term and call for more efforts toward media literacy skills. The aim is to provide people with the skills and abilities for critical reception, assessment and use of modern communication media in their professional and personal lives. This is highly commendable and valuable. It reflects the empowerment of individuals by preparing them for the opportunities and threats that media provide. But as I will explain below it disregards the two-way nature of today’s media and fails to point at the negative moral, ethical or economic impact that empowered individuals in turn can have on other groups and individuals.

Media literacy is an all-embracing term that extends literacy (reading and writing) with our interaction with media. Over the decades we’ve seen many different interpretations of media literacy. In order of appearance:

1. Mass media
   After almost a century of mass media such as film, radio and television we have become well aware of their negative influence and manipulative qualities. We have learned to recognise and understand how the authorities, leaders and manufacturers used mass media for their own interests via propaganda, censorship, commercial advertising and other lies. We know that we should never believe any advertising spots. Even so, we’re defenceless against them and keep buying the advertised stuff.

2. ICT skills
   After the advent of the microcomputer ICT skills became highest priority: being able to turn on the computer, open files and run applications. In early days quite some ict training providers emerged and made good money by reassuring people to “just press those buttons”. But today the training of operational skills has lost relevance because most software is self-explaining, contains embedded help functions and uses WYSIWYG screen layouts. Five year old kids can do all tricks effortlessly.

3. Information skills
   After the emergence of the world wide web and an abundance of information became available people were supposed to become information literate, that is, being able to effectively search, find and evaluate information on the web. Surely there are useful tricks to improve searching the web, but most of these assume that you know what you’re looking for beforehand (which is rarely the case). Generally you need to be either persistent, indifferent or just lucky to have a hit. Judging the trustworthiness of information remains a big issue though, since there is no reference that provides absolute truth.

4. Social media literacy
   In recent years the internet has transformed itself from a network of information to a network of people. The patterns of one-to-one communication (e.g. phone calls) and one-to-many communication (e.g. television) were merged into personalised, many-to-many communication. Media literacy’s focus is now on privacy and self-protection, school children’s nagging, grooming and social media dependence.

So far so good. In all cases media literacy refers to making sense of incoming messages. But by focussing on self-help and coping skills media literacy is very much about self-defense, self-protection, and individualism, if not egoism. It has been based on the asymmetric relationship between media and media users, as was predominant in the era of radio and television: safeguarding the individual against unwanted external influences.

For quite a while now, however, this asymmetry has been broken. Media users aren’t passive consumers of messages, but actively reach out to the world by their actions. By our virtual actions such as online shopping, online banking or online booking we trigger unknown material changes and processes in production, transport and other areas. We’ll be informed about the outcomes of the process (“Your new clothes will be delivered by tomorrow morning…”), but the process itself and its true impact remains concealed: we don’t know about the consequences. Increasingly, we will be interacting with the world in very detached and output-oriented ways, very similar to the ways drone pilots press their buttons and destroy their supposed enemies without bothering about collateral damage. We will be acting like stock traders who simply press their buttons to buy or sell their stocks, but who aren’t aware (or don’t want to be aware) of the true impact of their actions: sweating the poor, child labour, slave-running, bankruptcies, pollution, money laundering. This is exactly what makes a detached, incoherent and distorted view of the world.

Media literacy should enter a new stage by breaking through the one-sided, asymmetric focus on the user’s self-protection. Instead media literacy should focus on the true ethical, moral and material impact of our virtual actions. For a long time media literacy has aimed at removing barriers for media usage and it has encouraged people to press any button without hesitations. Now that more and more of our actions will be carried out online we should do the reverse: we should teach people to be responsible and to cautiously consider the ethical, moral and material impact of their anticipated actions. A general guideline would be: “don’t press any button unless you are fully aware of its expected impact”.

Brain-computer interfaces: the implications of accessing human thought

The reason for existence of cognitive psychology, brain research and psychiatry is to get hold of human thought. What happens inside our skull has been a mystery ever since our emergence. For many centuries mind reading has been the domain of spiritualists, telepathists, fortune-tellers and other swindlers. They were the only ones capable of – they claimed – revealing the hidden and inaccessible treasure that is situated inside our skull. During the Enlightenment scientists started to disqualify these methods because of their arbitrariness and lack of objective verification. They suggested to base insights on observations only. That wasn´t always helpful. A disreputable example of observational science was phrenology, which used skull measurements for explaining intelligence. Today phrenology is fully abandoned and recognised as a pseudo-science. In the last century we have seen various new mind-reading efforts, most of which are based on physiological sensors, which capture skin resistance, blood pressure, heart beat and other phenomena linked with our autonomous nervous system. In many cases these systems were disputable as such. In recent years new technologies (fMRI, EEG) allowed brain research to directly detect neural activity in our brain and to verify the location in the brain and the conditions for occurrence. Today various low cost devices for capturing electrical brain signals are available, e.g. the Emotiv and Neurosky headsets, which can be used as a brain-computer interface: controlling your computer by thought. This may seem magical, and to a large extent it is, because it achieves what was exclusively reserved for wizards, fakirs and yogis: controlling the world with our mind. But it works alright (sort of)!

Still this is only one-way action, which is no more than the convenient, handsfree operation of computers. The great challenge of brain-computer interface research is to master two-way interaction. But here, we are faced with fundamental ethical questions about the implications of computers controlling human thought. Already the manipulation of human thought through advertisements, propaganda or biased TV news is an effective instrument for those who aim for power and influence. Bypassing the audience´s eyes and ears and directly connecting to their central nervous systems, however, would greatly simplify and facilitate the alignment of thoughts. For many people this may look like science fiction, very similar to the feature film examples of brainwashing, mind switching and the uploading of knowledge to the brain (e.g. the Matrix). Nevertheless, the direct connection of computers and nervous cells is already a proven and established medical technology that is applied in hand prostheses (linking a robotic hand to motor nerves in the arm), cochlear implants (linking a chip to the auditory nerve) and retinal implants (linking a chip to the optic nerve) for restoring hand motor function, hearing and vision, respectively.

The consequences of such technologies are immense. If we can connect our brain directly to a computer and learn how to code brain data, we will be able to use computers for enhancing our processing power, extending our memory capacity, and for uploading and downloading knowledge and experiences. Even more, we could use the internet to link to another computer that is connected to another person and communicate directly from brain to brain: we would have two connected brains, we could exchange thoughts and even more, without the need for speech or vision. Science fiction? On the contrary: this year, brain researchers Pais-Vieira, Lebedev, Kunicki, Wang and Nicolelis used brain-computer interfaces to connect the brains of two rats to the internet, one rat in Natal (Brazil) and the other rat in Durham (USA). After having taught a trick to one of the rats, the other rat was able to do the trick faultless. This is nothing less than knowledge sharing, transferring thought via the internet from one brain to the other, or even more: remote behavioural control. We can hardly imagine the impact of linking human brains together through the internet. The result would be an unprecedented system of collective intelligence, if not the loss of human individuality.

 

Some insight on The Digital Turn

Below are some questions I answered for my publisher in a kind of interview about my book. This should give you some background on The Digital Turn, what readers can expect and why it’s important for every 21st-century citizen:

1. How did you come to write this book? What was your motivation?

I decided to write this book to counter the confusion that goes with the ever-growing parade of new digital media.

We easily go astray in the patchwork-like, highly fragmented domain of media, which is continually changing by new services and devices. It is difficult to establish a coherent idea about the impact and role of these new virtual spaces, and what the significance or position of a particular medium would be.

• Main focus on operational skills involving media, e.g. pressing the right buttons, but not being aware of the changing landscapes
• Today’s breath taking era of emerging digital media and the changes these bring about
• My professional engagement in blogs, columns and presentations about (digital) media
• The tendency of people to adopt a naive instrumental view about new inventions, like digital media, which means that new media are viewed as neutral instruments that just facilitate our lives (e.g. make things easier, faster, cheaper). However, history shows that media aren’t just useful tools, but have a substantive impact on the ways we arrange our lives.

2. Who does the book appeal to and why?

The book addresses anyone who frequents the Internet, or uses a smartphone, computer or tablet. So this is really a wide audience, basically everyone who uses modern media: who doesn’t? The book will be particularly relevant for teachers, media designers and other people professionally engaged in media, including journalists, web moderators, game designers, advertising agents, educational technologists, film makers and TV makers.

The premise of this book is that we should understand the basic determinants and mechanisms of media, meaning and cognition rather than focus merely on particular aspects or devices that happen to be in vogue. This book describes the underlying machinery of mediated communication and the ways we derive meaning from it. It provides a transcending media perspective that connects various media types and anticipates future developments in the field. Practically, the book is an indispensable aid for every 21^st century citizen.

3. What one thing do you want readers to learn/take away from this work?

Readers should become aware of both the great opportunities of new, networked media and the possible drawbacks. The purpose of the book is to enable them to become digital media literate, to understand the processes and mechanisms (not technically) that underlie these media. They should become critical information gatherers, which enables them to make sense of the unstructured, fragmented flow of messages and to help them to establish and contribute to the self-correcting nature of online communities. Readers should become aware of distortions, manipulations and deceptions of mediated representations, and they should be motivated to keep their media literacy and self-directedness up to date.

Will Google Glass lead to more road casualties?

In April Google released its first series of Google Glass prototypes. Two thousand copies of these augmented reality spectacles have been shipped to a selected group of volunteers, called `Glass Explorers´, who were prepared to pay $1500 and provide end-user feedback about the new gadget. Google Glass is a head-mounted display that includes an Android smartphone, which can be used for hands-free calling, augmented reality and photo and video recording. The device offers a small display near the upper part of the right eye, which serves as an overlay for augmented reality data. It has a camera, microphone, motion sensor and speaker and it is Wifi and Bluetooth connected with the cloud, in particular a number of Google services including Google Latitude (GPS-based overlays), Google Goggles (object recognition) and Google Maps (Navigation). All functions are voice-controlled (e.g. “record a video”, “send an email”, “share a photo”).

A full launch of Google Glass is anticipated in 2014. Large scale production will reduce costs of hardware well below $200, especially when sales are linked with mobile service subscriptions as is the case with existing smartphones. Hence, it is quite likely that Google glass and similar devices will become popular and fashionable gadgets that will receive large scale adoption. This video eyewear is a fancy product that comes close to the futuristic electronic vision device of Lieutenant La Forge in the famous Star Trek series. It has the X-factor and may readily challenge current smartphone-based augmented reality applications. It would provide a new standard for perceiving, and recording the world. Google sketches compelling applications in sports, gaming, social networking, shopping, elder care and many other areas. Street scenes would be full of eyewear glasses; not wearing one would make you the exception.

I wonder what happens when everyone would be wearing such a device. Of course, we would appreciate the enhanced augmented reality experience it offers and its direct access to all kinds of media and communication functions. I wonder how we should deal with car drivers wearing such eyewear. We don’t need a clairvoyant to conclude that the devices will be a source of extreme distraction. Many people suppose that we’re capable of multitasking, e.g. sending emails and driving a car at the same time, but we´re not. We can only do different things in parallel by rapidly switching between them. This switching comes at the price of reduced concentration and profundity, and we perform none of these parallel tasks well.

There is an extensive body of research that demonstrated the negative influence of the use of smartphones on driving performance (Basacik, Reed & Robbins, 2011; Stelling-Konczak & Hagenzieker, 2012): reaction times go up with 20% to 40%, drivers have less control over their car (zigzagging), fail to anticipate dangerous situations (slippiness, iciness), aren’t capable of maintaining constant speed, and suffer from inattentional blindness (e.g. looking at the road but not noticing relevant factors, less use of mirrors, reduced situational awareness). This holds both for calling, sending SMS, and checking social networks. Of course most people know about this and often try to compensate for the extra cognitive load by lowering speed and keeping more distance to other vehicles. But such measures can be hazardous as well. Handsfree calling has similar negative influences as handheld calling, simply because part of the caller’s attention is directed to the conversation. Research shows that the use of smartphones raises the risk of an accident with 300%, even up to 10 minutes after the call.

Thus, wearing Google Glass during driving is not a very good idea. The Google Glass image imposes itself as an inevitable part of our visual field. The restaurants, shops, monuments, churches and cinemas we pass will trigger an alarming flood of messages that will inevitably attract our attention: food menus, reviews, product files, promos, opening hours, advertisements. I would certainly buy an eyewear device. But I wonder how we can prevent its side effects. Do we need to await the evidence of many thousands of victims before we decide to ban this fantastic prospective gadget from our cars?

The Internet as a cognitive prosthesis

Some people claim that the Internet makes us dumber. The flood of short snippets of information on the Internet, over the phone, but also on radio and television, they say, reduces concentration, depth and reflection. We jump from tweet to tweet and interpret the world in only 140 characters. Calculators, translation computers, GPS navigators and Google assist us, but who is still capable of making a long division, who is able to move from A to B without navigator? Sceptics and romantics tirelessly vilify the modernity that is affecting our brains. But are they right? In many cases, our performance goes up: the computer has helped us to bring people to the moon, to make a ten-days weather forecast or to guide us effortlessly from A to B. Nevertheless, they put forward, without GPS, we are still helpless!

This is where a wrong inference is made: it is a misconception that the cognitive powers of man can be determined in isolation. It is impossible to determine someone’s writing skills without providing pencil and paper. Likewise, it is impossible to assess NASA’s capability of bringing people to the moon, while not allowing them to use their computers. Our performance is highly determined by the tools that we’ve developed and learnt to use.

From an evolutionary viewpoint we are made to exploit everything that we encounter in our environment. We turned branches and stones into assistive tools by which we bypassed our biological limitations and defeated our natural enemies. It explains the success of our species. We were good hunters indeed, but mainly by the sharp spears that we developed. Unarmed we were losing. Our capabilities are defined by our environment and by the tools that we’ve created.

Today’s environment, featuring the Internet, smartphones and tablets, is increasingly furnished with digital media. These media are not insomuch mechanical aids supporting our physical performances, but instead act as cognitive tools that strengthen our minds, strengthen our memory and increase our processing power. Digital media act on what is the defining feature of man and what distinguishes us from animals: our cognition. They allow us to become smarter! That is why media aren’t just replaceable instruments or commodities like spears and knives, but instead are extensions of ourselves.

It is said that we may get to know people from the books they read. Likewise, we are more and more defined by the media that we use. Our intelligence, personality and identity will be largely determined by our capabilities of dealing with the new digital realm. Media are the cognitive prostheses that are an inseparable part of our “self”.

More information about the impact of media on our cognition in The Digital Turn.

Social media spoils the celebrations of the new king

In The Digital Turn, I devoted quite some pages to the power and speed of social media. The basic idea of social media is that its users are “pro-sumers:” they are both the producers and the consumers of content. Users can create their own Facebook page, a blog post, a YouTube video, an iTunes podcast, a Wikipedia article and so on. It reflects the ultimate ideal of democracy and involvement, while it provides a voice to everyone. 

This week, the headlines in Dutch newspapers were dominated by a peculiar incident linked with the succession of Queen Beatrix by her son Prince Willem-Alexander. The National Committee that prepared the celebration had adopted a social media pro-sumer philosophy and incited the people of the Netherlands to post their text suggestions for a festive song for the new King. All text posts were then to be collected and condensed into a song for the new King: a song from the people, written by the people, sang by the people.

Thousands of people sent their rhymes and phrases. But right after the celebratory presentation of the song on the radio, a wave of criticism arose. Critics denounced the quality of the lyrics and qualified it as fragmented, rambling and full of linguistic blunders. Also the melody, which was even so composed by a renowned composer, was slated, and it was suggested to be plagiarized from an existing song. National celebrities tweeted against the song and an Internet petition was set up to ban the song. The YouTube version became inaccessible after people reported it as “spam,” “swindle,” “abuse” and “deceptive commercial content.” The composer broke down because of a load of hate mail. Within 24 hours, the festive mood had turned into a people’s tribunal. What was supposed to become the height of democracy had become a national nightmare.

Some analysts suggest that the commotion is not about the song itself, but reflects a deeply rooted aversion against monarchy, which is considered antidemocratic, outdated and hard to align with the egalitarian nature of the Internet and social media. Others ascribe this splitting of the nation to the contrast between the old Queen, who has been the patroness of the high-level elite arts, style and protocol, and her son, who – generally known for his nickname “Prince Pilsner Beer” – is supposed to be a supporter of popular amusement. Others link the commotion to the topical political issue of populistic budget cuts of museums, orchestras and theatres, which reflects a conflict between the upper class and the lower class.

The speed and intensity of the social media messages in this incident exemplify the power of the new media – the sympathetic initiative of national song writing for the King was mercilessly rejected by the crowd.

More information about the power of social media in The Digital Turn.