Janet Street Porter Does Not Get It

Who?

For Americans, the name Janet Street Porter does not mean a thing.

But in the UK she has been very well known as one of those people perpetually on the cutting edge of the media revolution.

Which is why I was astonished (or gobsmacked, as we might say in the UK) to read a piece she wrote in The Daily Mail earlier this week, excoriating Facebook and explaining the ‘dangers’ of social media.

Social networking isn’t just – as I complained last year – a pointless waste of time, because for a worrying number of young people it is proving to be harmful, if not deadly.

The DEADLY social networks.

Well…. umm… OK.

Look, the British have always had, for some strange reason, a fixation on pedophilia. They see pedophiles everywhere, the way Americans used to see c0mmunists under every bed during the McCarthy era.  My nice and nephew, aged 14, told me that a teacher at their school was recently suspended for taking face photos of all the new members of his class at the beginning of term. He claimed that it was to help him remember their names.  “He could be a pedophile!” claimed my British relatives. “He could photoshop their faces onto pornographic photos and then do God only knows what…”

Yes… well…

Like I said, the British have a strange fixation on pedophilia.

But Janet Street Porter now takes this dyed in the wool angst to entirely new heights when she declares that social networks represent a grave threat to society.

Porter goes on to enumerate at least a half dozen instances in which children were molested, attacked or even killed because of their online relationships.

Well, of course that is bad, but let’s take a look at the numbers.

6 out of 400 million members.

Statistically that is a .000000015% chance of attack.

Let’s greatly expand the numbers. Let’s say that there were 6,000 murderous attacks on children because of online contacts last year.  Man… first that would really sell tabloids. One can only imagine.  That would be about 2o a day.

Yet even that number we would be in the range of a .0000015% probability.

Now, to put this in perspective, the odds on being killed in a car crash every time you get into a car are a mind boggling 1 in 6,000, or a .00016 probability.

But what so upsets Media Maven Janet Street Porter is not, I think, the ‘danger’ of child molestation online (though it makes a pretty juicy story, when you take out the statistics).  I think what upsets her is that as a former media maven, her ox is being badly gored by the new online world.

In the olden days, in which Janet Street Porter (I love those English 3-part names), came to power, the media world was really a kind of monopoly, or rather an oligopoly.  Access to it was so expensive and so complicated that only a very few, very lucky people were ever afforded the opportunity to talk to millions (quite literally).  And because there were so few ‘talkers’ (as opposed to listeners), we took what they said VERY SERIOUSLY.  Otherwise, why would they have been afforded the rather unique privilege of talking to the rest of us.

It also made them very rich.

The primary impact of the Digital Revolution is that these people are no longer so ‘special’.

What makes someone special when anyone and their brother can get on line and spew their opinions as easily (and to as many people, really (some 3 billion at last count)) as Janet Street Porter can.

It must be really annoying.

No longer being so special

And for many journalists, no longer being paid to do what bloggers do every day for free.

And let’s face it, nice person that she is, and undoubtedly very bright, she is probably no brighter than a few thousand other smart folks who are blogging away every day on the web or on social networks. Right?

So she is annoyed.

And we’re just at the tip of the iceberg.

Youtube, which has only been in business for 3 years or so, has already uploaded more video than the US networks could produce in 2,000 years.  Every hour (!) 13 hours of video get uploaded to Youtube.  400 million people are on Facebook (making it the third most populace country in the world). Clearly, something is going on here.

Something enormous.

It’s a real life revolution.  A real life global shift in the way our world works.

This is a lot bigger than simply a new way to deliver The Daily Mail to its readers.

And Janet Street Porter, if she were smart, would be paying attention to that.

But she isn’t.

Instead, she is simply…. annoyed.