How Mel Gibson’s Finest Film Explains Journalism in the Age of Networks (And No, It’s Not “What Women Want”)

I love the film Braveheart. It may be sentimental. It may be historically inaccurate. And with its misty lochs and forlorn bagpipes it may fetishize Scottish nationalism to the point of the absurd. But it is a rip-roarer of a film complete with plucky Celts, a sexy French princess, and in Longshanks a cartoon English baddie who steals every scene he is in.

(As a side note, Longshanks, Edward I, is famous for persecuting English Jews and eventually expelling them from England in 1290. He and Mel Gibson would no doubt have got along swimmingly.)

But back to the film. This is Longshanks’s best line by a mile…

In the debate on the digital revolution, it sums up an attitude that I have come across time and time again, and it maybe articulated like this: The problem with the internet, is that it’s full of people. (If it helps picture me saying this with long white hair and wearing chain mail).

We can look at network maps and debate relevancy alogorithms but strip it all away and you’re left with people.

In today’s lecture, Antony Mayfield, Head of Content and Media at iCrossing UK, put people firmly back in the picture. He pointed out that Google’s seemingly unassailable hegemony can be explained largely by their insistence on putting the user first. Relevancy of results is king in Googleland and therefore we all remain loyal subjects.

Like Jessica Elgot and Jemima Kiss, I too have become a convert to the iconoclastic teachings of Michael Rosenblum and was lucky to see his lecture, nay sermon, at the Society of Editors Conference this week.

Leaving the stage to stalk the conference floor, Rosenblum extolled the virtues of video journalism, but the implications of his tour de force went much further. It is no longer possible to cling onto ideas of how we as journalists think things should be done. Our users will from now on tell us how they want things done and it is up to us to fall in line.

Mr Rosenblum tore into the idea that necessity is the mother of invention, asking whether anyone in the mid 1990s sat around in newsrooms saying, “Shit, we really need an Internet. I wish someone would invent that. Cos when the internet came along let’s be honest, you all went, ‘Fuck get that thing out of here.’ “

But Rosenblum and Antony Mayfield both believe in creative disruption, and see the seemingly cataclysmic upheavals bought about by the internet as a great thing for journalism, not least because it refocuses our industry on people, their wants, their needs and their ideas.

It struck me during today’s talk that though we tend to toss around technical terms when discussing journalism and the internet, the key values we come back to are intrinsically human. Today Antony Mayfield talked about etiquette, reputation and attention-seeking. In previous weeks we have talked about trust, storytelling and connecting with people.

Let us not lose sight of this. As Antony Mayfield concluded:

“Don’t be distracted by technology. Find and follow people.”

Without people, the internet is nothing. And like William Wallace and his army, kilts raised, genitals a-wagging, the people have laid down the challenge.

We can ridicule their blogs. But we can never take their freedom.

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