No Alan Jones. I am not a cyber-bully.

Thinky thoughts today about Alan Jones and the furore that has erupted both over his comments and the unprecedented social media campaign around them.

People have many different opinions about this and it’s not all straight forward lefties on one side and righties on the other.

But there is an argument out there that the social media campaign that has sprung up targeting Jones’s sponsors is threatening our freedom of speech (and perhaps association). Jones and 2GB themselves have railed today against this ‘cyber-bullying’ and how this is putting innocent people out of work and damaging business.

Allow me to vehemently and completely disagree.

We live in a world where much of our public policy is affected by private money and corporate influence. Where radio personalities like Alan Jones can and have wielded out-of-proportion influence to the audiences they represent. And where this does and has had a very, very real impact on our world, on what we’ve been able to achieve and on how we’ve been able to tackle very important and challenging societal problems.

The all-powerful narrative of the buck and the market means that everything these days must be reduced to a dollar figure to be understood and valued. We are treated by both politicians and the market as consumers first, and human beings very much later.

This reality has meant that people like Jones, and the big corporates have been able to ride democracy their own way for a very long time. They have big pulpits  bought with big money and with big microphones that they use to push their own (mostly conservative) agendas, often at the expense of the facts and the best interest of the rest of the community. The rest of the community – numbering in our millions – have had no real voice at all outside of the voting booth and our ability to band together over common interest.

Jones in particular has used his big microphone to sprout religious intolerance, racial vilification, sexism, and the most vile abuse towards a Prime Minister I’ve witnessed since I can remember being old enough to be politically aware.

And up until now he has done it with complete immunity and without the consequences that most of the rest of the world would have to wear for disgracing themselves and their employers.

Let’s face it – Jones has had a pretty sweet (and free) ride – up to now.

Social media changes things. It gives everyone a voice. Anyone with access to the internet can post a comment, send an email, tweet or facebook their thoughts. We can blog – and many bloggers have bigger audiences these days than traditional media personalities. It’s the way of the new world. It poses incredible challenges (such as how rife actual cyber-bullying and trolling is). But it also poses incredible opportunities for free speech such as we’ve never seen before. Now anyone who can write can have as big a microphone as Jones has enjoyed for years.

So colour me unimpressed that Alan now feels he’s being cyber-bullied.  No Alan – you’re not. You’ve mistaken my right to do business with whom I choose with bullying. Real cyber-bullying is very different.

Here it is in a sentence– after decades of turning us all into consumers and using that power to make over our society in the corporate image and damage those things that many of us hold dear, no one now has the right to turn around and claim I’m bullying them by exercising my right as a consumer to do business with whom I want.

You cannot make me into a ‘consumer’ and then cry foul when I use my ‘consumer’ influence to stand for what is important to me. You don’t get to be that much of a hypocrite.

I’m sure it must get up their noses. I’m sure it must really make them mad – this idea that we ‘consumers’ have found a way through all this corporate bile to utilise the system to stand up for a more decent and respectful societal discourse. They built a cross for their own backs, and now they don’t want to carry it?

That’s the power of social media.

Let me make it clear – I don’t deny Alan Jones his right to say whatever he wants. But by God – I claim my right to use the methods at my disposal (social media and the power of my dollar) to talk as loudly as he does. And to stand, finally, against the religious intolerance, science-denialism, anti-environmentalism, sexism and hateful rhetoric that he sprouts on a daily basis. If that has the follow-on effect of losing Jones and 2GB money and perhaps even shutting his show down, then he and his corporate mates own responsibility for that. Not me or those like me who are merely standing for what we believe in. He has the option after all of expressing his different opinions in a more respectful, polite and non-sexist way. I have a right to not do business with companies who support him while he chooses disrespectful and damaging rhetoric.

That doesn’t make me a cyber-bully.
Nor does it make me a danger to freedom of speech.

In fact it makes me a champion of free speech.

And actually that’s not just a thought.

Over and out.