There's really not much to the Catherine Deveny 'issue' left to be said... except the most interesting thing. In case you've been living on the sun, Deveny is a writer/comedian/professional annoyer who was basically employed by Melbourne's broadsheet (supposedly that's supposed to mean something) The Age to be their answer to tabloid Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt - Inflammatory, extreme, single-minded, harsh, unyielding. Deveny has, like most opinionated people, a Twitter account. And this year, Deveny tweeted during the Logies, the night we look back at the year in Australian TV and say: "Huh....yeah." She made a couple of tweets that touched nerves (you see, 'decent Australians' have quite a few nerves - ANZACs, sick kids, our borders, cricketers' WAGs), specifically:
Yeah - they're BIG nerves. Everyone: Don't make fun of our weird fatherless child-personalities, and don't make fun of breast cancer. There was outrage, fuelled by the Herald Sun and commercial talkback radio. The Age sacked her. Like I said, pretty much everything has already been said about this online. In summation, they all go something like this: "Even if you're not a fan of Deveny's opinions, The Age shouldn't have sacked her because of pressure from other media after a couple of tweets!”
Let’s not get distracted by the fun talk of whether Deveny is funny or offensive. For me, the most interesting thing about this is Twitter. Deveny herself wrote in an over-emotional response manifesto for ABC's The Drum: "This is so not about Twitter” – Except it is. It is about gender and mainstream double-standards and class, but it is also about the panic surrounding a platform that lets you broadcast (or narrowcast, if you’re a small fish like me) your views for free. When you are paid to broadcast your views in a publication people pay for, and you also Tweet your views freely to your followers, eventually there’s going to be some convergence between the two, for better or worse. To not expect it is to be naive and frankly ignorant of the implications of technology. This is something The Age and Deveny are guilty of, but also perhaps the wider range of commentators who have contributed to this debate.
There are really only three commentators who have attempted to tackle the wider issue of web-publishing in this context – Jonathan Holmes of Media Watch, Crikey’s Margaret Simons, and SMH’s Miranda Devine. I’ll refrain from reviewing them, you can all read. I’ll also refrain from explicitly addressing the subsequent “Twitter-scandal” involving Divine, the irony of which I’m sure is apparent to all.
Devine, and Holmes and Simons, all address, in some form or another, questions about content ownership and social media use. Deveny’s tweets are authored by her and are perhaps one of the only ways we can hear Deveny’s voice 'unfiltered’ by another editorial voice. The extraordinary thing about new media platforms like Twitter is that they are just that: platforms. They are comparatively free of editorial control, and allow those who use them to produce constant unfiltered content. Really the only meaningful restriction on Twitter content is the amount of space given for each individual message. Twitter is a forum that is designed to be invisible; its purpose is to provide easy-to-access data, in the form you want it, whether through a browser, RSS feed, desktop client or mobile application. This is unlike, say, Deveny being hired by a TV show like Q&A to give her opinion. Q&A is run by the ABC, and the ABC ‘brand’ (to echo Devine’s approach) frames the discussions on that program. When we watch Deveny on Q&A and read her in The Age, we are receiving her filtered through the brand of her editors. Even when we go to see Deveny in a live show, we see her through the frame of comedy conventions. Knowing we are seeing ‘comedy’ contextualises our understanding of what to expect. Twitter intentionally gives you no context.
What Deveny doesn’t seem to realise, is that she herself is a brand. She has an image. A ‘brand voice.’ And when other brands want to use that voice, they pay her; there is a trade-off. One brand, let’s say The Age, asks the other, Deveny, to add value (content) to their product, and in return Deveny receives additional exposure. Now, if Deveny chooses to present her brand unfiltered, for free, without context, outside of the control of paying editors, she must accept that her exposure as a brand has implications across all mediums. Her columns for The Age do not exist in a vacuum, nor do her Tweets, appearances on TV, books, live shows, or other columns. Her brand profile remains constant across all frames. She may argue her brand is framed by conventions of all of these settings, and she would be correct, except for Twitter: The platform with no conventions except a character limit.
It is about Twitter. Social media platforms are not designed to have their own voice. They are made of algorithm, code, and protocol, not editorial policy. If they do have a voice, it consists of many voices speaking at once, creating patterns. You cannot rely on it to give you context. If you are going out to swim in open ocean, understand you may drown if you’re not careful. There is no net.
