Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

In the new media it’s easy for our pet hatreds to be introduced to anyone who is interested. And of course everyone is interested, how else could it be? Jyrki Lehtola investigates

Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, how can we get the revenue model to work by using our old media, Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, hey, what about that revenue model of ours, Twitter.

The preceding is a poignant summary of what the Finnish media was like in 2011 when the rules of the game changed like they have changed every year. And we still don’t even fully understand what the game is supposed to be.

As late as 2010 you could still discuss the existence, significance and utility of Facebook as if there could be many different opinions on the subject; the defenders’ argument centred on social interaction and community, while the detractors was more ‘why would I join Facebook, I have a life.’

But in 2010 there was no longer any call for such wrangling, because Facebook was life. People didn’t join it anymore, because they already had. On Facebook we looked for cleaning help, shared our Spotify lists, shared links, endlessly, and told all of our friends how depressing Mondays are, or, as you would express it on Facebook: ‘Isn’t it great that it’s Monday again?’

We also hated there – oh, how we hated. Facebook tried to make us positive by offering us a ‘Like’ button, not a ‘Hate’ or ‘Despise’ button. But we were people who hated and despised – how to fulfil that important side of our nature on Facebook?

Easily, and, what’s more, in a pleasantly communal spirit; Facebook was a social medium, after all, not a medium that just tells us what to think, and what about. In the name of communality we created groups where we hated things and told others what to think.

We hated people who thought differently than we did, people whose values didn’t match our own, people who said ‘no’ when they were supposed to say ‘yes’ and people who worked in parts of the media that didn’t live up to our conception as social media actors about what people in the media should think.

Social media brought us a new communal gift: lurking. We created groups that hated and boycotted media, viewpoints and people, and then we sat and followed those same things, even though the purpose was to boycott them. Whenever the object of our hatred made a mistake, we linked to that error on Facebook, and then we laughed with our friends about how impossibly stupid people are.

Facebook was supposed to bring us a new, joyful sense of community, but even Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t do anything about our nature; we adopted Facebook in order to lure our friends into hating the things that we hated.

In 2011 Twitter also became an important part of our lives, because it understood our limitations and offered us the opportunity to condense our feelings and knowledge down to 140 characters. Twitter was the text messaging service for those who really wanted to subscribe to our social messages and hear that today we were ‘drunk in Porvoo’, that tomorrow ‘I’ll find out about a secret project I can’t talk about’ and that ‘here’s a link for all my Twitter followers to a page I found interesting’ because there can never be enough links in the world.

Twitter also gave us the opportunity to speak out in a way that didn’t require anything of ourselves. When you’re expressing your displeasure with a politician, the media or an international corporation in 140 characters, reasons don’t matter much, what you think does.

At the same time, Twitter gave the old media something to think about. What do we have to offer anyone anymore, and how can we squeeze money out of it? Because of Twitter, those of us in the old media were always late. Tweets were the first announcements of the revolutions in North Africa, the London riots and the death of Amy Winehouse.

We came limping along so late it was embarrassing. The subheading for every newspaper and TV news website could have been ‘News for the slow’.

The world became a place where you never had to wait for any information; everything was always available.

Whether we need all that information as quickly as we receive it is another matter. The new media was supposed to be social, but nothing had changed. There we sat, still alone in front of the television, just with the addition of our iPads, where we constantly received new information about what was happening in the world outside of the television; and, instead of digesting that information, we did what we always do nowadays: we forwarded it on.

It isn’t very long since we descended from the trees, and our gait is still a little unsteady. Our brains have been forced to adapt little by little to an accelerating world. Now that world has become so fast and so manic that our brains can’t necessarily keep up anymore. You can read about the effects of that imbalance in the old media, where the number of news blurbs about disorderly conduct has been rising sharply.

Translated by Owen Witesman

Because I am not a historian and Googling this topic would take more than two clicks, I do not know whether Gutenberg was accused of ruining the future of young people and making adults even stupider.

There would have been reason to. The invention of the printing press took us away from what is truly important. The world was better before Gutenberg.

People knew themselves and each other; they were connected to nature and what really matters. After Gutenberg invented the printing press, those poor people were forced to read books, creating an ever-worsening state of helplessness.

New inventions are always bad for everything we could be.

Television made us stupid. It brought us TV dinners and put the family on the couch watching advertisements, even though everyone could have been in their own rooms reading Hegel.

Magazines made us stupid. They had short stories, gossip, and pictures about people other than Hegel.

Now we have this Internet thing. It made us incredibly, unbelievably stupid, although, on the other hand, not so much.

The power of the Internet to make people stupid has been discussed as long as we have had the Internet to talk about the power of it making people stupid.

Because the Internet is something new, the potential and effects of which we are just becoming acquainted with, it follows that it makes us stupider. Google’s automatic answer service prevents us from using our memories. Wikipedia removes from the pool of answers the one that the world is a complex place in which there can be many contradictory answers to the same question. The endless news stream takes away our ability to concentrate. Each of these and many more considerations have had articles and books published about them.

Then there is the other, somewhat amusing perspective that has clung to the Zeitgeist, according to which the Internet is the salvation that will teach our youth and children how to get along in the modern world. This view emphasises willingness to change, coping with speed, multitasking, and that reading books is just a hindrance in a world of flashing stimuli.

We have spent the whole beginning of the millennium discussing this. People who write books have argued for the dumbing-down affect of the Internet; people who make their living from the Internet argue about what a good place the Internet is for our coping skills.

One of the most recent additions to the conversation is Nick Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. According to Carr, the Internet is changing how our brains work. On the Internet you don’t concentrate deeply on one thing, instead jumping from link to link in such a way that our brains don’t stop long enough on one thing.

Carr’s book has naturally aroused a discussion in which the opposition has argued that, well, here we go again with another elitist author tut-tutting current developments without offering any other solutions that tut-tutting current developments.

Now that this discussion has been going on for so long, would it be possible reshape it, if only for a moment?

Are we making the Internet stupid?

The Internet is a global place that crosses all boundaries, where we can get the latest information, which we can delve into ourselves or read about how other people have delved into, and in which we can be connected with people and perspectives we may never have been able to encounter otherwise.

That doesn’t sound all that terrible: a place where we can become acquainted with ten different opinions on the financial crisis, connect with our friends, check tomorrow’s weather, and purchase Terrence Malick’s latest film.

It would be nice in a place like that, but then we show up, we humans. Or at least the confusion of the Internet’s commercial actors related to us humans – related to what we are like and what to offer us so we’ll stay on the Internet in a way that can be made commercially viable.

And so they tried to invent different ways we could be present on the Internet: open discussion boards, a continuous demand to take a stand and let our voices be heard, and the recognition of how confused we are in the face of life.

And that is why I find instructions, queries, and polls on the Internet that apply to me so well. How can I keep my erotic life interesting? (I either have to remember that a) the other party is also a person, not simply the object of my erotic desires and b) it’s always fun to try new things) When is the right time to buy a child a mobile phone? (Depends on the child and your situation in life.) What to do when a child masturbates? (Talk with the child without embarrassing him.) Why am I not losing weight? (I eat unhealthy foods and don’t exercise enough.)

We have the Internet, a source of limitless potential, and how do we use it?

We turn it into a book – a book for rather simple children that tells us things we already know. We turn the Internet into a place whose default assumption is that we’re stupid, into a place that always has the same old questions and answers.

The Internet didn’t make us stupid. It didn’t have time, because we had already made it stupid first.

Translated by Owen Witesman

Right or wrong, my country? Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Big electoral turnouts are generally considered a good thing. But, writes columnist Jyrki Lehtola, in Finland the fact that the vote went up in the last Finnish general election caused a revelation. Educated urbanites and the media (perhaps near enough the same thing), are shocked by how 20 per cent of their fellow Finns think – and the ramifications caused tremors all across Europe

Listen up. Diversity is a resource. Except of course if it’s the sort of diversity that is a resource for the wrong people.

That sort of diversity isn’t the least bit nice. In Finland in the spring, we ran into the sort of diversity that even got the rest of Europe to start worrying. Out in the thickets and forests, diverse people had been springing up in secret, people of whose existence we urbanites were entirely unaware.

And they threatened to bring Europe down. Europe. Which was a bit much.

They wanted out of the European Union. They did not agree with helping those European countries that were groaning under the weight of their economic problems. They were True Finns, not Europeans. And Europe was worried: what if these few forest folk were to make Finland do a U-turn in its European policy? In Finland, backing a loan to another country demands a parliamentary decision. What if the other parties were to follow these forest folk? What if Europe were to be destroyed by the fact that a few True Finns would prefer to be by themselves rather than have a relationship with the rest of the world?

Before, those people had hidden their ideas on lavatory walls and Internet chat boards. On those infrequent occasions when they did come out, they had learned to remain quiet and politically correct, to accept that it wasn’t wise for them to speak of things they didn’t necessarily understand.

Then they suddenly opened their mouths, and those of us in the media down here in the South said in horror: Can you say that? You can’t.

And everything began with such an insignificant thing as their concept of art.

Perussuomalaiset, the True Finns, is a Finnish party born out of the protest spirit of those previously shut out of the political conversation. They received 20 per cent of the vote in the spring parliamentary elections, which has resulted in the unfortunate fact that now we have to get acquainted with the dispossessed among us instead of being able to assume that they must think about the world the same way we do. What kind of a nutter wouldn’t?

Before the elections, the True Finns prodded at the political elite with their folksy, anachronistic view of the world. They had different ideas about abortion, refugees, gays, and nature than us here in the liberal, urban media.

That didn’t really trouble us much yet. But then they published their election platform, which took on art. It was absolutely horrible: forest people mucking about with things that weren’t any of their business.

They hated contemporary art. They called it ‘postmodern fakery’, which the state shouldn’t be supporting. For them, true Finnish art was somewhere far away: in works that depict the Kalevala or Finland’s wars.

And thus began our media storm in a pipette. Facebook filled up with groups making ironic comments about the True Finns’ concept of art; arts pages weren’t able to discuss anything other than that there were people whose concept of art was a throwback to another time; columnists got stuck in place for a month like columnists do.

The anger of the elite towards the True Finns’ concept of art was something that could only result in one thing only: the part of the country who thought they were being discriminated against, began to despise the elite even more.

How could they fall to pieces over such a small thing? How could they react to one wrong idea with such frenzy? There were other things in the True Finns’ party platform, but this, their concept of art, is what you waded into. What’s wrong with you?

As a result of all of this, the True Finns were the indisputable winners of the elections.

Then life became even more confusing. They rolled into the capital. True Finns. Here they came on the train from their thickets, walking past the fashionable postmodernist facade of the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. How dreadful.

We just had to set upon them. To interview them, to run around after them, marveling at how exotic these primitives were.

Then one of them, a regular guy from the country who wasn’t used to sitting in big conference rooms full of stylized period furniture opened his mouth, and all sorts of things unfit for media consumption spilled out. He gave his opinion about refugees. He used the phrase ‘old negro’. He had exactly the wrong idea about everything.

We just had to attack him. To dig up all the information we could about him and question all of his ideas just because he had the temerity to say them out loud.

In Finland the leadership was trying to put together a government under difficult circumstances, but that was not nearly as titillating as one True Finn MP, a country boy, who had behaved improperly in the halls of power, without hiding behind silence or euphemisms.

It was utterly inappropriate. Uncouth, thoughtless, stupid in a sort of lazy way, but – please excuse me – so what?

Surely it’s OK to be stupid in your own way here? To think and speak the wrong way? To think just what you please about art, not necessarily knowing anything about it other than that everything was probably better in the past.

Yes, in a democratic country you should be able to think the wrong thoughts; that shouldn’t destroy our self-respect or image of our nation.

True Finns who shun refugees, gays, and the wrong kind of art do not necessarily approach diversity with the sort of understanding and tact we would hope. However, the problem for our southern elite appears to be that we can’t seem to handle the fact that there are people in our own country who think a different way than we do, and that now they have been given a voice.

How terrible.

Translated by Owen Witesman

To be, or not, a true Finn? Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Elections are coming: what will the vox populi, the voice of the people, dictate? And which people will be deciding Finland’s political future? As columnist Jyrki Lehtola reports, a political debate has arisen about the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ sort of pollster – and the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kind of Finn

Finland will be holding parliamentary elections in April. We’ve been organising them every four years, like clockwork, for the past two decades, a rare example of stability in a parliamentary democracy. Finland is the European Union’s model student, and the differences between our main political parties are nearly pro forma (who wouldn’t want to protect nature? who wouldn’t want better health care?), so elections in recent years have been more like an endearing tradition than significant, world-changing events.

However, this year everything is different. The upcoming elections have forced us to look in the mirror – and we aren’t liking what we’re seeing.

We have a problem. Some of the candidates for the upcoming elections are the wrong sort of people, who have the wrong sort of view of the world.

This has always been the case to some degree, but until now we have always been able to shrug off these ‘wrong people’ as a single-issue movement made up of freaks dealing with unresolved daddy issues. Now, dismissing these wrong sorts of people is significantly more difficult, because public opinion polls are telling us that as many as 16 per cent of Finns are ready to look themselves in the mirror.

These wrong sort of people make up a party named Perussuomalaiset (‘True Finns’, until now approximately three per cent of the Parliament), a uniquely descriptive name for a party that is full of true Finns.

And exactly what are ‘true’ Finnish people like? Just as we’ve always feared: negative people for whom the only acceptable change is change that means a return to something that used to be. They don’t want anything living next door or in their back yards that wasn’t there 20 years ago. No immigrants, homosexuals or people who aren’t true Finns. Their attitudes toward feminism, abortion and Europe are those of a man who, having eaten and drunk too much, is now lost in the past.

And Europe? Oh no! They hate Europe. They don’t want to help any of the European countries who have got themselves in a fix. They want to give up the common currency and return to the Finnish mark, because, in to their memory, when we used the mark, there weren’t any economic problems. They want out of Europe – to close the borders and sulk in front of the television in their long johns. And even the TV programmes are the wrong sort.

As a party, they represent the negative view of life. The only thing they don’t regard negatively is the idealised Finland of the past.

And they have nearly 16 per cent support. They could easily end up in the next coalition government, and that possibility is problematic for both the other parties and the media to handle.

The True Finns’ party chairman is the jovial Timo Soini, an extremely skilled populist who gives the negativity of true Finns the face of an easy-going teddy bear as he beams through his beads of sweat.

The media have tried to explain away the popularity of the True Finns as being a result of their party chairman’s charisma, in order to avoid facing the more awkward possibility. That awkward possibility is that… well… we Finns aren’t really like that, are we?

Our Turku is this year’s European Capital of Culture, and our Helsinki is next year’s World Design Capital. The True Finns probably don’t even know how to spell or pronounce ‘design’ in English.

We are a liberal, civilised state. Newsweek loves us and our educational system. In the autumn we resigned from the Lutheran church en masse when it was revealed that the church’s attitude toward homosexual unions was neither open nor approving.

We embrace diversity, we vacation in Europe, we are the EU’s star pupil, always the first to implement even the most ridiculous EU regulations. We recycle, we bicycle, we appreciate African art, we love local food and we try to keep our carbon footprint as small as possible. We are a responsible, liberal, civilised people. We always have been. How is it possible that 16 per cent of us would vote for a party whose candidates seem to represent everything that is so foreign to us?

And that is precisely the media’s problem with to the True Finns. The irritating thing about the True Finns is that they are so… so… Finnish, and we don’t want to have to deal with too naked a portrait of ourselves.

And now the True Finns are suddenly a significant political force – evidence that we have failed to turn a significant portion of our nation into model European citizens; and what’s worse, they seem to be proud of their prejudices and negativity.

But we can’t say that. We can’t admit that we Finns are just that, true Finns. Our whole idealised self-portrait project would fall apart in our hands.

That is why we try to turn the True Finns into an anomaly, an interesting, exotic minority, and we in the media have always taken the side of downtrodden minorities, because minorities are cute like baby kittens.

But now the downtrodden minority is actually that rather large part of the populace who don’t care about any other minorities than themselves. And they don’t resemble kittens at all. They resemble us Finns.

How vexing.

Translated by Owen Witesman

]]> http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/2011/02/what-are-we-like/feed/ 0 http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/2010/10/what-grade-is-your-kid-in/ http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/2010/10/what-grade-is-your-kid-in/#comments Fri, 29 Oct 2010 11:49:31 +0000 Jyrki Lehtola http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/?p=10274 Should a journalist show his hand? Columnist Jyrki Lehtola ponders the pros and cons of showing one’s true political colours

What’s the best way to present an initiative that would get the cynical, lazy news media to take an interest …

Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Should a journalist show his hand? Columnist Jyrki Lehtola ponders the pros and cons of showing one’s true political colours

What’s the best way to present an initiative that would get the cynical, lazy news media to take an interest in the outside world?

The easiest way is to make a proposal in which the outside world is actually defined as the news media itself.

This is exactly what Matti Apunen did early this autumn: Apunen, a long-time journalist and the former editor-in-chief of the Aamulehti newspaper, had just left the paper to lobby for Finnish industry and trade interests as director of the Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA.

He presented the Finnish media with a straw poll, following the Swedish model, in which reporters would anonymously answer questions about their political leanings.

The media immediately began grumbling, feeling that their illusory freedom was being threatened again in some vague way.

In the best traditions of Finnish discourse, they began with ad hominem attacks. Then they panned the idea by using themselves as counterexamples: I don’t know about everyone else, but I for one have voted for different parties in different elections.

Even though the discussion remained at that level, it continued for months in the Finnish media, because, according to journalistic logic, the public defense of a journalist’s integrity nicely underscores the presumed integrity of all.

Finland is the promised land not only for non-profit organisations but also for political parties. According to the most recent counts, we have around 1,480 parties, of which eight are represented in parliament.

Things are different in the civilised world. Out there, not every malady or personal problem requires the establishment of a political party; but rather, the established parties take up those problems and maladies in their own agendas. For example, in Great Britain, a land of two-and-a-half political parties, a study on the party leanings of reporters would be pointless: their political views are expressed clearly enough either by the articles they write, how those articles are headlined, or by where the reporter’s employer has situated itself on the media’s liberal/conservative axis.

And besides, more and more often a rough determination of political affinity can be made based on the reporter’s age instead of having to resort to a survey. People have a tendency to become more conservative with increases in age, income and indebtedness.

A reporter’s fumbling political leanings may not have much significance in his or her choice of perspective on a news story, but other criteria do. One still finds bias in reporters’ stories, but instead of party affiliation, it is determined by hundreds of contextual factors and dependencies from the reporter’s own personal life. It would be a good idea to highlight these contextual factors sometimes in a disclaimer at the end of the article, if it weren’t for the fact that they would take up just as much space as the article itself.

Relevant factors in addition to party affinity include sexual orientation, location of residence, size of mortgage, marital status, spouse’s profession, children’s ages and stages in schooling, degree of alcoholism, circle of friends, circle of enemies and those numerous youthful desires and dreams that went unfulfilled, somehow leaving a bitter taste in the mouth.

When the government is considering removing the mortgage interest tax deduction, the reporter’s attitude is not determined by party, but rather by the size of his or her mortgage and by how much this interest deduction means to the reporter.

Another significant influence on a paper’s relationship with the world is its editor-in-chief. It still isn’t a question of who the editor votes for in elections, but rather what his or her social and cultural networks look like.

Is the editor-in-chief an arts person or a sports person? What interest group bigwigs are represented at his dinner parties and with whom does he just have lunch? Who has been wining and dining the editor-in-chief in Lapland, and who is cross enough with him not to invite him to important networking events out of spite.

Over the past few decades, the media has changed, giving reporters more power over what attitudes news stories are coloured with. There are altogether too many regular columns and editorials in the papers, giving reporters the opportunity to tell us what we should think about each piece of news. In some situations it would be appropriate for the reporter to present the reasons related to his personal life why he thinks about a certain thing a certain way.

But more often than not this would be pointless: reporters aren’t so good at writing that the reader can’t tell from the sidebar that, ‘Aha, this writer has a mortgage, an alcohol problem, a marriage in crisis and two kids between the ages of nine and fourteen in comprehensive school’.

Translated by Owen Witesman

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This journal and this text appear only on the internet, and you can comment upon the elegant style of this text, as well as its fascinating content, at the bottom of the piece. If worst comes to worst, the apathy it arouses can even give rise to debate.

Does all that mean that I’m a part of… the social media? And if so, could someone tell me what social media mean and how I can get out of here?

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia defines social media as follows: ‘Social media mean web-based communication environments in which each user or user group has the opportunity to be an active communicator and content-producer. In social media, therefore, communication takes place between many and many, in other words the distinction between communicator and recipient characteristic of the traditional mass media is absent. Social media are a post-industrial phenomenon which has changed society’s production and distribution structure, economy and culture.’

Wow! ‘Changed society’s production and distribution structure, economy and culture’! Not bad!

There is no longer any reason to wonder why the whole world is currently careering from one economic crisis to the next. If society’s production and distribution structure, economy and culture change on the basis that someone on Facebook just said they liked summer, as a result of which 12 people pressed the ‘like’ button, society’s production and distribution structure, economy and culture are on a shakier base even than we had supposed.

Social media are today’s holy dogma; among the few things that arouses a whole heap of aggressive, pathological feelings in lonely people without enough to do.

I’ve been writing variably attitudinous columns and articles for Finnish publications for a couple of decades, but it is only my writing concerning social media that still provokes the kind of expressions of hatred and rage that warmed my soul more regularly a decade ago.

Rage is easy to understand, since when the theory and practice of social media meet, the result is not always a pretty sight.

Social media are divided into two castes. The most visible and audible group are the theoreticians; those figures in university and commerce who found salvation for their careers in social media.

Because no one really knows what social media are or how they can be exploited in one’s own work, they have given rise to a need to lecture. That is why the first group mentioned above tour the universities and businesses of Finland and the world lecturing on the redemptive message of social media. Like most of the lectures at this level, they are characterised more by abstract idealism than concrete suggestions, all of which could be condensed into the following suggestion: Join Facebook.

Whether the client is a business, a parliamentary candidate or a public charity, the advice is always the same: Join Facebook.

Social media’s second caste is its users. They are people with too much time. They write blogs full of crochet patterns, racist opinions and complaints about what’s wrong since they don’t find anything amusing. For them, social media are a cheap and well-founded way of avoiding a weekly therapy session.

The problem is the same as it always is when theory and practice collide: practice causes theory disappointment. It is quite simply hard to derive great visions on the basis of the simple fact that someone announces on Facebook that he likes doughtnuts, and that fifteen people ‘liked’ that kind of status definition. That is why social media idealism is too easy for someone like me to laugh at, and that is way it is much too easy to be enraged by such laughter.

Perhaps one should be a little more realistic in one’s definition of social media? Something like this, for example:

Social media is a flattering concept that covers everything for which the concept of social media is used. Social media is a joint term for the gathering together of diary entries which no one wanted to read in the first place.

Social media are an argument for why, in mass media communication, the communicator is distinguished from the receiver. Social media are what happened when you got to know yourself and understood that you never wanted to spend another moment in your own company.

Social media are either the moment when you are waiting for life to begin, or the moment when you no longer wish to deal with the life that once began.

Social media is a group of people who differ strongly as to how to define social media.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

How does it sound, the people’s voice? Loud and sometimes clear perhaps, but, as columnist Jyrki Lehtola finds, more often than not shrill and puerile

According to a study carried out by Finland’s biggest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, 60 per cent of Finns oppose the idea of allowing more immigrants into Finland.

The chancellor of the University of Helsinki, Ilkka Niiniluoto, is concerned about freedom of speech. Immigration researchers no longer dare participate in public debate, because they find themselves the target of death threats.

A hate group was set up on Facebook, the organising theme of which was the idea that an innocent Finnish pop singer should be killed.

Even now many of us Finns are agitating for fewer rights for homosexuals and lower taxes for ourselves, all the while demanding of our fellow travellers, ‘who the hell do you think you are, are you a retard or what?’

When the internet was only seen as valuable because there was porn on it, the internet didn’t bother us. Unfortunately, pornography has now been superseded by the voice of the people. Our voice.

All was well when ‘the people’ were out there, somewhere, in their cottages and forests. We were able to idealise and romanticise them. ‘The people’ represented all that was fundamentally and eternally good.

And since, according to Bertolt Brecht’s quoted-to-death definition, Finland is the nation that keeps silent in two languages, we didn’t even have to listen to the people: the people were, after all, mute. We could put our own desires in the mouth of the people and claim they were the people’s desires.

And the people already had a voice, the official voice. The major newspapers had long ago made a decision on principle that letters to the editor penned under pseudonyms would only be published in exceptional circumstances. As a result, docents, researchers, and teachers argued politely about sundry topics on the pages of the letters to the editor section of Helsingin Sanomat, giving rise to an image of a people capable of articulate argumentation.

Then we were given the internet, and everything fell apart.

The people got a voice, and it was not a beautiful voice. It was angry, bitter and prejudiced. It did not have passable command of its own language, nor did it know what to do when the computer’s Caps LoCK KEY WAS INadvertently left on, but that didn’t bother it: it continued spewing hatred at one and all.

And this people knew how to hate. Ensconced behind usernames and aliases, it hated everything external, different and new. And it did not argue, but rather shouted like an anxious teen from behind the bushes that you should be killed, you’re a fag, and at least your dad was a fag.

And it didn’t just talk that way about the big issues like tax policy, immigration policy or homosexual partnership rights. No, it managed to move everything to the same level of debate, whether it be pasta recipes (‘You f *** ing idiot, don’t you realise there are too many carbs in it! You’re sick!’), or car batteries (‘If you come ‘round here asking about car batteries, you must be gay, if you don’t know already!’)

Two interesting results have followed. The first is that it is not our fault, but rather the internet’s.

When the people’s voice is full of hatred, prejudice and resentment, none of us is really man or woman enough to say that something really ought to be done about this people, maybe civilise it a bit. Instead we blame the medium: something should be done about the internet – it made the people like that.

The second consequence is that populism has now won and elitism has lost once and for all.

Since the people’s voice is now audible, it must be listened to. No one has the right to say that the people are prejudiced and wrong. If more than half of the people are prejudiced and wrong, then the politicians, entertainers and business leaders must also be prejudiced and wrong, so the people will accept them.

Democracy is now the idea that more and more opinions and decisions will get their start in Facebook hate groups or internet chat rooms, and that is precisely democracy’s current problem.

Translated by Owen Witesman

Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Is it so bad to criticise a Finn, if you’re a Finn? Columnist Jyrki Lehtola takes another look at what you think about us Finns out there

Recently, the word ’Finland’ has been repeated in Finland, and generalisations made about what we Finns are like.

Last year saw the seventieth anniversary of the Winter War, and we congratulated ourselves on what a fine fighting nation we are.

A government branding work group tells us at regular intervals how creative a nation we are.

From time to time someone remembers to mention the sauna, while someone else is a little more critical and says we are also an envious nation.

It is business as usual in Finland. We tell ourselves clichés about what we’re like.

Until someone made a mistake and let the outside world in on some of the clichés about what we’re like.

Oh dear, that upset us badly.

At the end of 2009, there was a debate in Finland, typically Finnish in its absurdity, in which everyone talked about different things and in the end agreed what a good debate it had been; the subject had been given a good airing.

The Finlandia Prize-winning author Sofi Oksanen went abroad to market herself, this time to Denmark. At the same time she gave an interview about Finnishness to a Danish television programme.

In the interview, Oksanen described Finland as a dismal country in which the men drink too much and kill one another while the women are driven by depression to eating disorders.

Oksanen’s views were stereotypes raised to the level of cliché. A glance at the news reports demonstrates their truth, but at the same time their inadequacy, for the news is full of stories about Finnish men who drink too much but do not kill anyone,just passed out.

But then Oksanen’s image of Finland reached the Finnish newspapers and headlines, and everything became strange, in a very Finnish way.

Oksanen – an upstanding Finnish writer – took fright and began to correct her comments. Errm, like, that’s not quite what I said. It was the kind of sensationalist piece which made a tabloid-like presentation of stereotypes concerning Finland and Finnishness, and somehow it ended up with, like, me giving credence to those stereotypes.

Next there began a debate in the Finnish fashion, crystallising around this absurd question: is a Finn allowed to say bad things about Finland outside the Finnish borders, or should dirty washing be hung out at home?

Of course you can say just what you want. The criticism about the nature and current development of one’s own country is a long intellectual tradition in countries with even a slightly longer cultural tradition. In Great Britain, for example, a large part of literature and entertainment has always been based on national stereotypes and their ironies.

But it’s a little difficult for us to understand that, and so it was necessary to discuss such a crazy question. All the worse that it was a writer who made the criticism. We have tried to get used to the comments of businessmen and brand gurus, but writers – they should, historically, be on the side of the Finnish people.

That attitude reflectss something essential about Finnishness: low national self-esteem combined neatly with a sense of intellectual inferiority.

A pity that our discussion was, once again, slightly beside the point. A more interesting question would have been: isn’t it a bit embarrassing that a writer is unable to describe her country in anything but tired clichés? And are clichés expressed by a writer somehow of greater value than, for example, those spoken by a sportsman?

And perhaps the most important question about Finnishness: what kind of a country do we live in, if even an award-winning writer takes such fright after criticising Finland abroad that she feels she has to retract her words?

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Truth will not out, and neither will humour, if things cannot be freely discussed in the media without fear of giving offence, argues Jyrki Lehtola

One September weekend I was in the city of Turku watching Finland’s first ‘comedy roast’ being taped before a live audience for a television pilot.

Roast is a tradition originating in the US. At its centre is a celebrity guest of honour, the roastee. One after another, well-known comedians take the stage and for several minutes make fun of the guest of honour, on the premise that no subject is out of bounds and the more sensitive the topic, the more arrogantly it must be raised to the fore.

The task of the guest of honour is to be able to laugh at him- or herself as well as at the comedians, and at the end to propose a counter-roast, i.e. insult the insulters. Easy targets like reality TV stars are not chosen but rather prominent figures with extensive careers to their name, people for whom the mockery contains the same mix of respect and warmth as a stag night roast. A roast is a language game in which the most important thing is that everyone, including the audience, understands and accepts the rules.

Finland’s first roast in Turku went beautifully. The roastees, musician Jouni Hynynen and talk show hostess Maria Veitola, did not get angry. They were able to laugh at themselves. The comedians did not hold back but with a smile on their lips pounded the stars to a bloody pulp.

The hall was filled with people laughing uproariously. All of the participants in the language game appeared to be enjoying themselves.

That night, however, when people had had time to think about what is right and what is not, a moral hangover took hold. I met a couple of audience members who had enjoyed the roasts during the day. Now the lampoons no longer seemed as funny. They had mocked things that were too personal. They had mocked a woman. They had been too cruel. They had hit home. It wasn’t funny.

When laughter morphs into morality, internal political correctness has shoved its way in.
In the language game, the rules of which all parties have accepted, anyone can be ridiculed for anything. Mocking famous people is just one side of the roasts’ content. The other, more important aspect is that for a moment people in this country can speak without constraint about the most painful of things in ways we simply cannot speak about painful things here.

In their roasts, the comedians approached the guests of honour through topics like anorexia, sexuality, artistic creativity, appearance, the Winter War and even school shootings. It is both cliché and often untrue to claim that ‘nothing is sacred’, but in Turku we in Finland experienced a rare moment during which nothing appeared to be sacred and you could say whatever you wanted about anything.

The Finnish media is earnest and speaks with one voice. When the intent is to lighten up a newspaper, a cartoonist is paid to draw amusing political caricatures. The commercial television newscast always concludes with a ‘last laugh’, which has yet to make anyone laugh. The media has only one voice: an earnest, concerned voice that takes care not to offend any group or individual.

So you’re suffering because you were teased in school? You poor thing, come be interviewed. So you feel as if your father was somewhat distant? However will you survive? Let’s hug and make a documentary. You say your parents divorced when you were 20? Of course I understand that it still hurts 30 years later, and certainly this is the place for a pain-ridden personal portrait.

Too much understanding suffocates creativity and kills laughter. If you can’t mock anything and everyone has to share the same compassionate understanding about everything, the only comedy that remains is what is called ‘warm humour’, and anyone who appreciates humour at all, knows that warm humour is an oxymoron.

First in Finland one generation was careful, as neighbour of the Soviet Union, not to say anything at all about that neighbouror about its own self that might insult that neighbour.

Then came the next generation, which no longer carried the weight the Soviet Union on its shoulders. But nevertheless a single way of thinking continued to reign in the land. Whether it’s a question of tobacco laws, Big Brother or public transportation, in this country a single way of thinking reigns: courteous, cautious, and concerned in a pleasant way for the future.

In Turku a bold new generation without constraints has now stridden onto the stage. They saw a thin woman and yelled ‘anorexic’ at her. Not because anorexics deserve to be mocked, but because they wanted to see what would happen when they talked about things directly.

First we all burst out laughing. A few hours later, too many of us said they shouldn’t have said those things.

Often it’s the first reaction one should believe.

Translated by Jill G. Timbers

Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

When the Finnish media developed a crush on the country’s foreign minister, writes Jyrki Lehtola, no one could foresee the consequences. Especially if the object of their affections might begin to believe what they say about him…

It is a generally accepted truth that the spiteful media only raise people up in order to cast them down again a moment later.

Generally accepted truths are often not the case, although the media’s amorous relationships are, as a general rule, of short duration.

The Finnish media loves its hockey coaches until they make a mistake. The media made Martti Ahtisaari a president so that it could mock him for the next four years. Reality TV shows produce disposable stars that we follow in order to ask, the next moment, why we should have to pay attention to nobodies like that.

The love story between the media and a subject usually lasts about six months, after which a period of mutual battering begins. The subject makes a small mistake, which the media blows out of all proportion, as a result of which the subject begins to sulk, as a result of which the media begins to criticise the subject for sulking, as a result of which the subject opens his mouth and criticises the media for going on a witch-hunt.

Uh-oh. Mistake. The media bears nothing so poorly as criticism aimed at itself. Luckily for the media, that criticism generally comes from such a bitter direction and in such an inflamed form that it cannot be taken very seriously, and by his criticism of the media the subject only succeeds in appearing in an even more laughable and unbalanced light.

Something odd has occurred in the past year. The media has found an enduring love, or at least a love that has lasted for a year.

The object of that love is the Finnish foreign minister, Alexander Stubb.

Stubb is called a politician for a new age, a superman, because he is a normal person, that is, like a person is supposed to be if he has listened properly to his parents’ lectures: a man polite in manner, competent, positive, and cultured, who speaks several languages fluently and is able to engage in small talk beyond ‘it rained yesterday, the sun is shining today, a beer sure would hit the spot’.

The hero narrative built up around Stubb doesn’t really tell as much about Stubb himself as it does about Finland, which is so in the tank for its own wannabe internationality that it only requires one properly pronounced English word to convince us that we are an integral part of Europe rather than part of the stammering periphery somewhere in the north.

Alexander Stubb is also a new kind of politician in relation to the media.

The Finnish political discourse has always required keeping one’s mouth shut, with the occasional autistic grunt intended to make one seem prestigious. Stubb has, instead, voluntarily entered into a merry sort of small talk conversation with the world.

Stubb began regularly updating his diligent, some might say hysterical, blog long before other Finnish politicians. There are five Alexander Stubb Facebook groups to be found at the moment.

Stubb began his media work back in his days in the European Parliament, diligently drawing current and future opinion leaders to his office in Brussels. The groups were made up primarily of 30-40 year old media decision-makers, who have done their own part in making sure that the love story between Stubb and the media has lasted so long.

Most of these media decision-makers also assembled for Stubb’s 40th birthday party, where as the foreign minister walked by they chanted ‘Alex! Alex!’ like a flock of giddy fans; it’s possible that even Stubb found it irritating.

All would be well, but now Stubb the superman has begun to believe the worship of the media. Stubb is becoming a man for whom nothing is enough: like an ADHD child who has been pumped full of cocaine.

He has become a man who doesn’t know how to say ‘no’, because it would be rude to the Stubb fans. Stubb lends his face to advertisements and campaigns, running from one interview to the next, in his down-time writing a book that tells us how we should exercise and eat so that our body fat percentages can be in the same range as Stubb’s.

In his blog Stubb reported a normal Tuesday. It included a visit with Elizabeth Rehn, a visit to a Marimekko factory, an interview for the Swedish daily paper  Dagens Nyheter, a meeting with the executive secretary of IGAD, Mahboub Maalim, a meeting with the ambassadors from India and Pakistan, some of the regular work of a foreign minister, participating in an EU seminar and finally ‘knocking off’ a triathlon.

Stubb still had enough energy to tell about all of this at the end of the day in a long blog entry, which culminated with this information: ‘I improved my time from last year by a full 4 minutes and 35 seconds. Total time was 1:11:45 at a distance of 750 m swimming, 20 km riding and 5.5 km running. The swim went nearly three minutes faster than last year. It felt good. Training towards my main goal of the season continues.’

The love story between Stubb and the media contains a lesson.

Long-lasting love stories between the media and a subject are not necessarily good for the subject. It is healthy to receive some undeserved criticism now and then. Otherwise you start to believe the hero narrative created by the media, which can hardly be good for one’s health.

Translated by Owen Witesman

Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Just how ‘free’ is free speech? Pay a visit to any internet chatroom, and you’ll see. In the first column of a new series called ‘Journalist’s tales’, the media critic Jyrki Lehtola investigates intolerance on the internet

First there was utopia. Then came people, and utopia suffered.

As with all new inventions, from electricity to the atom bomb, internet social networks were supposed to make our lives better. They were supposed to give us license to network, to participate, to get to know each other, to get reacquainted, to flirt, to find an extramarital lover and to be connected to as many people as possible in as many inconsequential ways as possible.

If only it would have ended with adults being able to feel like children on Facebook. But then these children were forced to face the real world, and listening to their blubbering has been less than pleasant.

Even in social networks we’ve been forced to face the unfortunate fact that freedom of speech also applies to those with whom we do not agree.

Because of this, internet social networks are slowly becoming more politically correct, turning into increasingly more aggressive tea rooms where pitched battles are fought for one’s freedom of speech against others who are using their free speech to disagree about the world.

This is understandable. Facebook freedom of speech easily gives rise to the misconception that the I, the expresser of the opinion, am always right simply because I expressed an opinion, which due to a technological accident, is available for the whole world to read.

Social networks became problematic when instead of flirting on them, people started taking positions on societal problems.

When someone notices something wrong with the world, he/she starts a group on Facebook to oppose this error. These groups sprout up daily because in a Facebook group it’s easy to take a stand and express one’s social conscience. It requires no responsibility, no argumentation, no acknowledgement of the complexity of the world. Just an unfortunate name for a group that has only one idea.

And there are enough of these ideas: in under a minute you can join a group named ‘Stand up for Humanity’ and a group agitating for better grub in the greasy spoon next door. Not long ago there were news reports on the influence of Facebook on daily school life in the U.S.. People over there were throwing their hands in the air because over-eager parents had been creating vociferous Facebook groups to protest school starting times, the size of schoolyards and the style of teaching maths.

And the more people who join utopia, the more surely utopia will be destroyed.

The wrong kind of people moved in next door on Facebook, and they are raising such a racket that it’s becoming hard to be at peace with one’s own docile thoughts anymore.

Utopia became a place where instead of creating friendships we started to found hate groups. Hate groups hate many things, and often the wrong things, like sexual minorities and immigrants.

What should good people do about things like that? In normal, everyday life, we cross to the other side of the street, but on Facebook we show more backbone and found hate groups that hate the hate groups. And thus the reality of Facebook began to change: the bastion of friendship and networking became a hotbed of inflamed emotions, where the anger we restrain in the real world is allowed to run amok. Early this year a new group appeared on Finnish Facebook that publishes the names of criminal informants, and not in the spirit of forgiveness.

And thus utopia has been forced to face the problem of the real world: that freedom of speech also means freedom for words other than yours.

Translated by Owen Witesman