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