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

We don’t like to blow our collective trumpets, but it’s a little-known fact that the phone game Angry Birds, with birds and pigs in the starring roles, is actually Finnish, developed in 2009 by a company called Rovio. As the Helsinki freesheet Metro (31 May) notes, Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 200 million times on different devices since its launch in December 2009.

What is the secret of Angry Birds’ success? ‘I like it because it doesn’t really have any rules and you never know exactly what’s going to happen next,’ says our young reviewer Sophia, 9; her sister, Tia, 5, says ‘I like it because you get to shoot in it.’ To judge by the amount of time they spend playing Angry Birds, they like it a lot.

And how did Angry Birds come about? ‘At the beginning of 2009 our design group went through a number of different options,’ Rovio’s communications director Ville Heijari tells Metro. ‘One of them was angry-looking birds, and everyone fell in love with them right away.’ And what does Heijari himself like best about the game? ‘Definitely the fact that when you make a mistake, the pig laughs at you. That really makes you want to try again.’

In the pipeline is an Angry Birds movie, plus further development of the game itself. ‘So far the world has only seen an glimpse of the birds’ world,’ says Heijari.

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

Mervi Kantokorpi is a freelance literary critic and scholar who specialises in Finnish fiction, both prose and poetry. Pia Ingström works as a literary editor at the Swedish-language Hufvudstadsbladet newspaper; her autobiographical book, Inte utan min mamma (‘Not without my mother’, Finnish translation: Äitiä ikävä, Schildts), was published last year.

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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Stumbled upon: readers find Tommi Musturi's comic strip (June 10–June 18)

When Books from Finland was a printed journal, it was relatively easy to define its readership – now it is different: we are a part of the internet’s ecosystem, its surging and multifarious mass of knowledge.

Those who visit our pages may have the most diverse motives for wanting to read our articles – and they may travel surprising itineraries before arriving on Books from Finland’s pages, as we found out recently: StumbleUpon is still a fairly little-known service in Finland. Thus it took a while before we realised why so many of the comments about our piece on Tommi Musturi’s wordless comic strip, on colour and friendship, began with the words ‘I stumbled upon’…

The idea of StumbleUpon is simple: it filters and evaluates websites on the basis of the opinions of its members. It is, in other words, a social media application which is not used for traditional information-seeking, but instead answers the question, ‘What would I like to find today?’ On the basis of the user’s interests, the service suggests pages which the user, in turn, judges with an upturned thumb. A website may attract a significant number of visitors if it rises high on StumbleUpon’s list of recommendations.

This was the case with the piece on Tommi Musturi: during the course of a single day, it was read by thousands of people – and completely entangled our graph of visitor numbers!

Inspired by this, I signed up for StumbleUpon. The very first suggestion the site offered me was impressive: the real-time simulation page links the globes carbon dioxide emissions with birth- and death-rates. Did you know that Wikipedia has a list of the unsolved problems of philosophy?

Thumbs up, then, for Tommi, friendship and colours!



And remember: you can also get Books from Finland articles delivered straight to your inbox or smartphone by signing up to our RSS feed, or subscribing to our regular newsletter – the new one is, as we used to say, currently in the typewriter and will be with you soon.

Let’s keep in touch!

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

‘Hohto on mennyt herrana olemisesta’ – Televisio ja poliitikko

This book, based on the author’s doctoral thesis in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Tampere, presented in February 2010, takes as its starting point Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Koski applies Benjamin’s ideas on cinema and film stars to contemporary television and politics. Koski maintains that while the public have become alienated from politics, politicians have also become alienated from themselves and have become reiterative entities whose essential content is repetition. After television and other new media have called into question traditional forms of politics, a significant challenge for politicians has been to prevent viewers from getting bored. Koski discusses relationship between politics and comedy, the ‘cynical’ viewer, the popular public image of Marshal Mannerheim (an iconic figure in Finnish history and politics) and the popularity of Sauli Niinistö, the frontrunner in the upcoming (2012) Finnish presidential election. Dr Koski also considers historical and contemporary image politicians in various other countries.

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

Transcript

Thirty issues of Transcript have been published since its inception in 2002. Now, taking a look at them again, we think they should have been dated – it is rather perplexing not to find any dates attached editorials or introductions to what is very contemporary fiction from an area that is in rapid flux. Perhaps the dates could be added now that new editions are to appear, after a longish break?

Transcript is published by Literature Across Frontiers, a European programme for literary exchange and policy debate, with the support of the Culture 2000 programme of the European Union; it operates in partnership with local literature networks.

The Finnish issue was published in 2004, edited by our very own Soila Lehtonen.

High-tech: the ultimate gadgets of the 15th century, parchment and pen. A portrait of Jean Miélot, the Burgundian author and scribe, by Jan Tavernier (ca. 1456)

The day will soon come when commuters sit on a bus or train with their noses buried in electronic reading devices instead  of books or newspapers. Teemu Manninen takes a look at the digital future

Most people interested in books are aware of the arrival of electronic reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle, a kind of iPod — the immensely popular portable music listening device made by the company Apple — for electronic books. For a literary geek like me, the Kindle and e-readers should be the ultimate gadget: a whole library in a small, paperback-sized device. However, I’ve been wondering why digital reading hasn’t become as popular as digital listening. I myself have not invested in an e-reader, although I ought to be exactly the desired kind of customer. After all, I read all the time. Even the mp3 player I have is mostly used for listening to audio books.

But the Kindle, and the other e-readers around today, don’t offer everything I want from a mobile reading device. A lot of what I’d like to read is still not available on them (say, digitized 16th-century books). The screen where the text appears isn’t as nice as it could be or doesn’t have as many functions as it could. Perhaps one of the up-and-coming devices like the Plastic Logic reader, a slim device with no buttons that turns pages by touch, will change that in the near future — but then again, my problems with e-readers aren’t exactly problems which the right kind of device will solve. They’re problems with a more fundamental level of the reading experience, about everything material about reading and literary culture.

These thoughts I’ve had about mobile reading are also related to the changes that are going on in the publishing world, where traditional paper media like newspapers and magazines are struggling, and print publishers are eager to come up with new business models. I find myself wondering what the implications are for authors and what they write — for literature itself.

One option is tenacious optimism. The science fiction and fantasy author Michael Stackpole recently argued that authors must take advantage of the new content delivery methods which digital publishing is providing them with. He is the first author to publish short stories through the iPhone App Store, the online store which sells applications, or ‘apps’, for Apple’s mobile phone, the iPhone. Apps are little programs that let you do all kinds of weird and wonderful things, like find restaurants and gas stations, log gym workouts, see where your friends are on digital map displays, and so on. According to Stackpole, digital publishing offers a chance for young writers to reach audiences and create markets for their work without relying on major publishers.

Of course, Stackpole doesn’t take the problem of quality control into account. After all, the ‘job’ of most publishers is not just to deliver content but to find the best writing out there; good publishers are also reliable critics. But he does intuit, and I believe correctly, that digital publishing is already having an impact on the nature of what we read. He cites the example of the ‘commuter market’: people who read one or two chapters on their way to work or home. This kind of reading, Stackpole surmises, could point the way to a return to 19th-century publishing models, such as serial fiction (think of Dickens, whose fame and wealth was based on serialised novels which appeared in literary magazines).

It is important to note that Stackpole is not talking about the death of the novel or some utopian future where we no longer have paper books. I think the dumbest approach would be to believe that digital reading can simply copy paper reading and thereby take over its functions.

Certainly, some new electronic publishing platforms like Issuu and Scribd try to mimic paper books by having animated, turnable pages, but I don’t think this kind of digital publishing will ever replace printed books, no matter how well they mimic paper on the screen. This is simply because they are already something else, a new kind of reading experience which is arranging itself around the idea of the book, but is also being interpreted through social networking media like blogs, Facebook or Twitter, where anyone can share their thoughts with a community of readers.

When reading becomes a part of a social network (just think of Harry Potter fans), reading and writing morphs from a solitary activity to a socially shared engagement: authors connect with readers on a much more immediate basis (through comments, for instance), readers share their reading experiences, write fan fiction, and may even play-act scenes from their favorite books.

So, there are all kinds of new possibilities for reading and publishing. But at the same time we are living in a world where traditional paper forms of publishing are dying. Some media ideologists, like Richard Eoin Nash, believe that this is a good thing. Nash points out that ‘reading increasingly is writing — readers are writing back in all sorts of ways, commenting on books, re-mixing books as in fan fiction, or creating from scratch, and publishers, rather than barring this activity, or hiding from it, need to embrace it and find ways to serve it.’

In a way, though bombastically overstating the case, Nash is right. Literary communities coming together and doing things seems to be the trend for many of the numerous book-related events and happenings on the net, from a community annotating Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook online to a joint effort to ‘map’ Thomas Pynchon’s Los Angeles, to a recent technology start-up offering a service for making your own newspapers.

With such community efforts we come to my central argument — it’s not (or at least not only) the well-designed device which will make digital reading popular, but everything it’s connected to. The computer company Apple is a good example. Most people know it makes computers, but in the last ten years it has been mobile devices like the iPod and the iPhone which have made it really popular. What makes the iPod and the iPhone so great? The fact that the iPod is easily connected to iTunes, the fancy-looking online music and video store, which also helps you catalog your music in visually appealing ways.

The iPhone, for its part, was certainly a fancy phone with its touchscreen and all, but what made it a hit product was the App Store, which gave the phone thousands of new uses in everyday life. As Richard Ziade, an American web consultant, has pointed out, ‘The iPod/iTunes ecosystem is testament to the fact that people are willing to pay for a quality experience, even if there are fringe alternatives out there for free… Content is part of the experience.’

Now think about it from this point of view: what makes books so great? Libraries and book stores, and beyond them, literary magazines and newspapers and publishers and critics and book fairs and book readings and everything that makes up literary culture. A book is never just a book, a mere platform or an interface; it’s a part of a reading experience which stretches out from the immediate moment to something more universal.

So what I’m arguing is that digital reading will become a success when the devices become not only screens that let you read, but extensions of digital libraries and bookstores and whole reading communities. The Kindle, made by the online department store Amazon, is certainly a step towards the right direction. It offers a constant wireless connection to Amazon’s virtual shelves, and its growing popularity is testament to my argument.

At this point one might ask why the ailing, traditional publishing companies haven’t embraced digital reading yet. One reason could be the fact that paper publishing is still tied down by its own material nature, the literary print culture that has developed around it. They cannot envision reading as anything other than paper reading, and therefore cannot grasp that digital reading is a different kind of experience, demanding a different approach.

As the author Seth Godin has argued, ‘the new business isn’t the same as the old business, just with computers’, and Richard Ziade makes the same point when he claims that in the digital realm, ‘the physical constraints of content’ which traditional media publishers still often cling to become a ‘nuisance’ for digital users.

To reiterate, in order for digital reading to become more popular doesn’t simply entail scanning books and making them digitally available on any device that can display them. It means that one needs to build a new way to interact with and experience content. As an example, digital music publishing has done away with the idea of the traditional album. People now buy individual songs, and make their own collections or ‘play lists’ as they are called. Here, digitality simply means the ability ‘to pick and choose’ what you want to listen to in a way which traditional, material forms of music publishing made difficult.

In conclusion, I’d like to come back to the idea proposed by Michael Stackpole: that we might see a resurgence of serial fiction in the future, because digital reading makes it easier to collect such ‘play lists’. Personally I agree. I’m constantly annoyed by the fact that there are so many good stories hidden in paper magazines which I either never see or don’t want to buy because the rest of the content is rubbish. A delivery system that would allow me to download stories by authors I like would be marvellous. If a similar service were to be implemented for poetry, I would be in reading heaven.

But I’d like to believe that the digital reading revolution will go even further in inventing new ways for literature to exist in the world; most simply I’d like to believe that digital reading will make literature more available, and make people read even more. Books are, after all, cumbersome, and we are becoming more and more mobile.

Again, this does not mean, as the designer and marketing guru Russell Davies has argued, that we’re in an age where books are about to disappear (although environmentally speaking that would be a good thing!). Paper and ink will never go away, but only change in function as they become embedded in new ways of being in the world. Paper books might once more become luxury artefacts, as they used to be in the age before printing began.