As a child (just) of the pre-Internet age I remember
as a teenager walking through Hyde Park at the weekend and wandering through the
good natured melees that used to congregate at Speaker’s Corner. In the past there were Speakers’ Corners in
parks all over London and as long as Hyde Park has been around it has been a
place for crowds to congregate with the Chartists using it as a meeting place for
workers’ rights demonstrations.
The Parks Regulation Act 1872
enabled the park authorities to supervise public meetings in Hyde Park. Some mistakenly believe that the freedom to
say anything at all at Speakers’ Corner is unfettered; this is not so and
Public Order Act offences and offences of incitement apply there as much as
anywhere. That being said it is
exceptionally unusual for a speaker to be arrested at Speaker’s Corner and the
police generally adopt a benevolently laissez-faire approach to it.
Marx, Lenin and Orwell are among
Speaker’s Corner’s most famous visitors.
Even today at the weekends 20 or so speakers are regularly to be found
standing on their soapboxes expounding usually on politics or religion, though
less so on the other topic that is so frowned upon at dinner parties. The crowds that these speakers draw are not
huge but often a few hundred people can be seen listening in approvingly or
frowning in disagreement.
One thing which has not changed
much since I was a teenager is the scarcity of women speakers. This may be because most women have better
things to do than inflict their political opinions on indifferent
randomers. Indeed one could reasonably
ask what the point now is of Speaker’s Corner if not only for narcissistic
self-promotion of the most obvious sort.
It occurred to me on a recent
visit that before the Internet encountering women’s voices in public discourse
was still very much an exception not the rule.
Only a handful of women were in Parliament, there were few women
newspaper columnists, almost no editors, few women television and radio
presenters, token newsreaders and weather forecasters set aside. Women like 19th century children
were seen and not heard. Even by the
time I arrived at university and debated at the Union there were always more
men speaking than women creating a cock fighting atmosphere in more ways than
one.
Of course another reason why
women may now be eschewing the chance to wear an anorak in the drizzle in Hyde
Park holding forth to milling tourists is that the Internet now allows
communication to but, more importantly, with millions. At Speaker’s Corner you might see a bit of
heckling but in truth it is not a place for dialogue and conversation but a
place of ‘Look at me’ and ‘I am right’.
The role of social media and particularly
Twitter in facilitating the Arab Spring is already much commented upon but the
thing that I have found so amazing about it is immediate access to discourses
and voices which I would never have heard before the Internet. And by discourses and voices I primarily mean
women’s voices. One of the dangers of
Twitter (other than its boundless capacity to waste time and its incitement to
self-promotion) is that users choose the voices they hear. Accordingly mindless, misogynistic racists
can choose only to follow like-minded morons in a bid to affirm the commonality
of their opinions.
However the regrettable
prevalence of trolling suggests that this is not a universal approach to the
service. Men can be the victim of
trolling but very often it is women who are subjected to vile, personal and
threatening abuse. This can be criminal
and there is a danger that some women will be dissuaded from participating
actively on Twitter. However the very
existence of trolling as a phenomenon means that women’s voices are being heard
regularly by people who historically would not have heard them which I feel
must be a good thing. Furthermore there
are millions of users prepared to call out the unacceptability of abusive
tweets. Twitter is a community and
connection with like-minded people inspires the courage necessary to
participate in public discourse.
No longer is having a public
voice a privilege conferred only on the few and the vast majority of that few
being men. I have learnt so much from
Twitter about the lived experiences of women and heard narratives which a
generation ago were just not shared with men.
Anybody who listens to these experiences could only be acutely conscious
that the struggle for equality in society and in the wider world is as fraught,
contested and necessary as it ever was. The
richness that comes from exposure to plurality of experience cannot be
quantified and whatever Twitter’s shortcomings are providing a soapbox for the world
has improved all our lives.
