Who is bullying whom in the Jones saga?
Alan Jones is no stranger to controversy, but he does seem to have trouble reading the current mood of many Australians. Marilyn Campbell says his attempts to portray an online backlash as cyberbullying are highly emotive.
According to Stephanie Gardiner in the national newspapers on Monday 8th, Alan Jones described an online campaign against him as “cyberbullying”.
Jones is reported as saying his advertisers have been cyberbullied by people in an online campaign calling for advertisers to stop supporting his show. He is reported as saying people “don’t have the right or should not, have the right to attempt cyberbullying of people who listen to this program or advertise on it”. Further, he calls this behaviour, “bullying or harassment or intimidation or threatening conduct”. Even going as far as saying it is “cyber-terrorism”.
I know that Jones likes to voice his opinions strongly. That contributes to his popularity, with the love or him or hate him attitude that his employers want, as with other radio personalities who people listen to for entertainment. To voice his opinions strongly he uses emotive words. He deals in words. His job depends on his words. He uses words for their “shock” and emotive power without necessarily using them in a way which denotes their meaning but rather uses these words for their connotations and responses people have to them.
Words in our society have a way of leaking their meanings. They are used at first in a specific defined way but sometimes they are overused and become to mean other things. Take the word depression. Originally this word was, (and still is used by psychologists) as a psychological disorder. However, the meaning used by most people when they answer “I am depressed” to a general question of "how are you?", is a general sense of sadness or stress, not a psychological disorder. In the same way, bullying is used far more widely as a behaviour than the definition given to it by psychologists and researchers.
So what does it matter if we use these words without specific meanings common to all? It matters because we all need to communicate accurately so that our meaning is understood. The typical definition of bullying behaviour has three elements: – an intention to hurt, an imbalance of power where victims feel they cannot defend themselves and that the behaviour is usually repeated. Cyberbullying is then defined as bullying using any electronic means rather than face-to-face.
In the Jones case, was he bullying Julia Gillard? Were his words repeated with an intention to hurt and were they an abuse of his power? Are people who proposition advertisers by electronic means protesting or are they intending to hurt the advertisers repeatedly, abusing their power? Are people cyberbullying people who listen to his program? Or are people abusing their power with an intention to hurt Alan Jones?
Most people would agree that there is intention to hurt by Jones and the people protesting and it is being repeated. The moot point here is the imbalance of power? Does Alan Jones have more power than Julia Gillard? Are people who are intending to hurt Jones repeatedly by targeting his advertisers more powerful than the advertisers? Are people through social media more powerful than Alan Jones? In my opinion, there is not an imbalance of power in these situations. When the fundamental proposition of imbalance of power is taken out, what we are left with is a fight. In my opinion, Jones was nasty about Gillard and some people who do not like Jones want to hurt him.
This does not constitute cyberbullying. Neither is it cyber-harassment (harassment being a narrower definition than bullying, implying hurting people for reasons of race, religion, gender etc.). And it is certainly not cyber-terrorism.
Emotive words are not useful in rational and reasoned debates but then those kinds of debates are usually not entertaining.
Dr Marilyn Campbell is a professor at the Queensland University of Technology. She is a registered teacher and psychologist. Her main research interests are the prevention and intervention of anxiety disorders in young people and the effects of bullying, especially cyberbullying.
