On 2012 last year

 On 2012 last year.

"Beyond the politicians, the rest of us were being reshaped too. The first serious media impacts of what some of us like to call interconnectedness were being felt. Alan Jones called social media campaigns against him “cyberterrorism” which was not entirely off the mark, for social media campaigns like #destroythejoint or more temporary ones like the waves of rage against the 2DayFm royal prank are indeed about power and its use. Traditionally dominant analog media increasingly find themselves trapped in the same rituals of apology over and over again as the people formerly known by that engagingly passive term “audience” use social media to undermine their business model. That’s accomplished not so much by directly challenging media outlets as by challenging advertisers, who invariably figure discretion is the better part of valour.

The media has been told for a long time that the internet will bugger their advertising revenue. But no one told them it would happen courtesy of social media campaigns as well.
This had a particularly amusing outcome of upsetting powerful old white men, the sort of people not merely used to running things, but doing so in an unchallenged, and definitely unmocked, fashion. No matter where you looked this year, there was some privileged old white guy angrily denouncing things. Gerry Harvey or Solomon Lew or Ray Hadley or Alan Jones (Old White Guy primus inter pares), or the entire Republican Party (brilliantly condensed into Clint Eastwood railing at an invisible person, an act so laden with symbolism it deconstructed itself in real time), or the old men of The Australian, from Chris Mitchell down, powerful elderly males infuriated that the world no longer gives them automatic deference, let alone allows them to run things unchallenged. The result: the rage of the prostatetariat." - Bernard Keane.

If you want to read the rest of this piece, click here. I can't put it any better than the: rage of the prostatetariat. What a sentence.