My maternal grandfather was a huge influence on me. I adored him and I learnt so much from him. He was an architect and I remember him talking at length on the subject of things that flow: of “Water having a route that it would take, no matter how you tried to divert it. It would always find a way, a natural path”. These words have stuck in my head for years. It’s been over 20 years since he died and nearly 10 years since the Chichester floods he predicted in that conversation with me happened.

Today these words came back in a different light to me. A law firm called Carter Ruck gagged The Guardian from reporting on a specific question being asked in parliament. If you ignore for a moment, the moral, ethical and societal impacts of this act, it seems like a strange thing to happen and a rather naïve thing too. I mean it’s not as if The Guardian is the only newspaper. Or the only element of mass media in the country.

What happened afterwards is more about flow. People began to distribute the link to the story through Twitter, then look through questions on the Parliament UK site and then share their thoughts with friends who amplified them through the flow/microbroadcast network that is Twitter.

And before you knew it (well overnight), the law firm’s name, the name of the company involved and the word Guardian were all in the top 10 trends on Twitter. Before the earliest point (2pm) that The Guardian could get into court to dispute the gagging order a vast number of people knew about the information that was trying to be hidden and knew about the ridiculous lengths and moreover the ridiculous manner of trying to hide it.

Wired UK said it best for me.

“Awesome to be watching media history being made in real time as #trafigura and #CarterRuck trending topics show media censorship as futile”

And the lovely visualisation of Trendsmap shows how the view from space. A vast number of citizens being outraged at censorship of the reporting of their seat of government. Their place of democracy.

We can now all investigate, all publish, all amplify, all see what each other are doing, and make visualisations to make the information clearer. We can campaign and the flow of information can move in an agile way around the breaks and dams that are thrown up by those with the money to waste doing so.

What is clear to me, before we get totally carried away with our new found power is that you still need someone to start the surfacing of this. If anything the title of this blog post strikes me stronger today than ever before: “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)”

Update: Before it even got to court and before I could finish writing, Carter Ruck caved in.