Mondo Bizzarro: Digitalk
Is the internet making our conversation better or just adding to the noise?
How do we talk on the Internet? This question is usually answered by saying that we do not talk very well. The digital conversation is rude, simplistic, overemotional. And that is true, in most cases. Yet there are reasons for praising it, so obvious that may have become invisible. A cautious eulogy of the digital conversation is thus in order.
But flaws come first. After more than a decade of social experimentation with this new mode of talking, some problems are already clear – as exposed in the way people interact with each other in social networks or via those apps that allow people to have bilateral or multilateral digital conversations, as well as in the comment section of blogs, newspapers and the like.
People tend to make an expressive, rather than deliberative use of those tools, letting emotions reign, or else adopting a highly adversarial disposition towards others. Anonymity feeds incivility.
Fragmented discourse and ideological polarisation
Such propensity is also evident in the practice of swarming, as described, among others, by German philosopher Byung-Chul Han: an spontaneous and ferocious alignment of users behind a given argument, critique, or campaign. Obviously, the metaphor of contagion fits well too. There is apparently no clear logic, no reflection – just a mob-like behaviour that is far from the intellectual finesse championed by the Enlightened thinkers that devised the model of the public sphere as an essential part of representative democracies.
In this regard, it has also been pointed out that unlike the traditional mass media, social media are producing a fragmentation of the public that may be dangerous for the dynamics of consensus-building that belong to modern democracies. An image may hep to see this: whereas under the reign of mass media the whole public was watching one or just a few screens, the latter are endlessly multiplied in our times, so that we are less and less watching what others are watching, or reading.
Social theorist Cass Sunstein has dubbed this the “balkanisation” of the democratic public, a tendency that reinforces ideological polarisation. Increasingly, we do not share the same space with people we disagree with, but instead inhabit “echo chambers” where we only hear the echo of our own voice. Preferences are strengthened rather than challenged.
Less talking, more writing
However, the digital conversation – or digitalk – has a notable advantage, which usually remains unnoticed: on the Internet, we ‘talk’ by reading and writing, instead of communicating orally. What a discovery! the reader might protest. Yet it is a very specific feature, that produces major consequences. Therefore, it should not be overlooked.
We spend our days talking digitally. A decade ago, before the smartphone flourished, it was very different; three decades ago, before the e-mail and the sms, the difference was even more dramatic. We used the phone, sometimes we wrote a letter: as in 1972 or 1954. In both cases, we talked: personally or not. But the so-called digital turn has also brought about a typing turn that has reinforced writing and weakened oral communication. How grounded must a phone call be today, to be made at all! We write to each other, because it involves less costs than talking – it is more comfortable and effective. That is all. Or maybe not. There are consequences, side-effects, meanings.
Cultural innovations, specially if they are technologically led, often provoke a wave of nostalgic complaints about an allegedly lost authenticity, the feeling for a world that never existed: because that previous world was also full of people that lamented a prior loss.
Nowadays, we complain about the inhuman coldness of new technologies, be it the e-book or a chat service. In other words, we tend to think that the quantity of our interpersonal connections subtracts the quality of them. More is less! There is no better symbol than the Facebook friends, most of them are not even acquaintances. There is just one step before we romanticise personal encounters, thus seeing face-to-face conversations as the privileged format for human communication.
There’s more to communication than talking
However, a preference for non-mediated communication should be carefully weighed. Because every act of communication is, actually, mediated. To begin with, mediated by language – and thus by the disparate linguistic abilities of the participants – as well as by the different skills that go hand in hand with language and influence in any verbal exchange: body-language, intonation, charisma. Those mediations are potentially more determinant than the technological context or the digital tools through which the conversation takes place.
In interpersonal conversation, some will excel, if that is the format that suits them best – but many others will not. They will get nervous, experience stage-panic, be unable to find the right argument, feel overwhelmed by others’ rhetorical abilities or lack of education… Needless to say, the very presence of the other adds many valuable qualities to the communicative act, but then again none of these seem to augment the participants’ abilities for arguing. True, reasoning is not the main goal of every conversation. Many – the encounter of lovers, a family gathering, a night-out with friends – head in different directions.
Yet, the reverse is also true. Even outside the institutional realm, a good number of interactions do possess a strong argumentative dimension – irrespective of whether they try openly or not to reach a conclusion or take a decision. What kind of interactions are these? The possibilities are endless, including, yes, the exchanges between lovers, family, and friends, as well as our conversations with colleagues or acquaintances with whom we share some interest or hobby. In every case, the uneven linguistic abilities of the participants condition the course and results of the exchange. And in all of them, the digitisation offers some unexpected advantages.
The ‘Ideal speech situation’
Both the social sciences and the humanities have always been worried about language and its relation with reality, long before their linguistic turn was announced in 1967. Politically, this has been manifest as of late in the attention devoted to the concept of deliberation and the conditions upon which it can take place. Some ideas championed by this current of reflection may help to understand the advantages inherent to digitalk.
One of the most important thinkers that have worked on this is Jürgen Habermas, whose theory of communicative action has been widely discussed. An essential part of it is the so-called ‘ideal speech situation’ [idealen Sprechaktsituation]. The latter will occur whenever the communication between individuals is governed by a number of implicit norms that must pervade the conversation. This is a prescription, not a description: we must talk as if those norms existed. Which are those conditions? The conversation must take place in an atmosphere free of coercion; participants must have the same chances to begin the dialogue and take place in it; they must be exclusively motivated by the will to reach a consensus; and they must be able to evaluate rationally the arguments exposed by others.
Obviously, such a conversation does not belong to this world. But this prescription makes it easier for us to realise how absent they can be in practice from our communicative exchanges. The most interesting critiques to the ideal speech situation are those that refer to the exclusionary potential of deliberation. At the very least, to deliberate means being able to build up arguments in order to persuade others of their validity through the use of rhetoric. Yet not every citizen is equally equipped to do that -there is an inequality of cognitive and rhetoric abilities.
The last scene of Martin Scorsese’s The wolf of Wall Street makes it very clear: Jordan Belford, who has abandoned the stock market after success and scandal, is now performing as a motivational coach, and asks the audience at one of his workshops if he can ‘sell’ them a pen. Yet they are clumsy, slow, and ultimately unable to do well something that Belford himself always did superbly. This is fiction, but we can try and put Obama face to face with our shyer friend, and see what happens! We are not all endowed with the same epistemological authority. Nor are all equally trained in rational argumentation – some are more emotional, or ‘narrative’.
These are unsolvable problems. And they do not only affect institutional deliberations, but also, in fact, every communicative enterprise. That includes our private conversations, also a part of the public opinion that constitute a decisive aspect of our representative democracies.
In this context, it is easier to understand which are the specific advantages that digitalkprovides. As I said earlier, our speech situations are increasingly writing situations, since the digital conversation is one in which we, actually, do not speak at all: we read and write.
Internet talk: no interruption, no coercion
Because of that, in the course of our exchanges, be it in Facebook, Twitter, or Whatsapp, some interesting features emerge: interruptions are not possible or are less possible; the physical presence of others is not felt as a constraint; we can think best about the things we are going to say; arguments are more quietly weighed, because we must read them before we answer them, and this answer is not always immediately asked for.
In this regard, let us think of narcissistic or solipsistic personalities, who so very rarely pay attention to others’ arguments: digital media force them to do so. We could also add that the written quality of the digital conversation – as opposed to the vanishing words of a verbal exchange – demands in itself greater care.
Therefore, the digitisation of private conversations possess some democratising qualities, since it counteracts the initial advantage of those individuals who – being more charismatic or intelligent or more prone to violate the rules of the debate – usually dominate the communicative exchanges in which they take part. This superior ability will always be felt, but less so in a digital conversation. From this point of view, going digital is not a loss, but a sure bet. Shy people of the world, digitise!
It could even be argued that this digitisation operate as a partial neutralisation of the dominion of the visual that has marked the age of mass media communications. Let us remember how the great German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk described humanism: “friendship-founding telecommunication in the medium of writing” (my emphasis). Schrift: writing.
Depressingly, Sloterdijk himself declares that humanism as a shared foundation for human coexistence is dead. The banality of so many digital conversations may explain his pessimism. But the tools are not to blame. As I have tried to show, digitisation is a positive development, not the cul-de-sac of the Enlightenment. Rather than romanticise the old art of conversation, that is not going to disappear anyway, let us celebrate its new digital incarnation.
Manuel Arias Maldonado is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Malaga, and a former Fulbright Scholar at the University of Berkeley, California.
