How Does Public Discourse Become A Space Of Health?
(Answer, I have no idea.)
Maybe it is simple and obvious that because everyone can talk and everyone can be heard, no gatekeepers anywhere, all those on the fringe and all those who’ve spent zero time thinking, “hmmm, how might this message be received” given megaphones, we should not be surprised that we end up with public discourse no better than what one reads in the bathroom stall of a bad nightclub. Reward, via algorithms, volume and the screech of sirens over subtlety and the timbre of rhetoric and recovery from the usual human ailments of need, ego and tribalism will not get easier.
I remember a long-time newspaper journalist lamenting the fact that more and more op-ed writers were offering their take on things without ever having been reporters themselves. She said, in essence, that when you cover a traffic accident you learn pretty quickly how sure everyone is they saw what happened, and yet everyone has a different view. Despite having no reason to lie, one eye-witness is sure the blue car ran the light and another is sure the white car stopped short. This journalist thought it was good training, before offering up opinions about foreign or domestic policy, culture, or complex problems, to know that even with objective happenings and no vested interest people can see things differently.
Now, of course, opinion is all there is and everyone is vested. My tweet is not just me at my megaphone, it is my “voice” demanding attention, if not likes and dollars. Veracity? What is that? And with no center to hold onto, the worst of us, and what is worst in each of us, exult in the passionate intensity.
Whatever else is true, we must try to do better. I must try to do better.
How do we turn the internet into a civil square of discussion rather than a mosh pit of verbiage?
. . .
At this point, it occurred to me that surely someone else must have had this thought and so I searched “civil discourse on the internet.”
As my first result, I got this blog article, which is fine and tame and got “Civil Discourse Exists in This Small Corner of the Internet” (which promotes a Reddit channel) from The Atlantic, as my second. These were from 2019 and 2018. A NY Times op-ed from 2007 came in third. I admit I did not read, or skim the majority of the 900,000 results my search returned. But for now, I am just going to say that this pressing problem is not being addressed as if it were pressing. Or, rather, it is being addressed everywhere (though not for four years?) becasue . . . . ? There are no gatekeepers into the square nor any official podium there? Because with no Cronkite desk that would, as a center, at least allow people to hold focus for a moment? I can’t even make sense of the results of the search enough to figure any of this out except to say we have what we have, which is less than healing.
I guess what I would like to see is some sort of how-to list. You know,
When engaging the Internet to discourse with other humans:
Only ask questions
Remember to say, “while what you makes sense if . . .”
Disengage quickly with people who use the words “woke,” “Maga” or “Kanye”
But you can see that I am mostly speaking about how one responds to other people’s comments and am grasping at straws anyway. Nor does this even begin to take on the real hellscape of Twitter or the fact that in some sense there is really no back and forth, just shouting.
Perhaps: “How do you enter a mosh pit safely?” Would be a better title for all this. Except it is just the issues of woke and Trump and so forth that merit discussion, where we ought to be learning that debate can bring civility to disagreement.
Instead, of course, we learn, revel in, and profit from just the opposite.
Since I feel like a guy who is terrified of water while telling people in the middle of the ocean we must swim for the shore—the task is beyond me—let me end with trailing non-sequiturs.
Our discourse online and elsewhere is a sign, more than anything else, of pain. We need, as my friend Liz says, “a church that makes the things people need” and we need to be a lot healthier so we can talk to each other in a heath-inducing way. The circularity of that does not escape me.
I just unsubscribed from a channel (A Candid World) because the guy, who drew me in with a civil tone chose to throw Andrew Tate and Greta Thurberg in the same bucket as false idols. Both, he argued, demonstrate our willingness to look to children as models of how to be adults. I don’t really get that. Tate is a jerk and she’s heroic and while yes, both are “known” he self-promotes and she pushes an idea. Maybe my unsubscribing is exactly the wrong thing to do, but having given this channel more than a few chances, I am moving on.
And now I am going to get on an airplane to try and aid civil discourse on a campus far away and up the rhetoric of the young people there too. Unlike Greta, I fly against the world I would make.
Please excuse that and the incompleteness here, but my hypocrisy comes with a departure time that will not wait. Tomorrow I will make a note about leaving Amsterdam and then, at some point, try to get back to this subject.
Thanks for reading,
Ted