{"id":2670,"date":"2011-09-30T22:35:41","date_gmt":"2011-10-01T02:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2670"},"modified":"2012-03-08T15:45:44","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T20:45:44","slug":"nonversations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2670","title":{"rendered":"Nonversations"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Nonversations<\/h2>\n

\u00a0A shorter version of this piece was published in the Maryland Daily Record October 3, 2011<\/p>\n

It used to be said that the great difference between family and friends was that you could pick your friends.\u00a0 Technology, that great changer of realities on the ground, has subtly undercut the joke.\u00a0 You may not be enjoying quite the autonomy in picking your friends you once enjoyed.\u00a0 And that may be a good thing from a First Amendment standpoint.\u00a0 But the jury\u2019s still out.<\/p>\n

I refer, of course, to the world of social media, in which we ostensibly pick, link up with or otherwise inaugurate connections with \u201cfriends.\u201d\u00a0 Sounds like an act of great autonomy.\u00a0 But various kinds of linkage are likely to assure that our friends\u2019 friends come unbidden with the package.\u00a0 And once we enter that strange, strange world, before we know it, we are reading discussions partly or even wholly among people we have never met.\u00a0 Or we are participating in dialogues with people we knew once and have suddenly become reacquainted with.<\/p>\n

This system looks as if it were designed to counteract the siloing effect much remarked upon among the punditry, i.e. the tendency listen to radio stations and watch TV news slanted towards whatever your slant may be, visit only websites that stoke your own viewpoint, chat with neighbors selected to be just like you, and go to your house of worship to encounter the deity only with fellow-believers, and never encounter points of view that differ from your own.<\/p>\n

You have it in your power to create a comprehensive comfort zone.\u00a0 Given siloing, you can persist on a steady diet of Christian fundamentalism, or Tea Party-ism, or Islamic radicalism, or conservatism or liberalism whatever ism tickles your fancy, and seldom have to come up for air.\u00a0 But arguably the social media make it harder to stay in the silo the whole time.<\/p>\n

Once you log onto Facebook and check your Recent Stories, you are going to at least have to scroll past what your friends\u2019 friends say, and what your old friends say.\u00a0 You will enter a universe where everyone sounds off, and some of them will say one thing, and others say the opposite.\u00a0 Your radical lesbian feminist friend will be reposting something very different from your old classmate who moved to Arizona and is patrolling the border with the Minutemen.\u00a0 You will stroll down a veritable bazaar of discourse, with links and videos and screeds and rants and arguments.\u00a0 Arguments especially.\u00a0 Disagreements between those who mostly agree and disagreements between those who mostly never agree.<\/p>\n

The undisputed policy of the First Amendment (at least since the Warren Court[1] and certainly persisting in the Roberts Court era)[2] is to encourage expression of ideas with underlying hope that there will be not just an expression<\/em> of ideas (critical to human dignity), but also an exchange<\/em> of ideas (thought to be critical to the formation of a wise political consensus).\u00a0 Siloing is the enemy of this desired exchange.\u00a0 This is paradoxical, because siloing is only made possible by the very freedom of media sources to proliferate.\u00a0 But proliferation does have the side effect of enabling the balkanizing of public discourse.\u00a0 When the \u201clamestream media\u201d can be totally ignored, there is little common currency in the marketplace of ideas.<\/p>\n

This is where at least potentially the social media could offer some relief.\u00a0 You at least have to take notice of your feminist friend and of the Minuteman, whichever one you might initially be inclined to disagree with.\u00a0 You may see longs strings of stridency where the feminist and the Minuteman tangle with each other, rag on each other, belittle each other\u2019s logic.\u00a0 It can be quite amusing, and indeed I spent much of my first year in this world watching with a grin as just such matches played out.<\/p>\n

But increasingly I have come to wonder if what I am witnessing is a series of nonversations.\u00a0 (If you\u2019re behind the curve, \u201cnonversation\u201d is a neologism that denotes any of several different kinds of interchanges that look like conversations but aren\u2019t<\/a>.)\u00a0 Even given the commonly-experienced difficulty anyone has changing anyone else\u2019s mind, it has come to seem that the spectacle before us is simply a gladiatorial combat between viewpoints, not a dialogue in which people are seeking to influence anyone\u2019s thinking.<\/p>\n

At a gladiatorial combat \u2013 all right, maybe that\u2019s a bit old-fashioned, however apropos; try the NFL \u2013 at a football game on any given Sunday, the partisans of both teams come in to cheer their favorites.\u00a0 Each team does its best to put on a good show.\u00a0 But whoever wins, when the fans troop out they still root for whomever they were rooting for as they trooped in.\u00a0 No allegiances were harmed in the making of that movie.<\/p>\n

I recently tried a small experiment to see if the clashes in social media were similarly unproductive.<\/p>\n

There was a dialogue involving someone I\u2019d gone to school with back in my golden youth.\u00a0 This guy, call him Babulus, has become a Tea Party activist.\u00a0 Daily my old friend Babulus foams at the mouth about President Obama.\u00a0 The President has become what the decapitated head of King Charles was to Mr. Dick in David Copperfield<\/em>: a subject that intrudes into every conversation.\u00a0 No matter what problem is under discussion, it\u2019s President Obama\u2019s fault.\u00a0 He\u2019s the president and it happened on his watch, so it\u2019s his fault.\u00a0 QED.\u00a0 And the world must be told.\u00a0 Like a fan on a football Sunday, Babulus cheers when Republicans triumph and jeers as Obama sinks in the polls.<\/p>\n

Trading jibes with him is another old friend, Catus, who, amidst what from my view is some pretty shrewd liberal analysis, adds his own jibes at Republican pratfalls and personal insults for Tea Party figures.<\/p>\n

I interjected in one exchange that I was finding the tone of Babulus\u2019 remarks increasingly grating, that his crowing at Obama\u2019s misfortunes could be interpreted as gloating directed personally at those who had elected and agreed with the man, and that this was a turn-off.\u00a0 And I added that the syllogism which resulted in everything that happened on Obama\u2019s watch being Obama\u2019s fault left a little to be desired.\u00a0 I suggested, gently as I could, that if Babulus really wanted to convince anyone, he should lose the raillery and the inconsequential logic.<\/p>\n

Babulus\u2019 only substantive response was that he was exercising his First Amendment rights.\u00a0 As if that excused boorishness and bad logic.\u00a0 I could not draw so much as a pro forma<\/em> expression of regret.\u00a0 My comment had had literally zero effect on Babulus.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to bother again with trying to change Babulus.\u00a0 He and Catus and some other people in our Facebook debating society are obviously committed to slugging it out for the duration.\u00a0 Babulus is right that he\u2019s exercising his First Amendment rights, but he\u2019s not contributing to the First Amendment\u2019s purpose<\/em>.\u00a0 Jointly he and friends like Catus (with whom I mostly agree on the substance) have turned the encounter of disparate speakers into a sparring match whose sole end is the spectacle it produces.\u00a0 No one is seeking to convince anyone else or to be convinced.<\/p>\n

New social media should not be about nonversation.\u00a0 We have too much of that everywhere else, and too few outlets for a true exchange of ideas, which is a big part of the reason we have a First Amendment.<\/p>\n


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[1]. \u201cIt is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market, whether it be by the Government itself or a private licensee.\u201d Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. FCC (1969)<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[2].\u00a0 \u201cFactions should be checked by permitting them all to speak, … and by entrusting the people to judge what is true and what is false.\u201d\u00a0 Citizens United v. Fed. Election Comm’n (2010)<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

The Big Picture Home Page<\/a> | Previous Big Picture Column<\/a> | Next Big Picture Column<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Babulus is right that he\u2019s exercising his First Amendment rights, but he\u2019s not contributing to the First Amendment\u2019s purpose. Jointly he and friends like Catus (with whom I mostly agree on the substance) have turned the encounter of disparate speakers into a sparring match whose sole end is the spectacle it produces. No one is seeking to convince anyone else or to be convinced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3050,3047,1726,3044,3042,3048,3052,3049,3046,3043,3051,2199,3045],"class_list":["post-2670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigpicture","tag-charles-dickens","tag-david-copperfield","tag-facebook","tag-first-amendment-purpose","tag-first-amendment-rights","tag-king-charles-i","tag-linkedin","tag-mr-dick","tag-roberts-court","tag-siloing","tag-social-media","tag-tea-party","tag-warren-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2670"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3001,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2670\/revisions\/3001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}