It’s common to sit around with friends in your living room or a bar and watch a game, movie, debate, TV show, or whatever and make snarky comments. You’re making those comments for the other people in the room, and it’s all about being snarkier, more clever, more funny, and more loyal to the in-group. This isn’t some nuanced discussion of how reffing or basketball or movies or whatever work. You’re watching a game, and you make a snarky and hyperbolic comment about how bad that ref’s call was.
And perhaps it really was a bad call. Or perhaps not.
But whether it was really a bad, good, or ambiguous call isn’t really the point. The point is to have fun by talking trash about the opponent, confirming in-group attachment, gaining the approval of the other people by offering hilariously clever comments, hyperbolic statements (generally, but not necessarily, about the out-group). That whole experience is about bonding with others, about creating and fostering an in-group.
And that’s fine. It’s fun to say something snarky, unfair, hyperbolic about a ref, player, plaintiff on Judge Judy, competitor on Bachelorette, candidate in a debate, actor in a movie. And, as long as you’re saying it to your circle of friends, it’s fine.
Because it’s directed at your friends in the room, all norms of civility, decorum, respect, and fairness are not norms that apply to you and the candidate on Bachelorette, but to you and the friends in the room. The operative norm is whether your friends like it. And that’s fine in your living room.
The problem is that we have social media that are sort of your living room and sort of not. You have a youtube, Instagram, or whatever account with 20 followers, so it feels like the living room (even if it’s technically public). Or you have a twitter or Facebook account with 800 friends, but about 20 interact on any regular basis. You think you’re in your living room, making snarky, unfair, and hyperbolic comments about the ref, to a known and in-group audience, but you might not be. You might be. You might only continue to have 20 followers, or 20 people who interact, but something you say that you intended for that known audience might get publicked, and then you’re out there in the world.
Jon Ronson has written about this a lot, and about how to handle it. He shows that people can have their lives destroyed because they think the audience of their normal social media communication is the only audience they imagined when they wrote the text, but it reached a much broader audience (in rhetoric, this is called the “intended” v. “actual” audience).
Social media enables the gerfucking of the rhetorical situation of me talking trash with my small group of friends and me taking a very public stance. Social media publicks that trash-talking, when I never consciously intended to make as a public, context-free, statement. Ronson is interested in the personal consequence of that gerfucked publicking of the two audiences: the intended and actual. And it’s a good book.
I’m more interested in the political implications of that gerfucked publicking.
Just to be clear: the snarking in the living room isn’t intended to be a thoughtful contribution to public deliberation. The snark in the living room about the ref isn’t offered as some kind of reasoned contribution to political deliberation about refs, the three-point rule, corruption in professional basketball. It might, at best, be a kind of “YEAH ME TOO! I LOVE MY IN-GROUP!” moment of performance of in-group loyalty that a person is fine being publicked (they’re happy letting the entire world know that they’re passionate about the Cubs, Gwyneth Paltrow, Republicans). But it also might not. It might be a more hyperbolic, unfair, snarky take on the situation than the person really wants to defend were s/he participating in public deliberation.
Snarking in the living room and making a thoughtful contribution to public deliberation are, and really should be, different.
And that is the challenge of our current world of social media.
Imagine that we’re in a living room, and someone says, “That ref is fucking blind shithead who must be getting paid well for how bad his calls are.” And imagine that someone responds with, “I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. Research shows that refs make a consistent number of bad calls, and they tend to be evenly distributed, but we only notice the bad calls that hurt our team.” That measured, thoughtful response, even if accurate, would be considered a party foul. The living room is not a place for rational deliberation, and that’s fine. It’s a place where rants that are completely and totally unfair, unhinged, and unreasonable are welcome, as long as they’re about someone not present, they’re funny, clever, and/or mobilizing. They don’t contribute to thoughtful political deliberation because they aren’t intended to. That isn’t the function of this space.
Social media feels like hanging in the living room making snarky comments for the pleasure and approval of the like-minded, and we all treat it that way. But it’s also the only place in our informational world in which we might argue policies. It’s the only place in which we might argue with people who disagree with us about politics. It’s the last place of political deliberation.
Good decision-making requires that we look at the situation from perspectives other than our own. I work in a building built in 1953. I have watched an EMS team be completely unable to get a stretcher up to a classroom because, when that building was built, no one looked at it from the perspective of someone trying to get a stretcher to someone in need. The viewpoint of EMS workers, people who can’t walk up stairs (there are stairs everywhere that are actually unnecessary), fire marshalls—all sorts of people should have been included in the deliberation about the building.
I was in a long series of deliberations about the building of a unit, and the architects really wanted a “pony wall” in a particular place. We kept saying, “Take out the fucking pony wall” and they would say okay, and it was still there. I was feeling really victimized until I noticed that a particular guy would show up from time to time and say something along the lines of, “Not enough doors.” Finally, at one meeting, he said something along the lines of “I am the Fire Marshall, and your design is illegal because it violates fire code. You must have doors here and here, or this building will go no further.”
The architects were ignoring me, not because they thought me unimportant, but because they thought everyone unimportant. They couldn’t look at their design from any perspective other than their own. Including the guy in charge of making sure people can get out quickly in case of fire.
We need to hear from people who disagree with us, even if they ruin our beautiful design. Cultures in which groups can keep from hearing criticism of their arguments are cultures cheering themselves off a cliff (WeWork and Theranos would be good examples of that). Believing in yourself, believing in your own beliefs, believing that you’re right—those are all great bumper stickers, but they aren’t actually great ways to reason.
Various research in political science (including Uncivil Agreements and Ideology in America) show “cross-cutting voters” to be, if not the heroes of democracy, at least pretty close. These are people who listen to various sources of information, who have friends of various political affiliations. We should all be cross-cutting voters; we should all be listening to points of view that disagree with us, and not representations of opposition positions, and not hate-watching.
But a depressing amount of empirical research shows that few of us talk about politics with people who disagree with us (Ideology in America, How Partisan Media Polarizes America).
Before cable, and when the Fairness Doctrine was in place, we used to be forced to watch centrist news, but the internet has allowed people to fall in enclaves of deeply pure in-groups. Enclaves of in-group ideology become increasingly extreme. It’s not uncommon, when I’m trying to talk to people who self-identify as conservative, for them to say that they don’t watch Fox because it isn’t in-group enough for them, and I once fell into the informational enclave of anti-globalism, a self-identifying lefty group which has sub-groups promoting the notion that the Holocaust was a hoax and the Protocols is a legitimate document. There are informational worlds of youtube videos, private Facebook groups, Instagram enclaves that are entirely in-group amplification, in which the goal of the discourse is nothing but cheering the in-group team and yelling about the other team. That’s a party in which furniture gets broken, and someone wakes up naked on the front lawn.
That’s a different post, but my point here is that far too many of us reason from within informational enclaves so refined that we spend all our time arguing about who is more purely in-group.
We are all thinking in a world of people who think like us, while we think we know what they think because our in-group enclave inoculates us, whereas good deliberation requires including the views of people who don’t think like us. We can’t make good decisions about anything without trying to think about how and why we might be wrong. There is no position from which the universal right is accurately perceived. (Again, a different post.)
Democratic deliberation requires that there is some place that the decision-makers engage in rational-critical democratic deliberation. The people who wrote the constitution imagined a series of proxy deliberations—people would select a person they thought had good judgment, who would then go to a place in which people deliberated together, rationally, inclusively, and absent of factional commitment. In such a world, citizens don’t deliberate about what policies to follow, but about who deliberates well. It didn’t work, and quickly turned into exactly the kind of factional system the people who wrote the constitution were trying to prevent. Our political system has shifted that place of deliberation from elites (who deliberated just as badly as any other group) to “the people.” That is, to us. So, now we need to engage in rational-critical policy deliberation.
And rational deliberation includes listening to the best arguments of the oppositions.
Social media, especially Facebook, google, and twitter, are places in which we might engage in points of view other than our own, but the algorithms help us to avoid difference. I have to work to find political arguments from out-groups. There are other places–comment threads on places as varied as Slate, WSJ, captainawkward, FARK, WaPo, NRO—that have a dominant ideology (an in-group point of view) and out-group views get piled on (and the whole genre of commenting isn’t inviting for good deliberation). Those comment threads are not places in which people thoughtfully engage the best arguments of the opposition. They are places in which in-group hyperbole is allowed—they are the living rooms in which the furniture isn’t broken, but in which “I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. Research shows that refs make a consistent number of bad calls, and they tend to be evenly distributed, but we only notice the bad calls that hurt our team” is still not a welcome argument.
I am not saying that all comment threads must be equally welcoming of all points of view. I think that having site-specific informal norms is to be expected when people are looking for a place to vent, be entertained, snark about the ref. I’m saying that, for all of us, social media is the living room in which we try to make statements that resonate with people who already agree, that are clever and funny snarks about out-groups. And we pick our living rooms.
But where is the hard work of democratic deliberation? Of paying attention to the person we really don’t want to hear who says that we’re being unfair, hyperbolic, and irrationally dismissive, who says it isn’t a zero-sum battle between two sides, who insists that we pay careful attention to people we think are intellectually and morally bankrupt?
If social media isn’t that space, what is?