I remember the Internet in the early '00s.
It was a wonderful place: dangerous, exciting, fresh, engaging, authentic.
I remember this old thing called a "message board" where people would come to write about their thoughts on this-or-that with any other random person in the world who happened to stumble upon the same digital sphere.
Usually, it meant that people of similar interests congregated to discuss the things they cared about. There were art forums, technology forums, food forums, parenting forums, culture forums.
And I don't know if I'm just misremembering this but the conversations these message boards were, for the most part... intelligent and considerate.
People would have strong disagreements and argue passionately about the finer points of the topic at hand, dissecting and deconstructing their opponent's argument, point-by-point, sentence-by-sentence, flexing their logical brain muscles to such an extent that by the end of the debate all parties involved had authentically learned something.
I remember this experience fondly, and there is a part of me that still holds that this is true for today... but alas, it simply is not the case, and I think I have an idea why:
Social Media
When social media first came out, it was not that big of a difference on the general quality of conversations. But, honestly, certain developments have served to create an air of alienation and confrontation among people to such an extent that they are no longer even able to hold a conversation about a particular topic -- and remain focused on that topic -- let along form an argument to have a debate.
In short: people on social media behave much more stupidly than the internet user of old.
A Personal Case
I was on Twitter, just surfing around for stuff, and I happened to see a tweet by Alex Jones.
I actually don't wind up on Jones' twitter often, but I saw a comment on this post that confused me:
The thing is, I've never heard of a theory where the FBI conspired to elect Trump. I've heard about the FBI conspiring to elect Hillary, but not Trump. So I asked:
So, yeah... isn't it obvious that I simply haven't heard about this conspiracy theory and want to know more about it? And that's true, I just want to know more about this because... damnit -- I'm curious!! What's wrong with being curious???
Here was the response:
This only confused me more, because it's assuming that I'm "accusing" and "enemy", which is something I absolutely haven't done in any stretch of the imagination. It's at this point that it was pretty clear what was going on. This sort of thing seems to happen all the time these days, and I mean that -- within the last year and a half or so the internet has become a very hostile place for open speech.
I saw the pattern: these two users had diagnosed me as an adversary and were teaming up to attack me. It's a very common and very flawed approach, because what it ends up doing is punishing the curious, which, for people with less self esteem than me, will cause people to galvanize and shield their creativity and curiosity.
It went down, unfortunately, exactly and I was afraid it would.
At this point the exchange is completely derailed. This guy doesn't even realize that he hasn't even made a point yet, and his aim is all over the place. He doesn't get that what he's saying is that this Dowd guy from the first meme got his "FBI conspired to elect Trump" theory from "tinfoil hats" and... me.
This is obviously crazy, and I'm sure that's not what he's trying to say, but he's either not adept enough at rhetoric to know how to deduce or, honestly, he's just not smart enough to debate properly. And I think this is largely a result of social media conditioning and twitter text limits/meme responses.
Before I had gotten this dude's response I sat down to play Earthbound for a while and hang out with my wife. I intended to come back to the thread if I was feeling up to it (which I usually am), but I KNEW that when I came back -- no matter what I said -- if I pressed the point or asked the guy to explain himself, he would throw out an insult and block me.
Here's what I cam back to:
Yep. This is doomed now, just as I expected. This dude has completely given up on the conversation because he didn't have a point and isn't able to make an argument. He doesn't even know what he's doing in this conversation, what he's upset about or why.
It's really a sad example of what's happened to the general state of interpersonal communication today.
So I summarized what had happened thus far:
I knew I was going to get blocked. And that's really unfortunate because I JUST WANTED TO KNOW WHERE THIS SUPPOSED THEORY THAT I'D NEVER HEARD OF CAME FROM. Really,, that's it. That's all I wanted to know. And this dude is so brainwashed by this social conditioning that HE doesn't even know, and he's the one who's supposed to be making the point.
And, as one can see form the header of this account, the dude is clearly obsessed with Alex Jones. This is the kind of sad irony that we see when political positions are as galvanized as they are now. This guy is becoming the people he hates, and is so obsessed with fighting with his perceived enemy that he will turn me -- someone who's just trying to get a simple answer to a statement -- that he will hallucinate an enemy where there is none.
Now...
This post-mortem really has nothing to do with this particular exchange or these particular people. The sad reality is I've had this exact same thing happen dozens of times, and I have seen it happen frequently to other people.
This is just the way things are now.
What are we to do?
Is there an approach that you think could help this terrible shift in interpersonal communication culture?
I'd really like to know what you think if you have any ideas about this terrible trend in communication.
