Making the World Safe for Banality
Scott Payne has a piece on “glocalism” (the academy’s and my term, not his) that you should really read all of, but on his way to some wonderful (non-curmudgeony!) insights and injunctions he stumbles into an all too typical curmudgeon trope. To wit:
…a meaningful exchange and cultivation of community via platforms like Facebook and Twitter seems to the experiential exception, not the rule. More often than not, the kind of back and forth in which one engages when one these sites is a trade of surfaces and vapidity. As such, many folks grappling with questions about the influence of technology on the way we live are inclined to write these platforms off as nothing but fads…
I think this is trivially true: a lot of people post extremely boring things on Facebook. (Matt Labash has documented this in excruciating detail.) But I wonder what Payne and true curmudgeons like Labash think goes on in old-fashioned, presence-based communities. In my experience, neighborhoods and other communities that produce “rootedness” are overwhelmingly banal places, filled with small talk, gossip and all the other tokens of exchange that perpetuate relationships between members. “Rootedness” is only desirable because it teaches that these things are valuable, that there is wisdom in the everyday, that it’s possible to find fulfillment without spending one’s life wandering the globe searching for it. Why should a Facebook page be so much less banal than a church picnic or a block party?
Of course, man does not live by block parties alone. The relationship of governor to governed can’t be nearly as easily maintained via Twitter, as Ezra Klein noted the other day:
It’s intimacy without communication. (Senator Claire) McCaskill doesn’t actually say anything in 140 characters or less. The illusion of transparency comes because in everyday life, we only hear about the dinner plans of people we actually have a relationship with. What’s useful about intimacy, however, isn’t the exchange of trivia but the access to different perspectives. And I’d really like to hear her perspective! It would be rather nice if senators and congressmen routinely wrote posts explaining their thinking on major issues. A public service, even. Instead, they’ve all embraced Twitter.
I’d clarify that Twitter’s inability to accommodate this type of communication doesn’t signal that meaningful communication is impossible via Twitter, period. (“She said yes,” “I love you,” “Trying to forgive more,” “What boundaries have you tested today?”—all fit easily within 140 characters.) The other problem with the Congressional Twitter craze is that they’re mistaking their audience for their constituents. At the end of the day, the people who need to feel they know the “real you” are the ones registered to vote in your district or state. Twitter may help you build media cred to a certain extent, but intimacy matters less with the media (who will ultimately come to the same conclusions Klein has) than with the voters.
This is only a problem until congressional districts are drawn based on membership in particular social-networking sites, of course.
I think Ezra Klein is a bright guy, but to say that intimacy is about accessing different perspectives kind of chills my blood. Intimacy, it seems to me, involves letting go of “having opinions”. If you catch my drift.
— Freddie · Mar 19, 02:27 AM · #
“And indeed this idle talk is not confined to vocal gossip, but even spreads to what we write, where it takes the form of ‘scribbling’. In this latter case the gossip is not based so much upon hearsay. It feeds upon superficial reading. The average understanding of the reader will never be able to decide what has been drawn from primordial sources with a struggle and how much is just gossip. The average understanding, moreover, will not want any such distinction, and does not need it, because, of course, it understands everything.
“The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its becoming public; instead it encourages this. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one’s own. If this were done, idle talk would founder; and it already guards against such a danger. Idle talk is something which anyone can rake up; it not only releases one from the task of genuinely understanding, but develops an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, for which nothing is closed off any longer.” – Being and Time, sec. 35
— John Schwenkler · Mar 19, 03:43 AM · #
In network theory, connection strength between nodes is measured as information transmitted per a given unit of time, and is called ‘flux’.
The same is true for human networks. There’s a small handful of people with whom you communicate deeply and often, and a much larger batch with whom you communicate shallowly and rarely. In fact, I’d bet if you looked at the patterns of wall commentary on Facebook, or the back-and-forth frequency of those participating in JournoList, you’d see the exact same patterns.
Why do I bring this up? Well, merely to say that Twitter and Facebook aren’t going to do anything about the shape of the flux distribution curve — we’ll still have few deep friends and many surface ones — but these platforms are probably going to have some measurable effect on the strength of connections overall, across a person’s entire network from top to bottom.
This will open up previously unavailable coordination opportunities. It’s worth thinking about.
— JA · Mar 19, 04:13 AM · #
Dara,
First of all, thanks for the link and the kind words.
To the meat of your argument, I think there is still a qualitative difference between the everyday back and forth that happens in a physical community and the kind of vapidity to which I was referring on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook in particular is bad for mitigating conversation through meaningless applications that seems to lack any real life correlation in terms of getting to know someone. At least with the banality of small talk in face-to-face communal circumstances one has the benefit of getting to know how another’s mind works without any false or fictitious direction.
I’m not suggesting that all communication via these platforms needs to be about the meaning of the world in order to be considered valuable, but what I’m really after — and didn’t explicitly mention in the post — is a way of importing or imbuing communication via hyper-connected networks and platforms with a greater degree of the intimacy to which Klein is skeptical. I am skeptical to a point, as well, but not so much that I take the question to be closed in any meaningful sense. I think the possibilities are there for us to explore and we would do ourselves some interesting good by embracing those opportunities.
And the term I had used in an earlier post (www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2009/02/glocality) was glocality, really just a derivative of glocalism.
— Scott H. Payne · Mar 19, 03:34 PM · #