Simultaneous Monologues

Some thoughts on online dialogue and debate.

Social media and media in general promote the idea that they create dialogue around big issues. But this doesn't resonate with me, because what I see isn't dialogue at all. There's no free-speaking – what we see is edited, controlled, asynchronous snippets that remove the context of time and space. It's not a conversation or discussion because there is no central point of meeting or exchange, no rules of engagement, no shared sense of what the topic actually is. And there's no real purpose either – no aim to the conversation, just a mechanism for attracting attention and driving people toward more ads.

What happens in these media spaces isn't dialogue or debate. A debate has parameters, purpose, and a premise. These things allow arguments to be formed, compared, and contrasted. They allow logic to be applied.

What media does is hijack the concepts of human interaction and subvert them. Rather than dialogue, it creates a place for simultaneous monologues – each voice its own star – and then turns up the volume. In many ways, media behaves as a pyromaniac would: stacking the fuel, igniting the flame, and standing back as it all burns, enraptured by the chaos, with no concern for the results. And because there are no physical consequences, it just moves on to the next thing. And the next. And the next. Without any purpose beyond the gratification of creating a frenzied moment.

The web is capable of dialogue, yes, but not at scale. Dialogue is of human scale – not machines, not networks, but direct and tied. And it isn't only a space for airing disagreements. More often than not, dialogue requires some baseline of shared understanding to function at all: boundaries, rules, and conventions – perhaps unspoken, but mutual. That kind of mutuality can only happen at human scale.

For all the talk about the town square, we must remember that the square was not the place of debate or dialogue, but a space for shouting at one another from our own soapboxes. Dialogue has its home in cozy bars and cafes, on sofas and lounges, on long walks or seated around the fire – in shared places. Perhaps we never needed the town square online. What we need is something more akin to those cozy spaces.

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