Bring back Dialogue - what social media should be used for
just let me ramble for a bit, thanks
A lot has happened since my last post, but I decided to jump right back in with a topic that won’t surprise you: social media and the decline of dialogue. I've read a handful of posts on this topic, and I want to share my thoughts.
We have grossly undervalued dialogue in our society. This can be seen in our communities, workplaces, education system, and social media.
The purpose of this post is to share my thoughts and have a good time dunking on social media companies and the education system. And maybe I’ll convince you my opinion is correct along the way. Plus, this ties in well with with some of my previous writing, like the Twitter RPG, which is an idea to build a system that rewards deeper dialogue instead of dopamine chasing.
What is Good Within Social Networks
I’ll start with Simon Sarris’s post What is Good Within Social Networks.
Simon’s main point: for centuries, the main mode of communication between humans was discourse - aka two-way conversation. The first forms of mass-media completely removed this (Books, TV, newspaper, etc.) Social media is good because it brings back our ability to have discourse. It’s like TV, but you can dm the people who made the show. Social media is good, because it enables discourse.
Discourse is important, yet we are having less of it. Instead, we put headphones on and listen to other people talk to each other.
This is a huge difference from the past, with massive, but hard to notice effects.
There’s a common complaint that modern life seems to make friendship more difficult. I think this is partly because friendship is often created by consistent, repeated small interactions with people in unplanned settings, and we have fewer of those than ever. The car and the department store and online ordering erased many of these social settings—even though we might not have thought of the butcher as a social setting. The decline of clubs, fraternal orders, churches, etc., also played a now-lost role.
Despite this, the majority of users don’t use social media for discourse. In fact, most users don’t post anything at all.
Why is that?
Well, it doesn’t help that social media platforms don’t optimize for discourse. Instead, they take advantage of our worst instincts and optimize for time spent consuming on the app.
If they were optimizing for discourse, we’d see more new features like stories. Simon has a great explanation for why stories work so well:
The reason the format worked so well—and why companies wanted to copy it is that Snapchat stumbled upon a format that is a perfect avenue to intimacy. The ephemeral posting lowered expectations around formality. The normalization of private replies to public posting encouraged conversations to happen instead of comments. Before, direct messaging someone might have been unusual, now it was normal. Friendship is consistent, repeated small interactions with people in unplanned settings.
If social media was optimizing for discourse, we’d see more emphasis on features like stories:
I would think we should expect social networks to spend a lot more time thinking about why certain features are so compelling, or this space between public and private, or how to make new spaces. Externally, especially looking at features added to the major social networks in the last few years (stories excepted), it just doesn’t seem to be there.
I had never thought about why stories were such a successful feature. They are an invite to dm you. Almost like posting a prompt for people to answer (and sometimes people literally do this). This is amplified by the fact that people are much more comfortable replying in private. They can:
reference your inside jokes no one else will understand
gossip about friends
talk about private plans, or private memories
People are much more willing to share in private, which leads to much better discourse.
This confirms my own experience on social media as well. Twitter has had the biggest impact on my life: I’ve met a bunch of cool people and got a weird internet job. What many people don’t see, is that the most meaningful interactions happen in private - in dm’s, on zoom calls, in discords of smaller groups. Tweets are like snapchat stories, in the sense that active twitter users see them as an opportunity privately connect with the original poster. Unfortunately for many twitter newbs, this is not intuitive from the twitter interface.
Simon focuses on the positive: social media allows for discourse, even if most of us aren’t using it for that. This feature can never be added to traditional mass media.
The Other Take - The End of Social Media
On the other end, Glen Stovall writes we are seeing The end of social media. But, he is focused on the same point as Simon - discourse:
Discourse is the only difference between media and “social media,” and it’s slowly being phased out
Twitter and Facebook have decided that your news feed is no longer for discourse. both default to more content from creators and less from your friends.
Consumption is easier than discourse. That is what I meant when I said these companies “take advantage of our worst instincts” - they focus on consumption although we’d be better off focused on discourse.
Despite starting from a different point, Glenn ends up sharing a very similar stance to Simon. I’ll get to that near the end.
The Importance of Discourse
Is it really a problem if discourse isn’t emphasized in social media? Yea, it probably is.
In an older post by Simon, Are We Still Thinking, he talks about the importance of dialogue throughout history:
Through dialogue is how all people — peasants, kings, Da Vincis and Aristotles — for most of time, received almost all knowledge.
One-way consumption of information is a new thing - and our shared frustration about the world is likely the result of us starting to feel the result of this new paradigm:
Everyone understands the advantage of having a person to bounce ideas off of. Wouldn’t the opposite, always removing the other person, be a disadvantage? To get our information over the last 500 years, we all switched to reading more, and conversing less. In the switch from two-way knowledge to one-way, how are we sure we are not pondering less?
Simon mentioning Da Vinci and Aristotle reminded me of a convincing post by Eric Hoel: Why we stopped making Einsteins.
In the post, Eric argues that aristoctratic tutoring (a name he uses to to distinguish it from the modern day SAT tutors that come to mind) is clearly a better form of education.
Aristocratic tutoring was not focused on measurables. Historically, it usually involved a paid adult tutor, who was an expert in the field, spending significant time with a young child or teenager, instructing them but also engaging them in discussions, often in a live-in capacity, fostering both knowledge but also engagement with intellectual subjects and fields…
The main problem of which, is that it is reserved for wealthy classes
… As the name suggests it was something reserved mostly for aristocrats, which means, no way around it, it was deeply inequitable.
He has a laundry list of well known intellectual celebrities who benefited from or provided one-on-one tutoring (crtl-f search for these names in the article to see the details).
Bertrand Russell
Ada Lovelace
John Stuart Mill
John von Neumann
Darwin
Descartes
Virginia Woolf’s father educated her rigorously
Einstein
I bring this up because aristocratic tutors teach through discourse. The students discuss and debate with tutors. Discussion and debate are the best ways to solidify knowledge.
Tutors are discourse focused, while modern classrooms and lectures are content focused. No matter how many questions you ask your teacher, and no matter which direction the natural conversation may have take you, the teacher is required to get through specific material. That’s not discourse.
As Simon writes, we all understand the benefits of having someone to bounce ideas off of:
Everyone understands the advantage of having a person to bounce ideas off of. Wouldn’t the opposite, always removing the other person, be a disadvantage? To get our information over the last 500 years, we all switched to reading more, and conversing less. In the switch from two-way knowledge to one-way, how are we sure we are not pondering less?
You’d be hard pressed to find people who consistently found their professors as someone they could “bounce ideas off of.” Not to mention that bouncing ideas is not incentivized, unless they are are ideas for what might end up on a test.
It should be intuitive to us that discourse is the best way to solidify knowledge (especially considering the unfortunate defects of books), but we still don’t do it, or prioritize it.
Eric, Simon, and Glenn all point out that discourse is grossly missing from the education system and our social media (and our entire lives). At the same time, they point out how important it is.
Unfortunately, in the education system, discourse is too hard to measure. On social media, discourse is too hard to monetize. So we’ve built environments where we have to go out of our way to do it.
The Interactions We Crave
Podcast interviews are an insanely popular media format. We love watching and listening to others talk. Is this a sign at how much we crave it?
Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander has a lot of great thoughts on how our built environments are destroying opportunities for discourse. Here are a couple of his patterns that are good to start with:
children in the city: we don’t expose kids to adults, so they can’t learn from adults
scattered work: “Concentration and segregation of work . . . leads to dead neighborhoods.” (and no little discourse)
Glen and Simon Conclusions
Glenn and Simon, despite coming at the topic from opposite sentiments, end up at strikingly similar conclusions: discourse is good. And substack is the platform that seems to be doubling down on this.
They might be giving substack too much credit for adding chat to the mobile app, but I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a bit of my motivation to start writing here again.
It would be nice if you helped me put this to the test and hmu with a chat with your thoughts on this post.
Fun Conspiracy
Maybe wtfhappenedin1971 is the when the number of 1-way informational transfers (tv, newspapers, etc.) overwhelmed the number of 2-way informational transfers (discourse) and stifled the creativity of society.
Discourse with AI
If we can’t find discourse with humans online, are we going to resort to mainly talking to AI bots? I mean, they are getting pretty good…
Conclusion
Only one thing seems clear to me: we should be talking to each other more.
How we build this directly into social media apps is not clear, no matter how much I wish it was.
How we build it into the education system is even less clear.
What I do know is that we are under intense pressure to consume, whereas the students of the past were under pressure, by tutors, to understand ideas well enough to debate and play with them, and figure out what they wanted to learn next.
Alright be honest, did GPT-3 Do it better?
Surprised not to see podcasts mentioned! Seems to be the primary way people consume discourse now... personally I don’t like listening to two people figure stuff out, I’d rather listen to an audiobook, but they seem tremendously popular specifically because they provide a though-provoking conversation.