The Death of Discourse

A few things have struck me recently regarding the information age and interpersonal communications.

First, there's obviously some inherent good. I've been in touch with people I had lost touch with twenty or more years ago thanks to Facebook. It provides another level of communication with the people I've stayed in touch with, which is also good. A complicated aspect of Facebook, though, is the communal part. If I upload a picture of myself, all of my Facebook friends see it, too. If I update my status, same thing. If someone else posts a picture of me or asks a question on my "wall," that's out there for the rest of my friends to see, too.

So, I temper what I say, and I've asked people to take stuff down that might upset other folks. In some ways, this mirrors how I behave in real life - I don't swear in front of my grandma, but my vernacular can get pretty salty around friends. There's a greater capacity for communication, but also a greater need for humility and self-awareness.

Second, we're seeing physical media disappear. It's not that people are suddenly disinterested in the news or music anymore; there's a paradigm shift to computer-based delivery. Anyone with a computer and some moxie can distribute an album now, and blogs (who, me?) have somehow become the delivery mechanism for news.

Unfortunately, popular opinion doesn't really care about standards. So, instead of carefully researched, objective reporting (I know, I know), we now get an op-ed post on a blog with tons of comments and no fear of reprisal. In a way, it does seem a little more democratic, but at some point, it's difficult to know which posts and comments are based in fact and research, and which are pure conjecture. There is no accountability.

Third, interpersonal communications in real life are interesting. Words are only part of the interaction. Body language, inflection, location - all of these things add context to a spoken dialog. Interpersonal communications over the Internet are stripped down to words. I suppose you can contextualize based on a person's reputation, where the words appear, or other people's comments or reviews.

Sarcasm, for example, is difficult to convey. A joke where voice inflection and timing are key can easily read like an insult. There's a temporal aspect, too. If you're having a conversation with someone in real life, there's a reasonable expectation that walking off to the kitchen mid-discussion would be rude. Over the Internet, however, this is normal.

When you think about it, bars are great facilitators of discourse because of the casual atmosphere (and booze), but there are still social standards in place. On the Internet, anonymity is all the conduit the id needs to screech past the superego - social standards be damned. It would be interesting to find out what percentage of comments posted internet-wide would never have been stated out loud. I'm guessing it's greater than 50%.

Disjointed discussions, hit-and-run comments, slapdash blog updates - this is the unregulated, unrefined present (and possible future) of discourse.