Metamodern Communication Theory

Ahti Ahde
Ahti Ahde
Sep 9, 2018 · 11 min read

If you are like me, you have received your share of social media madness. Probably most human beings have already. It usually starts when some third party makes a fresh appearance to a conversation, brings in some weak argument, with which no sane person could agree with and the third party just does not back off. They either use weak reasoning or raging emotions in order to shut off all the hopes (when they try to dispose a belief) or cynicism (when they try to impose a belief) of other parties of the conversation. Someone has to lose their face as an end result, due to the way they enter discussions and how discussions will go from there.

The most common interpretation for the origin or the reason for this behavior is that, “they (the third party) are idiots”. However, I personally do not like following a single political or ideological philosophy, but rather I want to see both sides of each argument. Then I saw it in first hand, that the same people, who behave irrationally within another group, were behaving admirably rational within another group. So the problem had to be in the group dynamics, rather than individuals; of course not all individuals were able to shine in other groups, but the ability to shine seemed to depend strongly by the group within which they communicated.

As a part of this itch, I started looking for “intellectuals”, with whom the level of discussion remained high regardless of the topic; such groups tended to be short lived and usually after 800 members, things started to fall apart. Then something strange happened. I was invited to this Finnish group, called “political metamodernism” and then I saw it happening the first time ever: left-green socialists were able to have a serious conversation with right-liberal capitalists without social media rage. What was going on here?

This article is in my opinion by far the best analytical approach in order to explain why the intellectuals have gravity towards metamodern principles of having conversations. I will introduce the philosophical foundations, a quad theory — an easy to use visual tool to understand this thingie — and why we need it today.

The Foundations of the Intersubjective Communication Era

The metamodern philosophy underlines, that the goal of each interaction between individuals would have to be a positive experience for both parties. In practice this means, that you will assume absolute sincerity from others and you are assumed to maintain the longest favorable temper known in the history of the mankind. So instead of attacking other people verbally, you should forgive and mentor, build bridges by favoring words like both/and, rather than being yes/but all the time. Not only is this a good method for avoiding strawmen, but also such intentions will rarely go unnoticed by the co-conspirators, since in general such endeavors are rare within the raging domain of social media.

This form of communication is called intersubjective, where you prioritize the ones who are present over the things that exist outside of “now”.

The root cause for subconscious need for these more sane approaches to communication may arise from many things (more about those later), but one particularly interesting aspect is the changes in media consumption from technological point of view. 97% of the American youth play video games at least one hour a day and use the Internet daily. This is a huge change, which has happened almost within two decades from zero to hundred. Both mediums prefer interaction over submitting yourself to authored narratives, such as TV shows, books and news papers. And even TV shows have adopted more interactive formats, such as reality TV. Books have adopted preference for more immersive and minimalist narratives and traditional news… seem to suffer from all time low regarding public trust.

Why is it so difficult to succeed with traditional news these days?

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein coined the concept of language-games. What it means is that all efficient usages of language are based on shared foundation and presuppositions of the meaning of the words in typical sentences. When people need to communicate more efficiently, specific sentences and words start to carry more nuanced meanings, which are only evident for the team members of the same language game. Some of the biggest disputes of in the history of science have been merely caused by language-games; different presuppositions about the meaning of words. Even the Einstein’s theory of relativity was partly a mathematical language-game, since when you annihilate two particles, it is not exactly clear, weather or not you should include the mass of the anti-particle also to the equation (E=½mc²).

The philosophy of science has changed quite a lot due to quantum mechanics and humanistic sciences. The classic information theory is insufficient for describing many social phenomena and quantum information theory proposes, that in addition to having closed system binary communication (and the idea of corrupted messaged), there should perhaps also be a metasystematic, probabilistic communication, which accepts entanglement (outsider dependencies) and superposition (ambiquity of the meaning, when outside dependencies are unknown).

Frege came up with the idea of intensional logic, which Alonzo Church formalized and many others refined. It is an extension of propositional logic, which will help us understand the true nature of the language-games and the true value of the metamodern sincerity rather well. Church (or maybe Carnap) proposed that the “true” meaning of a word or proposition should be the information contained within the most generic context. This is called intension, an abstract idea which can be refered to. When a word increases (subjective) meaning by having some form of subjective knowledge, it’s extensional context increases or moves further away from explicit meaning and becomes more of what is implied.

The Brief History of Problems Resolved

In order to understand how to use Church’s theory to solve the social media problems, we need to look how we ended up here. It all starts from the Second World War, which was won by using the industrial era paradigms most efficiently. The industrial line of thinking proposes, that there exists the paradigm of systems thinking and that humans function well (or at least efficiently) within the idea of directed hierarchical authoritarian communication. It assumes, that closed systems exists, information is local and that human beings absorb all information if the message is powerful enough.

These ideas became popular, because after Second World War many people were dependent on local communities or governments, the TV became widely popular and mass media started to emerge as a thing. It didn’t help that many Nazi propaganda officers got amnestied and occupied as Public Relationships experts, advertisers and crisis communication consultants to United States. So what efficiently happened, was that the language-games were intentionally manipulated by experts occupied by mass media corporations. The general population didn’t have a chance to escape these imposed language-games before the Internet revolution of past two or three decades.

When you move a conversation from mass media dominated language games to Internet, you will end up with huge pool of language games to deal with, instead of having just few language games well related to your political, educational and location-based status as a citizen. The mass media had been the creator and maintainer of the “generic” language-game; it defined the intensional meanings of words, to which the rest of us had to adapt. However, today the era of institutionalized language-game is over, but this revolution is still in it’s infancy and the result is a bit of a mess. The metamodernism is a solution, but merely by accidental intuition.

The basic problem had been the lack of the idea of intersubjective language-games in media. The credibility of an argument had been merely defined by the authority of the sources in which the argument was published. Now that such authorities merely do not exist for the new generation, the misinformation grows bewilderly.

Rediscovering Language-Games

So, suddenly when this new political philosophy of metamodernism emerged emphasizing the intersubjective experience, I knew there was something worth discovering there. I will elaborate this more below, but here is an ideal discussion model, which has four important components:

  • The Subject: This is “me”, it tries to understand the object (content), within the context of the intersubjective conversation (language-game), trying to alleviate the cognitive dissonance by maintaining empahtetic connection to the metaobjective narratives presented (known stories to identify one’s self with). It represents the protagonist of the argument and it’s flaws can be felt through Avatar Dissonance; accepting the message has conflicts with the inner self.
  • The Object: This is “you”, it tries to persuade “me” to accept the claims presented by resolving conflicting presuppositions. This is done by sharing content, which attempts to persuade you towards mutual understanding within the (intersubjective) language-game. The metaobjective narratives are used as a deck of cards, from which you draw empathetic reactions, when cognitive disparities lead to dissonant feelings. It produces content, which “me” has to digest in the role of audience. In interactive communication, the roles of subject and object are taking turns. It presents the antagonist of the argument and it’s flaws can be felt through Presuppositional (or perhaps Cognitive) Dissonance.
  • The Intersubject: This is “us”, it tries to maintain the conversation intact by resolving conflicts caused by the language-game between the “me” and “you” while also trying to incarnate mutual understanding of the arguments. It provides the mechanics and tools of the conversation. It is the mentor of the argument and it’s flaws can be felt through Luda Dissonance (game studies).
  • The Metaobject: This is “them”, it provides the conversation with new narratives, which the “me” and “you” can use in order to form commitment to the discovery of mutual language-game, that is able to manifest mutual understanding of the argument topic. It provides narratives from outside of the argument in order to trigger empathy as a balancing force to the intensity of the language-game. It is the friendly distractor of the argument and it’s flaws can be felt through Immersive Dissonance (inability to feel “me” within the metaphors used).

What is important to notice here is, that the diagonals form a competitive dynamic pairs. The Subject and Object are having an argument and the Intersubject and the Metaobject measure the quality (and fairness) of their argumentation. Another way to put it is that the Intersubjective language-game is having a challenge of defining an argument without using Metaobjective narratives, which Subject and Object need in order to maintain enough trust to go through the cognitive misunderstandings involved.

It is also important to note, that communication is a competitive game of meaning delivery and thus according to Realistic Conflict Theory it is crucial, whether or not your companions perceive you as a rival or co-operative participant. If you are seen as rival, all meanings left with room for interpretation will be judged towards hostilities. This is the exact reason, why metamodern sincerity is so powerful tool as it builds cooperative environment as default rather than rival environment.

There are also co-operative dynamics: both Subject and Object try to use Intersubject and Metaobject for improving the game; and the Intersubject and Metaobject are adapting to the Subject and Object in order to understand the nature of the other. There is a narratological comprehensive theory involved, which helps you to prioritize and understand typical narratives in relation to these four perspectives and there is also a neuropsychological factors of change resistance involved, but those I will introduce more in depth in parts III and IV (this text was supposed to be part II, but it got published early). By understanding these two additional methods, you will be able to predict efficiently how the game of argumentation should be handled in order to provide sincere and fruitful experience for everyone involved. The most significant thing to understand is how rival competitive strategies differ from cooperative competitive strategies.

I mentioned earlier the four dissonances, through which the flaws in discussion can be felt. I discovered these four dissonances as part of a project, where I attempt to teach artificial intelligence to create and alter dramatic arcs better than 50% of the amateur humans. It also borrows a frame from the Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht, where he introduces a developmental theory, which builds upon the idea of Constructive Developmental Framework. In the Freinacht model we have four developmental dimensions:

  • Stage: Cognitive capacity, which in this context would mean the ability to endure or completely avoid Presuppositional / Cognitive Dissonance.
  • Code: Capacity to use language, which in this context would mean Luda Dissonance and is largely defined by the fluency of adapting the language-game.
  • State: The emotional “enlightenedness” or happiness, which in this context would mean Avatar Dissonance, capacity to be challenged for empathetic reaction within the scope of arguments.
  • Depth: The capability to understand emotional states beyond your own, which in this context would mean the ability to avoid causing Immersive Dissonance in others.

In relation to the historical frame I laid earlier, the mass media has been trying to dominate the Code (language-game; intersubject) and Depth (stereotypical models of empathetic reactions; metaobject).

In addition to the neuropsychological and narratological additions to this theory, I also have an intuition, which I will shortly introduce here. The Code has three emotional components (just like games in general), which are Pride, Guilt and Accomplishment. Instead of thinking pride as a negative emotion, the neuropsychological analysis show, that it is actually intersubjective and positive emotion as we do not generally feel pride for selfish reasons, but rather from validation of our behavior against the assumed social acceptance criteria. Similar thing is true for guilt. When we are over confident about our contribution, the social acceptance (or lack of) can easily result in backlash of guilt. The accomplishment is usually the result of pride-guilt trial-and-error iterations after we achieve some kind of new level of understanding about our social context. These are important for the Luda Dissonance.

It is important to notice, that pride can easily turn to anger, revenge and frustration. This is usually symptom of lacking the metamodern sincerity and having rival competitive game instead of cooperative competitive game going on. In brains, the ludalogical aspects are feedback by dopamine, which explains why social media rage can become addictive: you are misusing the pride by lacking the proper social commitment.

The Immversive Dissonance also has emotional component of empathy (oxytocing, endorphines); the more we can mirror ourselves in the content provided to us, the easier it is to stay immersed with the messanger. However, Avatar Dissonance is similar, but perhaps more subliminal, because it is realted to how we use narratives in order to distract ourselves from the ludatic failures through increased empathy.

The Presuppositional Dissonance or the cognitive dissonance merely causes frustration through broken attention span, which prevents us from mirroring or reaching new level of mutual understanding.

To wrap it up, the “object” creates content, which causes challenges to your cognitive capacity. As a “subject” you have responsibility to deal with those emotions and trying to help the “object” to create more fit content for you to consume. The methods for this include fine tuning the “intersubjective” language-game for which switching the roles of content production (“subject-object” competitive cycle) is a great tool for. Besides the language-game you also need to maintain a degree of trust, which is fine tuned by drawing meta narratives from the “metaobjective” world. The “inter-meta” competitive cycle attempts to build enough trust to over come the challenge of language-games and ideological boundaries and discover the root source of cognitive dissonance.

However, this part of my theory is still a bit of work in progress.

All this should provide you sufficient tools to better understand the conversations you engage to in the social media. If you feel frustrated (content causing cognitive dissonance), try focusing on the language-game or finding new sources of mutual empathy from the (metaobjective) domain of the argument. If you feel slipping out of the immersion and flow of the conversations, consider retuning your own language-game or (metaobjective) perspective. If you feel that the language game is insufficient to progress the protagonists and antagonists towards a mutual understanding, try to bring in something new from the metaobject. If you feel, that the conversation is quickly running off-topic, try to focus to the mistakes and mismatches in the language-game of the previous contents shared, and fix those issues.

Happy social media debates!

This text is a Request for Comments, a test bench for an idea. Feel free to clap and sharing this with text “Request for Comments”. I hope to test these ideas with as wide of an audience as possible to get further discussions started and refining more comprehensive theories in the process. Thank you for you time and effort!

Ahti Ahde

Written by

Ahti Ahde

Passionate writer of fiction and philosophy disrupting the modern mental model of the socio-capitalistic system. Make People Feel Less Worthless.

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