Intersections, Parallels, and Dynamics in Social Media and Real Life

In the past week umair haque wrote about why Twitter’s dying, Brian Fanzo wrote about Blab besting Google Hangouts, and a September piece by Amie Harper about “white fragility” got posted to a Facebook group called “The Regrarians” and got a fair number of people in the permaculture world all het up. The intersection of these events occurs first in the domain of time: not exactly simultaneous in our microsocial experience, but from an historical view they occur essentially simultaneously. The relevance of this intersection is how the interaction of permaculture people in social media illustrates the dynamics being discussed abstractly by Haque and remedied (or at least able to be moderated) by Fanzo’s representation of the potential of Blab.

Haque argues that social media (Twitter in particular) has become a field for abuse where people act out the traumas of modernity. “Technology as a culture is so out of touch with reality [it] doesn’t even understand what business it’s really in: not the code business (what is this, the 1980s?), but the enterprise of social interaction.” Now, this assertion is something about which reasonable people could disagree — such as if one believes technology is value-neutral, then defining it to be for “the business” of social good might be perceived as an overly-limiting or inappropriate moral stance. A more nuanced claim that Haque implies is that social media as a technology is (ought to be) about social interaction more than about coding. Which is where Blab might make a difference.

Fanzo “was hooked on day 1, not necessarily because of the tool but because I could see that the Blab team understood the importance of community and more importantly took an active role in building community the right way.” The boundaries that Blab’s design imposes (only four participants visible and audible at a time) establish conditions that might allow adequate containment for people who want to delve deeper to be able to get there without being overwhelmed by varying expressions of non-understanding, frustration and even anger. Exploring difficult topics could become more transparent and the resulting understandings might spread further, faster.

The thing is, users of Twitter (especially) but also Facebook and (I’ll risk the generalization) other modes of social media (reddit, less so, maybe?) have not pushed the designers to create tools that enhance and promote more sustainable modes of discourse. It isn’t just the canalization that Haque calls the “ists” — “Journalists retweeting journalists…activists retweeting activists…economists retweeting economists,” and the other ways by which “people have self-sorted into cliques, little in-groups, tribes” — it’s that cross-platform linking and cross-pollination are discouraged. Translation is perceived as a time-consuming hassle rather than the precise mechanism by which differences can be explored and mutually-shared understandings co-created.

So…Amie Harper publishes her piece about white fragility. Someone posts it into a Facebook group filled with people who personally know and/or have been inspired by the ‘object’ of her critique, a popular permaculturist, Joel Salatin (@JoelSalatin). The comments come fast and generally furious. It is unclear who actually read her article, and less clear if anyone is familiar with the concept of white fragility. Paul Graham suggests that as “the…web turn[s] writing into a conversation” it is “to be expected” that more people will disagree than agree with each other. When Graham wrote (2008), he explained that the ease of internet communications means

“there’s a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn’t mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it’s not anger that’s driving the increase in disagreement, there’s a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it’s easy to say things you’d never say face to face.”

Seven and a half years later, Haque’s critique that “no one wants to spend their life being shouted at by people they’ll never meet who are angry not at them but at the world for things they barely even said to people they barely even know” might constitute evidence that lacking skills in online disagreement has contributed to an increase in anger being expressed online. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle that exemplifies and illustrates the problems of modernity: the rate of events exceeds human capacities leading to the collapse of adequate/approved social rituals for communicating.

It may seem ironic that the collapse of civil communication is as rife within the permaculture community as elsewhere because the original principles of permaculture include the sociocultural and relational. Admittedly, it is challenging for anyone to be confronted with knowledge about an aspect of their own being of which he, she or ze has previously been unaware. There are not any particularly graceful ways of raising concerns about whiteness (which, for the record, needs to be distinguished from racism, per se). Nonetheless, whiteness is a subtle part of the global problem of planetary survival that permaculturalists are trying to solve.

We view social justice and permaculture as natural and necessary complements. If we can cleave disagreements cleanly, perhaps the two discourses can be grafted together to yield healthy and sustainable relations that depend and take nurture from essential diversity.

peace,

steph

Read Soirée’s take: “I Laughed as Everyone Lost Their Shit”