In the essay that opens this conversation, Jeffrey Bilbro wrestles with challenges of our digital ecosystem and its reconfiguration of human relationships and communities. With new media come new forms of association, action, discourse, identity, and relation to the word, and with these dysfunctions, many of these unforeseen.
When considering society and its ills, conservative Christians are often at risk of overstating the role played by ideas and also by morality considerably. Social problems are presumed primarily to be the consequence of non-Christian philosophical commitments or of sinful rebellion.
With this narrow focus on ideas and morality, there has been a curious yet dangerous inattention to the immense power of technique and technology to produce dysfunction, especially when accompanied by a lack of wisdom and humility. While our creation of novel techniques and technologies may be informed by our ideological commitments and moral values, our creations are never the meek and obedient servants of these, but, as their meaning unfolds over time, reveal perverse tendencies for which we may not have been prepared and have not corrected.
Ideas do have a role to play, even though the ideas might often be less determined by distinctive Christian commitments. Western Christians, living in technologically advanced liberal capitalist societies, have often naïvely adopted a bullish modern myth of progress and freedom. Freedom is overly identified with negative freedom, with the freedom from external constraints: science and technology are regarded as great liberators, as is the deregulation and extension of markets, and the amplification and expansion of unrestricted speech. Trusting in the providence of the invisible hand, we are confident that the maximization of such freedom will all conduce to a commonweal.
The Internet promises the weakening or overcoming of external constraints, unshackling discourse, community, and identity from old limits. It removes the obstacle of physical distance and the shackles that tie us to specific locations, making possible near instantaneous exchange with people on the other side of the globe. It rapidly accelerates the once trudging pace of communication. It demolishes many of the barriers of status, office, connection, wealth, and privilege excluding people from certain social discourses, exerting a democratizing effect. It undermines old forms of institutional social control, facilitating the speech of marginalized, excluded, and dissenting persons. For those who overwhelmingly think in terms of negative freedom, all these things will likely be considered largely unalloyed goods.
It is likely that the instincts underlying such convictions themselves implicitly operate in terms of technological governing metaphors. The operations of our society’s systems are to be optimized according to principles of universal rational technique—harder, better, faster, stronger.
For critics of media and technology, however, governing metaphors are more likely to be ecological. A society is an immensely complex yet often fragile ecosystem. The introduction of a new technology or technique is not merely additive, but can effect ecological change, often triggering unexpected yet vast trophic cascades, even to the point of ecological collapse. The caution of such critics is rarely driven by principled opposition to new technologies and techniques, but from the conviction that the potentially extensive ramifications of their introduction call for a great deal more circumspection than typically shown.
Each of the supposed negative freedoms we now enjoy have their threatening flipside. Freedom from isolation has brought a stiflingly dense sociality in which the rapid and reactive movements of mass opinion squeeze out the space, time, silence, and solitude in which reflection and deliberation might once have occurred. The pace of discourse online and the ease of publication has weakened us against our passions. The attenuation of both the power of institutional gatekeepers and of the walls of individual solitude that allowed for the formation of independent opinion, have empowered the far more capricious power of the mob. Release from obscurity has left us increasingly exposed to surveillance, scrutiny, and social judgment. Felling the forests that once sheltered diverse and complex conversational ecosystems has produced a monoculture of discourse, in which local discourses are drowned out by the wild winds of vast ideological conflict that sweep across the now denuded plains of the universalized public square. The humbling of old exclusionary institutional authorities has left us with a rabble of self-proclaimed authorities and a lurch towards conspiracy theorizing.
In the digital world, both solitude and community are sacrificed for something that is not either. Likewise, the private and the public are greatly confused. Once obscure or private interactions are now potentially exposed to the gaze of the masses. Yet the very architecture of social media does not allow for the presence and operation of a true ‘public’.
The immediacy of online discourse has often stripped words of the contexts in which they might be meaningful and wise. Now statements and events increasingly function akin to Rorschach inkblots, to be interpreted in terms of abstract and polarizing ideological ‘narratives’. Narratives, one of the most essential human ‘technologies’ now operate in a radically novel environment, within which they can routinely malfunction. Our vast partisan accounts are designed to reduce the chaos of the world to scrutability and render it as an arena for purposeful action. As social media casts an ever longer shadow over local and quotidian life, narratives that are increasingly vast, universalizing, and even, by consequence, quasi-essentializing, come to eclipse more local, variegated, and grounded narratives, becoming more determinative of our (in)action and commitment.
Mass media serves to render our world a narrated order, filtering, structuring, classifying, and recounting. Oliver O’Donovan writes, ‘What we expect of the media… is to typify our reactions, to impose familiar appearances upon the unheard-of, to ensure a process of routinisation of news.’ He observes that entertainment and advertising serve to connect our own interests to the world of the news. Guy Debord wrote perceptively about this in his 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle, remarking upon the way that what was once directly lived has moved into a vast spectacle, which now mediates social relations.
The ease of self-expression on social media can give us the illusion that we are all meaningful participants in a new global and democratizing Republic of Letters. The thrill of feeling connected and involved on the cutting edge of the affairs of our day can blind us to the fact that, for most of us, in our discussions of the forces shaping politics and society we possess little more capacity to change things than we do in our discussions of the weather. Beyond taking precautionary measures against their inclemency, our energies could be far more effectively and intelligently employed within the modest horizons of local, familial, ecclesial, and communal worlds.
In response to such things, Bilbro helpfully highlights some of the limitations of the commonly proposed responses of fact-checking and diversifying news feeds. His concluding counsel is salutary in many respects. However, I wonder whether the ‘joining’ he advocates is in unwitting danger of losing sight of the ways in which we are always already concretely situated, emphasizing the chosen commitment of the ‘joined’ community to a degree that obscures the unchosen ‘given’ one. The fixation on ‘diversity’ in the contemporary church and society may often be shaped by a questionable desire to synthesize communities more congruent with abstract social ideologies, rather than more firmly rooted in and productive of a concrete neighbourhood. Rather than move into a new neighbourhood or drive to a new church with different people, a better calling might be greatly to ration our use of our cars, to commit ourselves more fully to our present neighbours and neighbourhoods—whether they be ‘diverse’ or not—and to grant ideology much less of a role in mediating our relationships with those around us.
When thinking about responses to social dysfunctions, we can focus upon the ‘organism’ or upon the ‘environment’ (a distinction drawn from Edwin Friedman). In the first case, the emphasis is upon action that an individual can take to avoid or mitigate the dysfunction’s impact upon them. In the second, the emphasis is upon reducing the dysfunctionality of the environment itself. Attempts to reduce the dysfunctions of our online environments can take various forms. Some approaches focus on technological counter-measures, which operate within realms of media saturation (what Willem Vanderburg has called ‘end-of-pipe’ solutions, responses focusing on addressing symptoms rather than root causes). The example of the Bruderhof may perhaps be one more of minimizing the place of the technologies themselves, situating people within the strong relational gravity of a well-ordered environment, within which it is much easier for individuals to maintain a healthy relationship to media and its abstract narratives.
However, if we are to be more effective against the dysfunctions of contemporary media, perhaps we need to devote more attention to reforming or redesigning our media technologies themselves and reconsidering the ways that we inhabit them. A more effective response must involve a thinking through of the technological order, rather than an abandonment of it, extensive abstinence from it, or a reliance upon heroic individual virtue or weak counter-measures to protect us against its dominance and pervasive incursions. While these responses can all be important ways in which we protect ourselves from our media’s damaging effects, we must aspire to a more comprehensive yet realistic transformation of the environment of society.
This, I believe, will require creative reimagining and transformation of our media and our use of it. Indeed, we may be facing increasing pressure to renegotiate our participation in the current online order as the dominant social media platforms, merchants, and payment and funding services increasingly curtail Christian voices and agencies. A movement beyond the current iteration of the Internet may also be influenced by various nations seeking to wrest control back from the dominant American services. Institutionally mediated trust is rapidly failing, as Rachael Botsman and others have noted, and the future will almost certainly involve—and require—an extensive reinvention of our trust networks, with distributed trust increasingly dominant. As an effect of this, we should not be surprised to witness the rise of very different sorts of online networks, something people are already trying to imagine and create. As Christians mindful of and concerned with the quality of our discourse, we should be creatively and attentively involved in this process.
In the essay that opens this conversation, Jeffrey Bilbro wrestles with challenges of our digital ecosystem and its reconfiguration of human relationships and communities. With new media come new forms of association, action, discourse, identity, and relation to the word, and with these dysfunctions, many of these unforeseen.
When considering society and its ills, conservative Christians are often at risk of overstating the role played by ideas and also by morality considerably. Social problems are presumed primarily to be the consequence of non-Christian philosophical commitments or of sinful rebellion.
With this narrow focus on ideas and morality, there has been a curious yet dangerous inattention to the immense power of technique and technology to produce dysfunction, especially when accompanied by a lack of wisdom and humility. While our creation of novel techniques and technologies may be informed by our ideological commitments and moral values, our creations are never the meek and obedient servants of these, but, as their meaning unfolds over time, reveal perverse tendencies for which we may not have been prepared and have not corrected.
Ideas do have a role to play, even though the ideas might often be less determined by distinctive Christian commitments. Western Christians, living in technologically advanced liberal capitalist societies, have often naïvely adopted a bullish modern myth of progress and freedom. Freedom is overly identified with negative freedom, with the freedom from external constraints: science and technology are regarded as great liberators, as is the deregulation and extension of markets, and the amplification and expansion of unrestricted speech. Trusting in the providence of the invisible hand, we are confident that the maximization of such freedom will all conduce to a commonweal.
The Internet promises the weakening or overcoming of external constraints, unshackling discourse, community, and identity from old limits. It removes the obstacle of physical distance and the shackles that tie us to specific locations, making possible near instantaneous exchange with people on the other side of the globe. It rapidly accelerates the once trudging pace of communication. It demolishes many of the barriers of status, office, connection, wealth, and privilege excluding people from certain social discourses, exerting a democratizing effect. It undermines old forms of institutional social control, facilitating the speech of marginalized, excluded, and dissenting persons. For those who overwhelmingly think in terms of negative freedom, all these things will likely be considered largely unalloyed goods.
It is likely that the instincts underlying such convictions themselves implicitly operate in terms of technological governing metaphors. The operations of our society’s systems are to be optimized according to principles of universal rational technique—harder, better, faster, stronger.
For critics of media and technology, however, governing metaphors are more likely to be ecological. A society is an immensely complex yet often fragile ecosystem. The introduction of a new technology or technique is not merely additive, but can effect ecological change, often triggering unexpected yet vast trophic cascades, even to the point of ecological collapse. The caution of such critics is rarely driven by principled opposition to new technologies and techniques, but from the conviction that the potentially extensive ramifications of their introduction call for a great deal more circumspection than typically shown.
Each of the supposed negative freedoms we now enjoy have their threatening flipside. Freedom from isolation has brought a stiflingly dense sociality in which the rapid and reactive movements of mass opinion squeeze out the space, time, silence, and solitude in which reflection and deliberation might once have occurred. The pace of discourse online and the ease of publication has weakened us against our passions. The attenuation of both the power of institutional gatekeepers and of the walls of individual solitude that allowed for the formation of independent opinion, have empowered the far more capricious power of the mob. Release from obscurity has left us increasingly exposed to surveillance, scrutiny, and social judgment. Felling the forests that once sheltered diverse and complex conversational ecosystems has produced a monoculture of discourse, in which local discourses are drowned out by the wild winds of vast ideological conflict that sweep across the now denuded plains of the universalized public square. The humbling of old exclusionary institutional authorities has left us with a rabble of self-proclaimed authorities and a lurch towards conspiracy theorizing.
In the digital world, both solitude and community are sacrificed for something that is not either. Likewise, the private and the public are greatly confused. Once obscure or private interactions are now potentially exposed to the gaze of the masses. Yet the very architecture of social media does not allow for the presence and operation of a true ‘public’.
The immediacy of online discourse has often stripped words of the contexts in which they might be meaningful and wise. Now statements and events increasingly function akin to Rorschach inkblots, to be interpreted in terms of abstract and polarizing ideological ‘narratives’. Narratives, one of the most essential human ‘technologies’ now operate in a radically novel environment, within which they can routinely malfunction. Our vast partisan accounts are designed to reduce the chaos of the world to scrutability and render it as an arena for purposeful action. As social media casts an ever longer shadow over local and quotidian life, narratives that are increasingly vast, universalizing, and even, by consequence, quasi-essentializing, come to eclipse more local, variegated, and grounded narratives, becoming more determinative of our (in)action and commitment.
Mass media serves to render our world a narrated order, filtering, structuring, classifying, and recounting. Oliver O’Donovan writes, ‘What we expect of the media… is to typify our reactions, to impose familiar appearances upon the unheard-of, to ensure a process of routinisation of news.’ He observes that entertainment and advertising serve to connect our own interests to the world of the news. Guy Debord wrote perceptively about this in his 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle, remarking upon the way that what was once directly lived has moved into a vast spectacle, which now mediates social relations.
The ease of self-expression on social media can give us the illusion that we are all meaningful participants in a new global and democratizing Republic of Letters. The thrill of feeling connected and involved on the cutting edge of the affairs of our day can blind us to the fact that, for most of us, in our discussions of the forces shaping politics and society we possess little more capacity to change things than we do in our discussions of the weather. Beyond taking precautionary measures against their inclemency, our energies could be far more effectively and intelligently employed within the modest horizons of local, familial, ecclesial, and communal worlds.
In response to such things, Bilbro helpfully highlights some of the limitations of the commonly proposed responses of fact-checking and diversifying news feeds. His concluding counsel is salutary in many respects. However, I wonder whether the ‘joining’ he advocates is in unwitting danger of losing sight of the ways in which we are always already concretely situated, emphasizing the chosen commitment of the ‘joined’ community to a degree that obscures the unchosen ‘given’ one. The fixation on ‘diversity’ in the contemporary church and society may often be shaped by a questionable desire to synthesize communities more congruent with abstract social ideologies, rather than more firmly rooted in and productive of a concrete neighbourhood. Rather than move into a new neighbourhood or drive to a new church with different people, a better calling might be greatly to ration our use of our cars, to commit ourselves more fully to our present neighbours and neighbourhoods—whether they be ‘diverse’ or not—and to grant ideology much less of a role in mediating our relationships with those around us.
When thinking about responses to social dysfunctions, we can focus upon the ‘organism’ or upon the ‘environment’ (a distinction drawn from Edwin Friedman). In the first case, the emphasis is upon action that an individual can take to avoid or mitigate the dysfunction’s impact upon them. In the second, the emphasis is upon reducing the dysfunctionality of the environment itself. Attempts to reduce the dysfunctions of our online environments can take various forms. Some approaches focus on technological counter-measures, which operate within realms of media saturation (what Willem Vanderburg has called ‘end-of-pipe’ solutions, responses focusing on addressing symptoms rather than root causes). The example of the Bruderhof may perhaps be one more of minimizing the place of the technologies themselves, situating people within the strong relational gravity of a well-ordered environment, within which it is much easier for individuals to maintain a healthy relationship to media and its abstract narratives.
However, if we are to be more effective against the dysfunctions of contemporary media, perhaps we need to devote more attention to reforming or redesigning our media technologies themselves and reconsidering the ways that we inhabit them. A more effective response must involve a thinking through of the technological order, rather than an abandonment of it, extensive abstinence from it, or a reliance upon heroic individual virtue or weak counter-measures to protect us against its dominance and pervasive incursions. While these responses can all be important ways in which we protect ourselves from our media’s damaging effects, we must aspire to a more comprehensive yet realistic transformation of the environment of society.
This, I believe, will require creative reimagining and transformation of our media and our use of it. Indeed, we may be facing increasing pressure to renegotiate our participation in the current online order as the dominant social media platforms, merchants, and payment and funding services increasingly curtail Christian voices and agencies. A movement beyond the current iteration of the Internet may also be influenced by various nations seeking to wrest control back from the dominant American services. Institutionally mediated trust is rapidly failing, as Rachael Botsman and others have noted, and the future will almost certainly involve—and require—an extensive reinvention of our trust networks, with distributed trust increasingly dominant. As an effect of this, we should not be surprised to witness the rise of very different sorts of online networks, something people are already trying to imagine and create. As Christians mindful of and concerned with the quality of our discourse, we should be creatively and attentively involved in this process.
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