This is becoming something of a trend in my posts (well, one other post on the topic, but whose counting? Oh, you are. Bugger.) My exceptional procrastination efforts have actually started to implode in on themselves, with the ultimate end of time-wasting being replaced by actual constructive, productive and inductive logic/work. And nowhere is this more clear than my Facebook activities.
I am well aware of the irony that emerges from complaining about unnecessary, unproductive and apathetic internet content in a blog. What interests me in this though is the qualitative aspect of debates, opinions and issues on the information superhighway of the interweb. For example, see http://hectorroddan.wordpress.com/2008/05/22/reformation-of-manners/ for a specific instance of this) is the post I make on a Facebook comments page or an online forum/chat room of the same quality as a written letter to someone in authority, a complaint delivered over the phone or a heated face-to-face exchange?
I personally think that internet discussions, almost regardless of topic, when conducted on public message boards or other fora do not neatly fit into any of the traditional categories of information exchange or dispute. For instance, to complain or raise a point of view on any issue on a Facebook page, profile or group requires much less effort than writing a letter to your MP, arranging a public meeting about an issue or setting up a real-life petition. Secondly, I cannot help wondering if there is a narcissistic element to many such posts. It is a case of “here be my views, querrel in thy boots all ye who readeth here” as opposed to stating a point of view to the public in general, or a specific audience.
Of course, many would doubtless argue that the internet has democratised and revolutionised communications, allowing a much wider section of society to present their own world views and engage in the key debates of the day. But I have a serious problem with this since internet communication is by its very accessibility, exceptionally diffuse and vague. It can only feed into official decision making in an off-hand way. Furthermore, the anonymity of the internet – and ’social networking’ sites in particular – seems to strip many debates of the usual decencies and politenesses, often reducing them do a slanging match between equally uninformed parties.
If such communication is routinely pointless, why has it become so popular? My own gut feeling would be that it is a form of communication which shares aspects of the public platform and big spectacle embodied in, for example, the US Presidential election debates which are about to get under way, and the intimacy and privacy of drunkenly setting the world to rights in a pub with your mates.
Thus, there are no entry qualifications to engage in internet debates. Beyond the ubiquitous profile mugshot and whatever information one chooses to disclose via profile pages etc, your views are effectively anonymous. Thus, there is nothing to stop the exaggeration of facts and, beyond the subjectivity of the individual reader, no real means of verifying the truth status of any claims made. More importantly, since there is no real target audience (since the comments page, discussion board or chat is likely to be available to anyone in possession of internet access), what you say has no official standing.
Is this reduction of major issues and debates to a radically intersubjective exchange of personal opinions necessarily negative? There are clearly two sides, but I have a feeling I would err on the side of caution. Firstly, it is ludicrous to suggest that the sort of exchanges which proliferate on the internet are some product of the technical revolution. I would suggest rather that their accessibility has been – to use that much cited word of our time – globalised. Furthermore, this process is not as value neutral as some may suggest. Theoretically, the internet has provided merely a way for distant peoples to exchange views and interact. Yet I would argue this process is value-sloped. The sort of everyday discussion of issues of the day (broadly defined) that was going on in the alehouses of the sixteenth century and in informal and semi-formal social groups ever since human beings have been around simply does not corealate simply with the slanging matches of the information superhighway.
First and foremost, the publication or posting of an opinion on the internet, I would argue, gives it a self-sanctioned quasi-officiality. It is a statement of opinion but in a very different way to one expressed over a pint in the local since it is published and publicly available. This can be seen to objectivise a discourse which in the pre-internet times would have been wholly or mostly private, localised and contained. In short, the act of declaring a statement in an internet post is very different from the lost temporal moment of an utterance in a debate or an official letter raising an issue to an individual or group apparently ‘in the know’ or in power.
Thus, such internet communication occupies an ambiguous position as discourse. This position, I would argue, can have an extremely detrimental effect on the quality of any debate or on perceptions of authority. Since an internet discussion board possesses an ambiguously objective status, it can be seen to be both a public and private expression of opinion. Thus, contributions can be seen to be regulated by the two vastly different modes of behavior appropriate to either public or private discourse. Furthermore, deciding between whether one’s post should be a reasoned, considered, polite and informed contribution to the debate or a sharp gut reaction is made entirely subjectively. Clearly, the equally subjective reader can discern between the two but this is perhaps not yet the heart of the issue.
This ambiguity arguably has larger implications for the power-knowledge nexus (cf. Foucault) of such discourse. If we accept the basic premise that knowledge is subject to power relations and not some a priori to them, it must be agreed that internet debate and discussion can have a radical impact on the perception of power and its exercise. In enabling (to use the most value neutral term) wider access to debate on a given issue, the internet can be seen to impact on the subjective perception of those with power and influence over the issue by the interlocutors engaging in the ambiguous subjective-objective internet debate. This is perhaps a common sense observation (as much Foucaultian thought tends to be, when it is boiled down into non-jargon). Basically, by enabling a quasi-public yet unofficial discourse, the internet devalues the more meaningful and official channels of communication. Such a thing as a Facebook debate allows one to vent steam and/or give one’s reasoned opinion yet the creation of the post is implicitly the end-in-itself. It is an expression of a view, that is all. Thus, such a contribution lacks influence since it bypasses or fails to engage with the prime decision makers with influence over the given issue. Therefore the individual feels they have said their piece – to borrow some imagery from here and there – they feel purged and redeemed by contributing, yet their contribution is inherently meaningless unless the forum they contribute to has some official sanction (for a brilliant examples of such fora, see http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=35134540250&ref=ts, or http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=42309175229&ref=ts).
Furthermore, as I pondered at the start of this article, contribution to non-official, private message boards, I would argue possess an inherently narcissistic element. Furthermore, the fact that anyone can contribute, but that contribution provides no meaningful goal or objective – such as a petition or letter might – the contribution and, implicitly, its content is rendered meaningless. Simply another bit of flotsam and jetsam floating out there in internet land, clogging up our bitrates.(see many topics on the ‘Pluto isn’t a planet anymore’ Facebook group – one of the most bizarre fora for engaging in moral/social/political/religious debates, http://www.facebook.com/board.php?uid=2207893888&f=2&start=30&hash=5392502bdfdf1843250d046fd643fa08).
Of course, the fact I have chosen this forum to express my dissatisfaction and objections, is perhaps a beautiful piece of irony, or blatant hypocrisy. Any suggestions?
All links are, to my knowledge, to public sites. No copyright infringement or offence intended.
