Twitter is Twaddle
Public discourse needs to be based on substantive pathways of thought, not some means of patching up messes stemming from unstructured blather
With Miroslaw Manicki
Water and words
How do you clean up bad water? With good water. A lot of good water is best for this purpose. Dilution alone can have a good effect.
How do you fix a spillover in a stream or canal or irrigation ditch? Give the water a place to go. Gravity will do the rest.
As with water, so with words. Cleaning up questionable public discourse can be done with many streams of refreshing, grounded, thoughtful, and legitimate public discourses in areas of interest and importance. This can be done at scale; there is nothing artificial about it. In fact, by empowering experts and authorities in the context of their professional lives can serve to revive their efforts and reinvigorate their sponsoring institutions and their professional networks.
We have a theory. The fact is people need water to survive. Barring this, they will bridge the gap with something else. Some replacements will work better than others. Good results will require something that eventually works its way to H2O for use by the body. Without this, the people will suffer as they work to get hydrated even at minimal levels. At the same time, it is important that whatever else was consumed to acquire that water doesn’t do irreparable harm to the body and its processes.
By fotosr52
People also need content. They need information. In our complex, changing world, they need solutions to problems that they cannot resolve themselves. For example, the benefits of specialization and commitment to singular tasks leave people at risk to attain other things that they need and want. Wants themselves deserve attention, but the lack of necessities raises the stakes. When dependable information is not available from any viable source, life challenges cut very close to the bone and people get desperate. They get mean. They say or do things that they would not otherwise say or do.
Drowning out antisocial media
This article is not about Twitter, or its sibling social media frameworks, but about what we should have in terms of public resources for dialog, information, and guidance, what we could have, and we hopefully will have. The question isn’t about what is right or wrong about the social media environments that have grown like wildfires, and as stated by Manuel Castells, have “led and mislead” societies around the world in the last few decades.
So, our future is not to be so much to be gauged by a few tech mavens with questionable qualifications and problematic personalities for the task, but with immense financial resources, but in the unleashing and empowerment of the hords of leaders, experts, authorities, and educators who are dedicated, committed, knowledgeable, and capable of providing direction and guidance. The product of this is best activated by tapping sources of genuine data with regard to nature and society to develop concrete action items that will deliver credible private and public answers on time and in useful forms.
We will make the comparison herein between content in communications and water. Just as we need water from a physiological standpoint and for other reasons, we need the products of communication to persist, to thrive, and even to exist. Without senses, we are doomed and what the senses bring us is what we are considering now.
As to one of water’s critical uses, food, useful parallels can be drawn. My father was a great gardener. He was not alone — many people in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States largely lived out of their gardens. In the process, there were many lessons learned.
In those years, autumn would bring an avalanche of produce into the kitchen, where it was transformed in several ways. In our case, we harvested a good deal of whatever you could imagine that could grow in the mountain valleys of Utah. There were row crops and root crops, fruit trees, vine plants, a lot of corn, a lot of potatoes, even my father’s favorites, the rhubarbs and the radishes. We had apples and peaches and grapes and plums and all of the strawberries and cherries and apricots. There were families of kinds of tomatoes alone.
This involved a good deal of preparatory work. The different kinds of plants needed special care, with some planted close together and others spaced out over an extended distance. The real question was in the delivery of water to the plants. For the most part, this involved the creation of irrigation ditches alongside the rows of plants.
My father’s plan was to not waste a drop of water. Eventually that led from open ditches as displayed to a sophisticated drip system that was so accurate, we no longer needed to weed the garden, as none of the water went to waste and weeds never got a chance in the first place.
In the meantime, there was a lot of hoe work to dig and maintain water ditches among the crops. This was a lot like playing with Chinese handcuffs, because it got harder as you went along if you did the wrong things.
As seen below, water is being applied from a hose, but typically, water comes from surface stores, from reservoirs, large canals, shallow pipes, and networks of ditches leading to the fields and gardens where the water is applied.
That is the story of water.
Concepts leading to cooperation
We now come to the question of content, of information, and how these come to affect people. The question is not so much what can be done with the phenomenon of Twitter, which has proven problematic at best. More to the point, it has done little to encourage useful discourse and much to unravel relations and norms. Other social media platforms have social effects, but they are similarly problematic.
“Rabbit!”
Did I make you look to the side? Of course not, but if you had been walking in the forest, you might. This is much of what Twitter is about — it is a contextless bulletin board. There is little means of sorting out sources and subjects. It is an excellent way to start arguments; it is a very poor environment for arriving at rational, effective solutions. Similarly it works poorly for even defining and evaluating problems themselves. Anyone without attention disorders going in will likely develop them in the resulting chaos.
Do people really have a need to argue with strangers? Is there a valid pent-up need for contextless complaints?
Why did an avenue of acceptance for such a strange idea present itself in the first place? No surprise to observers of contemporary life would be unaware that interpersonal relations have been deteriorating for some time. This has been observed and its implications pointed out by many. Typically, such observations to not go further than perhaps a shrug followed by a stiff libation.
It is important to pursue the problem in ways that can lead to constructive action. To do this, we encourage a view into history to look for constructive actions from past societies. This is promoted by Anthony Wallace as en effective way of improving social conditions. Further, it is important to come to understanding of older societies themselves to gauge which of these are worthy of emulating.
Gordon Childe was one of several historians that indicated that prevailing perceptions of human history are counterproductive. For example, he not only pointed out that European efforts to revive the cultures of Greece and Rome were poorly-executed, but that those cultures were themselves uncivilized when compared to the old cultures of the Middle East, going back thousands of years — written records dating back about 6,000 years at the base of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
About a half million readable tablets have been recovered from the dust tells, or ruins, of the area. There is much duplication among them, a blessing since tablets of the kind are often broken or partially deformed. One major library has been found with tablets in good condition that leads researchers to believe that enough such records have been brought together to be representative of the world of the Sumerians, the people living there from 4,000 BCE to 2,000 BCE.
As found in the documents, that was a time and a place of prosperity, minimal warfare, and advancement. Hierarchical to be sure, the prevalent society in question was structured so as to support cooperation, with many mutual responsibilities and obligations by people and institutions at all levels. Society, for one thing, was organized so as to assure that all of the fundamental needs of the people could be met. There were many kinds of ways — public, private, social, and commercial — by which these were to be met. Such important factors were fundamental to all else.
There were about a dozen city-states in those times — each overseen by a ruler with familial and social ties to one another. There were walls around cities, but no boundaries between them. Much of the land was under cultivation — some overseen by temple and palace organizations, some by private families and associations. Once they have fulfilled public obligations for work commitments, the people could engage in commerce or other activities on their own. Due to extensive trade, there were many kinds of products and materials available made available due to extensive farming and food distribution — much of it in the form of barley, which could be transported and used as a de-facto currency.
These factors were learned by archaeologists. Eventually, that knowledge was absorbed by historians, who could provide perspective. These included Childe, Paul Bairoch, Henri Pirenne, and Fernand Braudel. Their basic conclusion? Don’t look to Greece and Rome. Grecian philosophy was one of many attempts to resurrect the old culture of Sumer. Rome was a dim and violent reflection of Greece’s ill-fated attempt at longstanding peace.
Greece’s model was incomplete, resulting in the ill-fated fights between Athens and Sparta, from which it never recovered. As pointed out by the archeologists and linguists that studied Sumer, that culture provided longstanding examples of governance and peaceful co-existence, which Greece and Rome do not. Even the competitive legal system touted as coming from Justinian Rome points to challenges brought on by a lack of cooperation. Justinian was one of the last emperors, not the first. He documented his program to hold the empire together, not put it together in the first place.
This is symptomatic of the lack of understanding of or support for cooperation in contemporary governance, or in contemporary discourse, for that matter. We need means to bring people together in agreement and mutual enterprise, not break them apart. There is an addition to disputation that is eating away at society at all levels and seriously undermining any prospects for prosperity and peace.
Gardens of goodness
The same people in our times who would reject scientific findings regarding health would scoff at the idea of using an old block cell phone, when slick, powerful, highly functional smartphones are available. Below, we can see one form of these for those who were too young for them or who never came across one.
In their day, these were considered useful and highly advanced. It is likely that few used them sent messages to one another doubting the existence of truths nor questioning the efficacy of science. They knew that they were making use of something advanced and special.
Today’s communications technologies are so advanced as to disappear in the hands and minds of their users, who are open and didactic in their presumptions of relative truths and obstructionist ideas. With no clear idea as to ideals, they are quick to criticize the “other,” which to them conveys automatic scorn.
What would our ideal garden of ideas look like?
As processes can lead us step-by-step to arrive at the truth, lies themselves result from application of processes. I had the dubious opportunity of working in finance for five years near two liars, my partners. Seeing how they operated at close quarters, I witnessed two distinct strategies for lying — one ‘high’ and one ‘low.’
Beginning with the low style, it was brash and brutish and highly manipulative. It had to be, because the liar was out of his league. He really did not know what he was talking about and in the field of venture finance, that is a problem. So, we can see a pattern there of both lying and stealing — theft as it were of the work product of his associates. This meant mostly mine.
The high style was much more subtle and hardly detectable. This was due in large part to the fact that the liar was smart. He did his homework, and he knew what he was talking about. He could describe a complex plan involving science and policy in a five-minute period that brought sustained support for our projects. The problem here was not lying about concepts or facts, but relationships. He was mean. He was determined to do you in.
To do this, he would reel you in. In my case, this was partially achieved through shared Louis L’Amour readings, which had a patina of virtue about them. It worked on me.
In both cases, it was critical to project virtue. It would have been devastating to have been found out. This dichotomy is the key to ultimate success in our garden of virtue. Nobody — even the most egregious of liars — wants to be thought of as lying all of the time. Their lies nonetheless erode everything. As we can thus see, the path of lies leads to the end — destruction and devastation. Eventually this becomes obvious to all; nobody wants to be stuck with that.
Real facts and good acts
Getting serious about the question, there is a helpful model — Ferdinand Tönnies’ model of social structures. This approach to social structure distinguishes between communities (Gemeinschaft in the original German) and societies (Gesellschaft originally). A community in this sense is a kind of ethnic, religious, immersive social engagement that has holistic implications. It incorporates beliefs, longstanding traditions, and most likely kinship. It is unlikely that an individual can have more than one Gemeinschaft commitment, although it is possible in the case of immigrants or cross-cultural marriages.
The following Figure shows the differing relationship of the two under conditions where legitimate processes are prevalent, at the top. This is contrasted with reversed conditions at the bottom, where prerogatives reign, which is to say that lies carry equivalence to possible truths, albeit ones that are not validated by means of accepted processes. This also serves as a political model, as can be seen, the ‘left’ is contrasted with the ‘right’ in typical ‘government vs business’ style.
As you can see, at the top, with the “politics of process,” we can see better outcomes. Nature and science are best supported with facts as supported by ‘Gesellschaft’ societies, while lifestyle choices and societal patterns can be protected by ‘Gemeinschaft’ communities. These are what effective social media technologies and systems should support.
To learn more of nature’s knowledge flows and how to tap into them, please refer to a book we wrote with an international team called “The Big Step Forward.” This covers the question of an overwhelming flow of truth as supported by validated processes matched up with extensive, comprehensive systems to tap into and benefit from viable data sources.
This will result from purposive efforts to build extensive systems in support of the needs of the people. The traditional social media platforms may continue to do their thing, but viable, important, and legitimate facts can be obtained, and credible everlasting acts can thus be performed in this way.