Closed Minds?

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist whose The Righteous Mind I both thoroughly enjoyed - and learned from a few years ago. This is a rarer combination than you might imagine! All too often I am left wondering what additional value a particular reading actually gave me. This morning’s post brought me a fascinating video from Haidt about the role social media is playing in the polarisation of societies – particularly Anglo-Saxon.

And demonstrated the additional value which such visual presentations offer – with good visual summaries of the differences between the Open and Closed Mindset – or what Haidt calls “Discover versus Defend”. And I’m indebted to The Atlantic journal for Haidt’s article earlier this year on “After Babel” which is as balanced a piece as you can expect these days about the different phases social media have been through in the past few decades – initially optimistic but now deeply pessimistic.

Facebook hoped “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected.

I do understand that a huge industry has arisen around the social, psychological and political effects of social media – but Haidt’s short video and article are a very helpful summary

Coincidentally the current edition of the New Statesman has just published this great essay by Jeremy Cliffe which suggests that the traditional coffee house could contain a model for a transformed social media (probable paywall)

Jürgen Habermas in his 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which defined the öffentlichkeit (the public sphere) as “society engaged in critical public debate”. He argued that the history of the public sphere in the West is deeply rooted in one particular tradition: that of the European coffeehouse. The coffeehouse of old was also a space for news, discussion and encounter. It was in many ways the original social network. And its history points a way forward for a global social media industry now at a crossroads.

Debates rage over the role of social media networks, just as they once did over that of the coffeehouse. They stand accused of stoking precisely the same social ills. Consider “The Character of Coffee and Coffeehouses”, written by an Anabaptist bookseller, John Starkey, in London in 1661. His pamphlet can be read today as both an account of its time and as an uncannily apt commentary on Twitter and the like today.

Starkey complained of “diverse monstrous opinions and absurdities” and “strange and wild conceits” in a setting where there were “neither moderators, nor rules” and where “infinite are the contests, irreconcilable the differences”. Even high-brow participants were cheapened by association with this new institution, he wrote: “The divinest truths, become as common… as stones.” And yet, many coffeehouse regulars of the time responded forcefully to these complaints – just as social media users today are willing to credit their chosen platforms with the democratisation of wits, exchange, information and debate.