Online debate

March 2024 Forums General discussion Online debate

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  • #85905
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Why are we on this forum – or on any other discussion forum?

    Are we hoping to refine our ideas, pick up points we had not considered before?

    Are we hoping to “convert” people to our way of seeing the world?

    The author of a recent Guardian article called “The Vortex – Why we are all to blame for the nightmare of online debate” has considered the reason behind his, and other people’s, participation in online debate.

    I think it’s an interesting article, and a lot of it rings true.  Although I tell myself I make contributions in order to refine my ideas – I’m not so sure online debate has shaped my opinions all that much.  Granted, you sometimes get recommended books and articles which may be of interest.

    It is also a sad fact that hidden behind a keyboard people feel emboldened to say things they would never say to a person face to face.

    Perhaps the real reason I’m debating is the chance to “feel the warm sense of bonding that arises from endorsing a fellow group member’s opinions, or best of all from having our own opinions endorsed..”

    Read the article and see what you think.

    Quote:
    The most basic characteristic of the Vortex is a fundamental disingenuousness about what it is we’re doing when we visit social media forums to engage in political debate – a disingenuousness no less evident in the output of many professional pundits and columnists. We may

    tell ourselves we’re there to inform people, or to get informed, or to try to persuade those who disagree with us. Much of the time, though, our real motives emerge from the phenomenon psychologists call “in-group bias”. We want to telegraph our good standing as members of certain groups to other members of those groups: the anti-Trump resistance, say, or people who think Brexit is lunacy, or opponents of homophobia, and so on. We want to feel the warm sense of bonding that arises from endorsing a fellow group member’s opinions, or best of all from having our own opinions endorsed, through “likes” or other positive feedback. If the world is going to hell in a handcart, we at least want to feel we’re travelling in a big group of friends. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we want to make those who don’t belong to our portfolio of in-groups feel bad: to shame them, or just to wind them up.

    Quote:
    Frankly, it’s unnerving to examine too closely the kind of people we become in the Vortex. For one thing, there’s the embarrassing tendency to end up angrier at people closer to you on the political spectrum than those much further away, perhaps because an in-group’s integrity depends on closely policing its boundaries.

    Rather than disengaging from social media, the author suggests the following:

    Quote:
    The more challenging alternative is to cultivate the ability to scrutinize your motivations in real time. To identify the surge of glee at the prospect of sticking it to your enemies as it arises; to notice when the real motivation behind a tweet is that you’re bored, or feeling slightly lonely, or because you’re desperate to focus on something other than work.

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/29/vortex-online-political-debate-arguments-trump-brexit

    #130832
    Anonymous
    Inactive
    meel2 wrote:
    Why are we on this forum – or on any other discussion forum?Are we hoping to refine our ideas, pick up points we had not considered before?Are we hoping to “convert” people to our way of seeing the world?

    Maybe you'll get a response to your questions from some of those who visit the forum considering it is the most viewed page of the website (averaging 250 views per day) with average time spent per view of 2 minutes 24 seconds.

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