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Viewpoint with Andrew Brown: How the internet smashed the old boundaries

17 January 2025

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THIS week’s column is about the online media that have largely replaced the press, and even TV, as the means through which people understand their societies. It is largely inspired by Henry Farrell, a political scientist who has a really disturbing and, I think, profound insight into the damage that Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) are doing to our democracies at his Substack, Programmable Mutter.

The problem, according to Farrell, is not what people believe — that is the problem of individual misinformation — but what they feel they are allowed to believe; and that is a collective problem. Because we are social animals, we are aware of the coalitions that magnetise us, and we react to them all the time, even if largely unconsciously. This is the way in which we pick up accents, idioms, and the knowledge of what is not done. It is, if you like, an emergent property of social groups. Every group has its boundaries, whether it’s as small as a family or as large as a language; that’s what makes them coherent and distinct.

Ever since the invention of writing, technology has tended to break the boundaries of these cells. It exposes us to people who feel like social partners but whom, in physical life, we will never meet or interact with. This is obviously true of the authors whose books really move us.

But the internet smashed all the old walls. This was one of the first things that anyone noticed who went online as early as the 1980s, in discussion groups on Usenet or on systems such as the Well. What looked like the abolition of physical distance was really the abolition of social distance.

At first, this smashing of boundaries felt like a complete liberation. Everyone could be like Kingsley Amis writing to his friend Philip Larkin when he said that that talking to him was wonderful, because, in their letters and conversations, there was nothing so shameful that it could not be said. What a vast improvement over the constraints of normal social life!

But, very soon after the discovery that you could say anything online, we learned that it is just as true that you shouldn’t: that shame is a necessary part of social intercourse, and that the shameless must learn by being publicly shamed. But who are the public that this process requires? Is anything sacred to everyone? Go ask Salman Rushdie.

So, the online world naturally reformed itself into a froth of bubbles, or a network of cells, where everyone was, to some extent, shielded from all the dangerous and horrible blasphemers outside.

To call them “bubbles” is itself misleading, because it suggests that contact with some hard point of fact will burst them, and we know that it won’t. They are much more like cells, with walls that actively resist intrusion and some capacity to move away from hostile environments. Within these cells, it is not just permitted but compulsory to believe certain things, or to suppose that you believe them.

Dr Farrell’s interest is in the effect of this technological change on democracy. If democracy requires that governments be responsive to the will of the people, how, he asks, are we supposed to discover what the people actually want and believe? Voting is one way, as are opinion polls; and so, now, is online opinion.

But, he says, “all these systems are not just passive measures of public opinion but active forces that rework it”. Different voting systems will produce very different accounts of what the voters want; and the unreliability of polls is notorious, partly because the answers that you get are so dependent on the questions that you ask. When it comes to social media, “what we observe is filtered through social media, our understandings of the coalitions we belong to, and the coalitions we oppose, what we have in common, and what we disagree on, shift too. . . People’s sense of the contours of politics — what is legitimate and what is out of bounds; what others think and are likely to do and how they ought to respond — is visibly changing around us.”

I wonder whether there is not a recent example from church politics in the way in which the opinions of online survivors’ groups shaped almost all the coverage of the Makin review and the subsequent meltdown of the Church of England.

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