Communication and Feedback

Much of the prevailing discourse about free speech has been implicitly solipsistic. There is an assumption that the most important thing is the ‘right’ of the talker, as if communications were always somehow one way and disconnected from listeners. 

Social media encourages this of course, because of the sheer ease of public speech and because within that environment we all speak to an auditorium that is at least partially swathed in shadow.

One way I approach this issue today is to recall how I learned to write my essays at Girton. From the moment I put pen to paper I had a mental image of my reader, singular, not an amorphous group of individuals with different biases, but one person with whom I had had regular face to face interactions, an individual who was by definition a lot more informed on the basic material than I was, and a lot more intelligent to boot. Writing for such a person is a genuine discipline.

For me the scariest thing about platforms like Twitter is to see this discipline turned completely on its head. Elite academic minds, well-informed and skillful with words, using the medium to communicate with the relatively ignorant, deliberately and with considerable guile. This version of ‘free’ speech involves carving up issues so that there is a notable slant, sometimes well camouflaged, but the overall effect is warped, propagandistic.

One of the most critical comments ever delivered by one of the readers of my essays was that I possessed a style which might convince anyone I knew more than I really did. But I took this as a sort of semi-compliment, as this was one of those skills one was driven to cultivate on the side, given the basic circumstances of the weekly supervision.

But if I had constructed my essays the way supposedly acute, reasonable and knowledgeable people now communicate into their chosen echo chambers, I’d surely have been on the end of some serious ear-bashings.

So, rather than concerning ourselves uniquely with the freedom of expression, we should surely also be simultaneously considering the proportion of public speech which is ‘talking down’ (or indeed screeching all around), the sophisticated getting off on positive feedback from the unsophisticated, and whether there are any trends therein worthy of our anxiety.