The Vortex: Why we are all to blame for the nightmare of online debate. By Oliver Burkeman
The Vortex: the
psychological whirlpool into which I can feel myself getting sucked almost
every time I open Twitter, or Facebook, or any of the websites devoted to
chronicling the mendacity and stupidity of the world – by which I mainly mean
politics – in 2017. This metaphor is slightly self-serving, since it suggests
not a failure of self-discipline on my part but an external force so strong I
could hardly be expected to resist it. Still, that’s how it feels. Once the
waters claim you, you’re no longer really in control.
At the very edge, the
Vortex exerts only a gentle pull, which usually manifests for me as the thought
that catching up with the news might be a relaxing break from writing or household
chores. Or it’s the inner voice arguing that having finally persuaded the baby
to take a nap, I deserve the small pleasure of a few moments on social media.
It’s rarely relaxing or pleasurable in practice. But by the time I remember
that, the current is too strong: I’m already firing off sarcastic one-liners,
vigorously favouriting posts from people intelligent enough to share my
opinions, or else actively searching for updates from commentators whose views,
I know in advance, will render me livid. By this time, my stomach muscles have
tightened and my jaw is clenched, which is the point at which some people erupt
into sweary tirades or vicious personal feuds. But that’s not really me.
Mostly, my ranting continues inwardly, sometimes for hours, so that I can
easily find I’ve spent an entire session at the gym, or a trip to the
supermarket, mentally prosecuting a devastating argument against some idiotic
holder of Bad Opinions who will never have a clue how much I cared.
I realise you don’t
need me to tell you that something has gone badly wrong with how we discuss
controversial topics online. Fake news is rampant; facts don’t seem to change
the minds of those in thrall to falsehood; confirmation bias drives people to
seek out only the information that bolsters their views, while dismissing
whatever challenges them. (In the final three months of the 2016 presidential
election campaign, according to one
analysis by Buzzfeed, the top 20 fake stories were shared more online than
the top 20 real ones: to a terrifying extent, news is now more fake than not.)
Yet, to be honest, I’d always assumed that the problem rested solely on the
shoulders of other, stupider, nastier people. If you’re not the kind of person
who makes death threats, or uses misogynistic slurs, or thinks Hillary
Clinton’s campaign manager ran a child sex ring from a Washington
pizzeria – if you’re a basically decent and undeluded sort, in other
words – it’s easy to assume you’re doing nothing wrong.
But this, I am
reluctantly beginning to understand, is self-flattery. One important feature of
being trapped in the Vortex, it turns out, is the way it looks like
everyone else is trapped in the Vortex, enslaved by their
anger and delusions, obsessed with point-scoring and insult-hurling instead of
with establishing the facts – whereas you’re just speaking truth to power. Yet
in reality, when it comes to the divisive, depressing, energy-sapping nightmare
that is modern online political debate, it’s like the old line about road
congestion: you’re not “stuck in traffic”. You are the traffic.
And by “you”, of
course, I mean me. (And you too, though. Don’t try to wriggle out of this one.) 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. (You can call all this “virtue
signaling” if you must – but please be advised that this simply
identifies you as a member of the right-leaning tribe whose members like to
think of themselves as so hard-headed and rational as to be immune to such
things. In other words, it’s virtue signaling.).. read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/29/vortex-online-political-debate-arguments-trump-brexit