Ian Dunt is the editor of politics.co.uk and the author of the forthcoming book, How to be a Liberal. Below is a transcript of his recording for our Humanism At Home series on ‘Coronavirus, civility, and social media.’
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My name is Ian Dunt, and I’m gonna talk about social media.
It’s an odd one, social media. I mean, it’s sort of given a lot of blame and a lot of praise. I mean, the reality is, technology doesn’t fundamentally change stuff in the human condition. It basically reflects who we are. And a lot of the time it’s pretty ugly, reflection, awful lots of pile-ons and tribal hatred and a desperate attempt constantly to seem as if you can prove your own virtuous disposition over the benefits of the other.
And it’s not ideal that that is the manner that it often comes across given the fact that we’re now mostly quite alone in our homes, desperately hoping for some kind of human contact. In a lot of cases, social media is basically what you’ve got, and however, there is an opportunity in this period for us to use it in a slightly wiser, kinder way.
Now, the word kindness gets bandied around quite a lot at the moment and has been for a few months in terms of how one behaves online. And it’s quite an easy thing to say, quite a difficult thing to actually work through.
Everyone thinks of themselves as kind. And in fact, some of the people who are harshest online would like to tell themselves that they only do so because they they’re so kind about the human race or about the groups they represent.
In social media, the ‘kindness’ is usually in that split second thought just before you press send, when you think, ‘Well, actually, what am I achieving here? What are the feelings of the other person as I do this?’
None of that is to say that we shouldn’t be critical and even aggressively critical when especially when it comes to ideas and when it comes to politics. That’s how our society is based. That’s how progress happens. But it is to say that there is a period now where we more than ever… don’t really know what’s going on in people’s lives. Like, you really don’t know what they’re going through. You don’t know who that worried about in that family or friendship group.
We’re all going around with this sort of low-level anxiety in us. And that’s not always low-level either. It’s a background social anxiety what’s going on in society, we know that it’s all startlingly new and weird and quite disturbing. The empty streets. The cinema is closed down. The pub that you like being closed. All of this looks… it looks like a zombie movie without the zombies. We know. There’s a sort of deep culture, pop culture, brain-level, we recognise it like this is what happens when things get very bad. And we all have that.
We also have a lot of us, especially me as it turns out, who internalise it by basically just presuming you are sick all the time. I mean, if you cough for any reason ‘Well, that’s it. That’s me gone, that’s the end of the road.’
So we’re going through a lot. And in that moment, there is an opportunity to try and actually act on the kindness that we keep on saying that we want to pursue on social media. And that’s obviously Twitter. It’s obviously Facebook, but it’s also true for in places like WhatsApp, places that are more about people you know, rather than sort of strangers who you bicker with.
And it’s all in that one moment, the moment of hesitation you have before you press send, where you just think, ”Have I done this as fairly or as decently as I can? Have I truly considered the fact that it is another human being on the end of this thing?’
And if we do that, I mean, there is a chance that this current period will be marginally less dreadful than it is right now. And when it’s over, we can just go back to being arseholes.