It seems to me like online discourse is going more and more toward mockery, public shaming (like shame restacking so followers can attack) and so on—anti-rhetorical moves. The result is that in the digital space that keeps expanding, rhetoric is becoming more a thing bypassed.
Combine that with the fact that there’s no physical or social consequence online, and it feels like the only solution is “just don’t engage”… or beat them at their own game and be just as cutting/mocking.
So my question is this: as online discourse becomes more hostile to classical rhetoric, and the only effective method seems to be “play by their rules,” which is sort of a betrayal of the Logos… should we participate at all?
That is, what do you think of a calculated retreat?
Like how St. Benedict saw the world as being so corrupting, a temporary cloistering was needed to preserve what we had.
Maybe there’s something to the idea of a cloistering of Catholics from the world as things accelerate with unpredictable destinations and insane speed.
It is hard to say. As with any decision to speak or not, it always depends on the particularities of the context and the openness of the audience to persuasion.
In general, I think people spend too much time thinking about how to build online community and not enough on their local, embodied community. The funny thing is that if all Catholics collectively decided to stop participating on a given platform, depending on the platform, that might have a serious impact on the company's profitability. In addition to reflecting on how the medium hedges in what we can say and how we can say it, I think we need to recognize as Catholics that this isn't a real public sphere. I'm typing this comment, for example, on a platform that has commercial interests. And those commercial interests may infect all my writing and responses, such that I may avoid controversial topics if it means losing my account, etc.
In an ideal world, the Internet would disappear. Communal gardens and common pastures would spring up. Handwritten letters and books would replace email and blogs. Face to face conversation would constitute the overwhelming majority of our daily interactions.
The idea of the commercial interests infecting everything that we communicate in a platform is a great observation.
It’s something we all probably sense intuitively. And a lot of time when I see people gaining popularity, I worry that they’re going to think of their faith in terms of personal brand.
I’d love the local, communal gardens. I love various online Catholic “communities” as concepts, but in practice they always seem to fall into regular social media engagement styles OR just have low engagement overall.
Watching now! This is awesome
Thanks for watching! Let me know if you have any questions/comments.
It seems to me like online discourse is going more and more toward mockery, public shaming (like shame restacking so followers can attack) and so on—anti-rhetorical moves. The result is that in the digital space that keeps expanding, rhetoric is becoming more a thing bypassed.
Combine that with the fact that there’s no physical or social consequence online, and it feels like the only solution is “just don’t engage”… or beat them at their own game and be just as cutting/mocking.
So my question is this: as online discourse becomes more hostile to classical rhetoric, and the only effective method seems to be “play by their rules,” which is sort of a betrayal of the Logos… should we participate at all?
That is, what do you think of a calculated retreat?
Like how St. Benedict saw the world as being so corrupting, a temporary cloistering was needed to preserve what we had.
Maybe there’s something to the idea of a cloistering of Catholics from the world as things accelerate with unpredictable destinations and insane speed.
It is hard to say. As with any decision to speak or not, it always depends on the particularities of the context and the openness of the audience to persuasion.
In general, I think people spend too much time thinking about how to build online community and not enough on their local, embodied community. The funny thing is that if all Catholics collectively decided to stop participating on a given platform, depending on the platform, that might have a serious impact on the company's profitability. In addition to reflecting on how the medium hedges in what we can say and how we can say it, I think we need to recognize as Catholics that this isn't a real public sphere. I'm typing this comment, for example, on a platform that has commercial interests. And those commercial interests may infect all my writing and responses, such that I may avoid controversial topics if it means losing my account, etc.
In an ideal world, the Internet would disappear. Communal gardens and common pastures would spring up. Handwritten letters and books would replace email and blogs. Face to face conversation would constitute the overwhelming majority of our daily interactions.
Thank you for this.
The idea of the commercial interests infecting everything that we communicate in a platform is a great observation.
It’s something we all probably sense intuitively. And a lot of time when I see people gaining popularity, I worry that they’re going to think of their faith in terms of personal brand.
I’d love the local, communal gardens. I love various online Catholic “communities” as concepts, but in practice they always seem to fall into regular social media engagement styles OR just have low engagement overall.
I wish the internet would shut down eventually.