Methods of communication have huge social effects.
Before the written word people lived tribally. All communication was word-of-mouth, and social order was personal, local, and traditional. Religion was myth, custom, and folklore. Among the Old Testament patriarchs, it was family memory.
The development of writing made possible the state and organized religion, and ultimately extensive, elaborate, and law-governed entities that last for centuries, like the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church.
The printing press was another great leap forward. By promoting standardization and fast and cheap communication it led to the modern world, with its modern science, nationalism, and comprehensive bureaucratic administration. It also led to the Protestant and Catholic reformations.
Communication by wire and then the airwaves—telegraph, telephone, radio, film, TV—shrank social as well as physical distance. So it gave us mass democracy and pop culture. It also gave us Hitler and Stalin. Such men could never have done what they did without radio, film, and loudspeakers to propagandize the masses, and the telephone to make possible instant personal supervision and control of everyone everywhere.
In the Church, twentieth century communications empowered both ultramontanism and cafeteria Catholicism. They made the Pope a celebrity whose every word was spread around the world, while flooding the lives of Catholics with secular influences.
The Internet has continued and radicalized many of the same tendencies. By making everyone everywhere immediately present to everyone else it has abolished space and privacy. The vastly reduced cost of producing, gathering, arranging, and propagating text, audio, image, and video has multiplied the possibilities of popular participation, of teaching and learning, and of manipulation and propaganda.
Many of the effects have been bad. There is more information and less trust, more confusion and more fanaticism, more opportunism, less principle, and fewer common loyalties. The result is growing division and enmity as inconvenient truths get out, polite lies disintegrate, and impolite fables multiply and spread. Everyone feels besieged, opponents no longer recognize each other’s legitimacy, and people in Church and State worry that the end of the world is coming, whether through climate change, globalists, Nazis, or general apostasy.
But why do things seem to be turning out badly in so many ways, and what can be done about it?
The world operates through action and reaction. We expect greater power to help us attain our goals, and it often does, but it also liberates other people—including tyrants. Tyrants have more power, and they’re unscrupulous, so why wouldn’t they win in case of conflict?
When cheap instant communications promise to liberate popular discussion, organization, and action, you can expect some people to make use of them for deceit, distortion, and control. That happens in a variety of ways, some intentional and some automatic.
Better communications were expected to mean more and better knowledge. They can be used for that, but they have also meant a growing divide between personal experience and what we think we know. That makes knowledge fragile, and it is one reason for the “post-truth” society we hear about.
We now get information, advice, and models for living from far away, and we’re swamped in sounds and images supporting them. Tradition and local knowledge disappear in favor of what might be reliable reporting and expertise or might be be spin, propaganda, pretentious humbug, and outright lies. Under such conditions we can inform ourselves, if we are careful and lucky, but we can also lose ourselves in deceit and fantasy.
Those who know what they want and have money, social position, and the services of talented people have the advantage in such situations, so how they present things is likely to end up accepted as reality. Under such circumstances, how much can we trust what we are told? Should we take talking heads and images on screens more seriously than folk wisdom, classic texts, and the life experience of ordinary people?
Tweets were going to get the facts out, so fraud and abuse would be exposed. Instead they make facts vanish into white noise and spin, so fraud and abuse become what the powerful and well-placed say they are. Google was going to mean informed citizens. Instead it means a citizenry that mostly finds out what Google wants them to find out.
Social media ought to help people renew social connections and develop communities of common interest. To some extent they do, especially among those whose habits and connections were formed before the Internet. But they end by suppressing community and social connections by making them superficial and transient. It’s easy to connect to others, but even more easy to break off.
That has a cumulative effect that spreads to all human relations. “Cancel culture” and “ghosting” are real, and have become so much part of life that Internet advice columnists routinely tell readers to cut family members out of their lives for violating some point of expected opinion or protocol.
Weak human connections mean more reliance on formal ones. It seems, then, that Facebook and Twitter, which were going to empower communities, likely end by empowering bureaucrats and billionaires.
Social media also serve as tools of domination in a far more direct way. When the formal operations of the law don’t serve dominant opinion as much as its supporters would like, social media mobbing can provide what’s missing. Sometimes online mobs are supplemented by real-world ones that the law may be unable or unwilling to control, because the law is also subject to the reign of dominant opinion.
And then, of course, there is the emerging threat of the Internet of Things. From Alexa to surveillance cameras, it was going to enable us to control our physical environment by warning us of risks and making everything around us subject to our commands. Instead, it means that Amazon and others can know everything about us. With such knowledge available, and given other trends, can a social credit system like that developing in China be far behind?
All these trends reflect a basic weakness of technology, which is that it multiplies power without regard to ultimate purpose. If there is nothing to supply the lack the future will belong to the powerful and cunning rather than the good. But what to do?
The developments we’ve been discussing are part of the process whereby universal formal organizations like global markets and transnational bureaucracies are gaining influence at the expense of more local, traditional, and value-laden institutions like family, religion, local community, and particular culture. That process leads to an utterly inhuman society, but the support it gains from advances in communications technology makes it daunting to fight. Worse, governments, big corporations, and major non-profits have lined up behind it. Why not, when it seems to open the way for them to run everything?
The only large institution that provides a grounded and independent perspective from which such tendencies can be seen whole and resisted is the Church. But she has become less inclined to do so as she has become more this-worldly. So even from a secular standpoint, the future of humanity depends on her ability to return to herself and abandon her subordination to modern secular trends. To that end we need a Church that speaks her own language, accepts her own traditions, and returns to her own sources. May her pastors and members take that need to heart, and find ways to respond to it in the Internet age.
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