Faced with liberated speech that has become unleashed on social networks, two French intellectuals alert us to the risks of speaking out without limits or safeguards. As our behavior on digital platforms moves further and further away from a so-called “normal” course of action, how can we manage to contain our excesses? Proposals to once again take responsibility for our public speech.
By allowing insults, insinuations and threats to proliferate in the media and on all social platforms, we risk one day seeing the “inhuman” triumph. “Remember that speaking can make you live or die, can build or destroy. This is why nothing you say, write and repeat is without consequences,” argue Monique Atlan and Roger-Pol Droit. What if the time had come to rediscover the proper use of speech?
Admire me…
“I would like to be admired and followed for what is behind the image, but, if I am honest, I must admit that I only admire and follow images” , write the two intellectuals. Like a magnifying mirror, social networks reveal this human, all-too-human ambiguity: we play the game of showing ourselves, reluctantly, and we criticize those who dare to reveal themselves completely, without modesty. The result is a generalized depreciation of the attitude that has become the norm and a tendency to devastating, or dangerously vengeful, blame…
Double sided
While speech proliferates at the same time as likes, “almost no one speaks, in their own name, to anyone else anymore, and almost no one listens anymore,” observe the authors. And this language continues to to wither, to deteriorate, to be damaged. Because if quantity explodes, quality implodes. Of course, it happens that speech comes out of silence, for the better, as when it denounces abusive domination and hidden violence or when it names silent terrors.
But this double-sided speech demonstrates what is most insidious when it spreads hatred, when it mistakes lies for truth, when it uses the public forum or the media to take justice into its own hands. What to do then?
The crisis of speech reveals a crisis of limits. There is therefore an urgent need to find lost limits. “These limits are neither walls nor shackles. On the contrary, against irresponsible, disempowered speech, without identifiable author, without control of any kind, we plead for a rethinking of the boundaries where all speech is inscribed if it wants to remain human,” say the authors.
The weight of words
“How can we conceive the conditions – practical, technical, legal, ethical, social, political – of speech that is both free and regulated? », they ask. Channeling the flow of words without confining it is possible. The authors suggest several actions that should absolutely be considered: restoring the meaning of speech at school; evict hateful content from social networks; give a right of reply; supervise, through ethical reflection, the speech of conversational agents. On a more personal level, “it is up to each person to weigh what they say, what they repeat, transmit or attack.” After all, speaking or remaining silent is never without importance, without repercussions, without consequences.
*This article is published thanks to a partnership with the magazine Management HEC Montrealwhere it first appeared.
When words destroy
Observatory Editions
307 pages