While interviewing the guest editor of Saturday’s Cahier des Arts, Sugar Sammy, I remembered a televised debate in which I took part several years ago about him, facing a talkative sociologist.
In the middle of a six or seven minute debate, it seemed obvious to me that the exercise was useless and that nothing relevant would come out of it, as our points of view were so opposed and irreconcilable. I ended up concluding this dialogue of the deaf with an irrefutable argument: “Well me, Sugar Sammy, he makes me laugh. »
Viewers have seen that the sociologist and I do not share the same sense of humor or the same values. What makes me laugh doesn’t make him laugh. What makes me indignant is not what makes him indignant. We are in every way poles apart.
I recently interviewed, for a dossier on the future of social networks published this Sunday in the Context notebook, Professor Elizabeth Dubois, associated with the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at Harvard University. She was telling me about the migration of Twitter users to more niche platforms since the arrival and the slippages of Elon Musk. I asked her if she was worried about people taking refuge in echo chambers, a danger we are often warned about.
“Long before social networks, there were social groups,” she replied. We exchanged with people who have similar interests to ours and it was completely normal. »
What brings about social change are people coming together and creating communities because they have similar ideas or values. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Elizabeth Dubois, associate at Harvard University’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media
“Except when groups of people limit their access to ideas and information that allow them to understand other perspectives,” she adds.
The most worrying thing, adds the professor from the University of Ottawa’s communications department, would be that these groups completely cut themselves off from the traditional media, where most of the information is still drawn from. A phenomenon that she says she has not noticed “even in the United States, where the polarization is perhaps the greatest”.
How are ideas best expressed in traditional media? In columns, editorials, letters to the reader based on information verified by journalists. Whether they are ideas of left or right, or even “extreme center”, this popular euphemism among the right that does not assume itself. “You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts,” said American sociologist and politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Social debates are not resolved in four three-minute clips calibrated for a televised debate. We often idealize the French-style debate in our country, which is more and more summed up on television sets by the excesses of the culture of clash – as they say in Paris. It distills more disguised insults than constructive exchanges, bluster than food for thought, in the commercial logic of information-show.
Is it better to have a sham debate or a sterile debate than no debate at all? to distort an expression dear to Éric Duhaime. The leader of the Conservative Party of Quebec invited me I don’t know how many times to debate with him when he was a radio host. To hear him repeat things that I fundamentally disagree with?
So that he comes out of it feeling like he’s won a one-on-one rooster debate? No thanks. Life is too short.
“We don’t discuss cooking recipes with cannibals,” said French anthropologist and World War II resistance fighter Jean-Pierre Vernant of the far right.
To find out about the latest whims of the far right in Quebec, I sometimes consult the Twitter account of a well-known actress. The paranoia of digital surveillance rubs shoulders with the conspiracies surrounding the vaccination against COVID-19, the defense of tenors of white supremacy, transphobia, the denial of global warming, the contempt for drag queens, the support for the censorship of artwork by ultra-conservative parents and support for Elon Musk in his crusade against public media. And that’s only in the last month.
If I want to get a fair idea of an opponent’s argument, I just have to listen to it or read it. If I want to respond to his arguments, I take advantage of forums, in the media or social networks, where I can allow myself to get to the bottom of my thoughts, without fear that it will be interrupted by someone’s bad faith. one who does not want to hear anything.
And if I really want to answer a question with someone, the best, in my opinion, is to do it in private, preferably over a beer. Ideas are worth more than the spectacle to which we too often try to reduce them.