The Intertwingling of American Lives

We didn’t always consume news this way, and why that matters for democracy

If you’re like most Americans, you feel like the world is going to hell in a handbasket: Axe-wielding fanatics on trains. Murderous truck drivers. One tiny-teste’d Oompa Loompa on HGH, name of Donald, threatening democracy.

It’s all right there, in your Facebook news feed! And that is what’s so disturbing: the latest outrage from that flacid-faced, lightly-carbonated Orangina of a GOP candidate scrolls into view right alongside news about Pokemon Go, cat GIFs, and your friends’ baby photos. Not only is the news weird, the news is juxtaposed weirdly.

It wasn’t always thus. Forty years ago, the news came twice a day. Once with the morning newspaper over Cheerios, and once with the evening news before Pat and Vanna. Your world was your world: front porch to pool, bedroom to ball game. The news was a troublesome visitor, but it always arrived with a firm serif’d font or a steady, stentorian tone. And it could always be turned off. This isn’t nostalgia. This is just the way it used to be.

Then, in 1980, billboard magnate and mustache fashionista Ted Turner launched CNN. Suddenly the news became part of your day-to-day, twenty-four out of twenty-four. You didn’t have to watch it, but it was there: The Challenger Disaster, Baby Jessica, the first Gulf War — an Upside Down of demogorgons that was only a channel change away.[2]

Now, there’s a tendency to look back at these times as simpler. But maybe we should really be looking at them as false. As in, the way we traditionally consumed the news did not reflect the way that news was actually happening.

To use an Arvid Engen-level analogy, we were putting news reports in hierarchical folders — safely nested away, ready to consume when we clicked — when we should have been giving them tags. But news isn’t a thing that is imposed, top down, like a structure of nested folders, on people. News happens bottom up by people. The organizing principle of news isn’t a time slot. The organizing principle of news is you.

And that’s where Facebook comes in. Like most big things, Facebook was dismissed as a toy when it launched. Pokes. Relationship statuses. Party pics. And that conception was loosely true until last year, which is when a majority of Americans began getting their news from the platform. Two hundred and twenty-two million daily active users. And growing.

Grok what that means — news is no longer something you read in the morning, or see at night, or that mom puts on the TV when she’s vacuuming the rug. Facebook deeply intertwingles news with the rest of your life. In other words, you don’t get to choose when you see the news. And the vector of that news — your actual, real-life friends — has become personal: Trump alongside Pokemon, Putin alongside pics of your niece swimming. “In an important sense there are no “subjects” at all,” wrote Ted Nelson, defining the intertwingularity. “There is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.”

That’s a big change. That’s a huge change. More stuff is happening. We hear about that stuff more frequently. We hear about that stuff when we’re looking for the exact opposite of that stuff. The people who tell us about that stuff are our friends. And it’s all connected. So news is no longer an appointment. Facebook is no longer a toy. News is now your life. Facebook has become America’s largest public agora.

So, this may all sound mouth-breathingly obvious. But I submit that the meaning of this fact hasn’t sunk in. Very few us belong to the Lion’s Club. Very few of us serve on our church vestry. Very few of us belong to 4H, or a bowling league. But very many of us are on Facebook. This is our primary experience of America.

And here’s where the post takes a turn for the politically pedantic: if you agree with those premises, then it follows that we have to stop treating Facebook like a time-sucking guilty pleasure — “ugh, I wish everybody would just stop posting about politics!”—and start treating it like what it is: a conversation with other citizens about our future.

Of course, that sounds like a rhetorical bridge too far. Our experience of talking politics or civics on Facebook is argument, followed by caps lock, followed by Godwin’s Law. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We need to stop thinking that our job is to convince our friends that they are wrong, and instead convince our friends that we are listening.

The point of debate is not to change someone’s mind. The point of debate is to try and understand someone’s mind, and for that person to understand that you care enough about their opinion to try. Which is exactly what game theorist Anatol Rapaport intended when he provided guidelines on how to be charitable when criticizing a friend’s views:

1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”

2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3. You should mention anything that you have learned from your target.

4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

The news has changed. America has changed. But America is nothing if not a conversation. The next time you’re on Facebook, have the conversation.