About the necessity to meet in person.

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT

This reflection begins with a conversation between colleagues during a business trip in Asia, conducted without devices or interruption, which the author describes as a microcosm of eye contact, gesture and laughter. From that experience he examines the mode of communication that has become ordinary, in which speed is assumed, sharing is expected, and value is measured by approval, and argues that people were not made for it. He points to children addicted to internet consumption and to undergraduates suffering burnout and depression as indications. A second argument concerns who benefits: large companies profit from the lifetime and content users supply without payment, while governments attend more to their own financial returns than to the protection of their citizens. The author records that a colleague named this structural violence, and concludes that meeting people physically remains the most effective way of having a supporting impact on their lives.

KEYWORDS

Communication, social media, structural violence, personal contact, social competence, digital addiction, attention, media economy, responsibility, education, isolation, community

INTRODUCTION

Dear reader, please understand this short article as a critical reflection on our current situation, a situation that few of us may understand in full, and who are prepared to act accurately.

MAIN CORPUS

A meeting without screens

While being on a business trip in Asia, I had the fortunate possibility to meet and to sit down with two colleagues of mine. It was one of these moments beyond social media, phone conferences, short and voice messages. We got lost in time and created our own micro cosmos of eye contact and gestures, exchange thoughts and lots of laughter. What was going on? What was different from our widely accepted mode of communication? It was about us, being a group of like-minded persons having common and dissimilar points of view, and enjoying a creative and constructive discussion.

The communication we are offered

Media intents to make us believe that nowadays communication should be fast, via satellites and glass-fiber cables. More likely, that each information should be shared in order to be social, and should be noted and marked with a like as soon as it appears. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my strong belief that mankind was not made for this type of communication. The increasing number of addicted children to internet consumption is as dramatic as more and more bachelor students suffering burnouts and disillusion or even depressions at a very young age.

Who takes the benefit

I ask you to make up your mind and to take a step back in order to observe from another angle what is happening in our lives. Being end-users of media, huge companies make immense profits with the lifetime and the content that we offer them for free. Fear of missing information and data is raised in our unconsciousness and we are forced to constantly buy the latest mobile devices because of software updates, new applications, or predetermined breaking points of hardware.

Is this the life that we are looking for? Obviously, we are spending more time enriching others than we invest in our personal or professional development. If we are able to reject this information terrorism that is accepted and supported by our governments, only then we will be able to get control of our lives again and master our destiny. Too sad indeed, that it is a government that concentrates more on the financial turnover of their states, than on protecting and investing in the citizens. We are running the risk to impoverish more and more regarding both, education and social competence.

What is lost

The time that we invest in media is life capacity that we do not dedicate to breaking free of physical, mental, and spiritual slavery. And yes, the high-speed communication via video phone calls and networking makes us connect with people, but are you still trained in initiating small talk, in starting a conversation, or in making a person laugh? I am afraid we do not win with our current way of communicating, but that we miss far more, actually skills that we can’t even transfer to our children.

Structural violence

But getting back to the beginning, the group of my colleagues. One of my colleagues came up with the term of structural violence, and all of us agreed that this is what we are actually suffering. He did not want to miss the opportunity to make us reflect commonly on how we may resolve this dilemma. So, we spend even more hours on investigation and evaluation of reasonable strategies.

SUMMARY

The reflection moves from a particular experience to a claim of general reach, and the step between them is what holds the piece together. The conversation described at the outset was not remarkable for what was said but for what was absent from it, and that absence allows the author to identify by contrast what mediated communication has replaced: the face, the gesture, unmeasured time, shared laughter. From there the argument shifts the question from the individual to the structural. If the time we give these channels produces profit for those who run them, if the states that ought to protect us also take a return, and if the result is an educational and social impoverishment transmitted to the next generation, then this is not an unfortunate personal choice but an arrangement of the social order. That is precisely the sense of the term the author takes from the conversation itself rather than imposing from outside.

CONCLUSION

One thing is for sure, each of us is part of a complex social structure where we have responsibilities towards ourselves but also towards our environment. Getting in contact with them by meeting them physically is the best way to have a supporting impact on their lives. Exchanges on common and dissimilar points may form an endless value and may create true friendships and harmony.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The author’s diagnosis gains force once it is made precise what these systems actually capture, because the available responses depend on that precision.

What is captured is not principally time but attention, and it is captured by mechanisms designed for the purpose: the unpredictable reward, which is the reinforcement schedule most resistant to extinction; the absence of a natural stopping point in continuous scrolling; and permanent social comparison, whose effect on the mood of adolescents is documented with particular consistency among girls. Naming the mechanisms matters because each admits a different response, and because it allows the impoverishing use to be distinguished from the use that is not. The available evidence suggests that total screen time predicts little, that passive consumption predicts a good deal, and that active exchange with people one knows predicts almost nothing. The distinction confirms the author in the essentials and asks him for precision: it is not mediated connection that displaces the encounter, but a particular mode of it.

Three levels of response follow and they should not be confused. At the individual level, what works are measures that alter the arrangement of the environment rather than relying on willpower: removing the device from the room where one sleeps, disabling notifications, replacing one mediated meeting a week with a physical one. At the institutional level, schools and organisations can set rules that no individual can set alone, and several countries have now regulated the use of phones in classrooms with results that are beginning to be measured. At the regulatory level, where the author correctly locates the problem, instruments already exist: age appropriate design codes, limits on interface patterns that induce unintended decisions, and systemic risk assessment obligations for the largest platforms. That these instruments exist does not mean they suffice, and it does mean the situation described is not inevitable.

One qualification on the responsibility of governments, which the author raises with reason. A state that draws tax revenue from these companies while owing protection to its inhabitants faces a conflict of interest that is rarely declared, and that conflict explains better than negligence why regulation arrives late and arrives weak. Naming it resolves nothing by itself, and it directs the demand to the right place.

Finally, an observation from the field this journal serves. The author holds that social competences are being lost which cannot be transmitted to the next generation, and that concern translates directly into our work. Sustaining a difficult conversation, tolerating another person’s silence while they think, reading a face that does not match the words, remaining in a disagreement without abandoning it: these are the capacities on which all mediation rests, and they are acquired only by practising them. It is one more reason for what the author proposes at the end, which is not a theory but a practical instruction: meet, look at one another, and give the conversation the time it needs.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

FURTHER READING

Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin Press, New York.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, New York.

Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2018). Associations between Screen Time and Lower Psychological Well-Being among Children and Adolescents. Preventive Medicine Reports, 12, 271 to 283.

Orben, A., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). The Association between Adolescent Well-Being and Digital Technology Use. Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 173 to 182.

Verduyn, P., Ybarra, O., Résibois, M., Jonides, J., & Kross, E. (2017). Do Social Network Sites Enhance or Undermine Subjective Well-Being? Social Issues and Policy Review, 11(1), 274 to 302.

Kross, E., Verduyn, P., Demiralp, E., et al. (2013). Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults. PLoS ONE, 8(8).

Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 on a Single Market for Digital Services, in particular the provisions on systemic risk and the protection of minors.

World Health Organization (2019). Guidelines on Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour and Sleep for Children under 5 Years of Age, Geneva.