Rewarding immediate reaction crowds out slower kinds of talk

The argument

The second argument for this position concerns timing rather than audience. Proponents observe that these networks are arranged so that the value of a contribution decays quickly: a remark made while a subject is current reaches people, and the same remark made after reflection reaches almost nobody. Anyone who wants to be heard therefore has a strong incentive to respond before they have thought, and the incentive applies with most force to exactly the subjects that most need thought, because those are the ones that provoke the largest immediate response. On this account the harm is not that fast exchanges exist, since conversation has always included quick talk, but that fast exchange has become the form in which serious matters are first and most widely discussed. A view assembled in the time it takes to type it is then defended, because people defend what they have said in public, and the position holds that this sequence of speaking first and reasoning afterwards is close to the opposite of how understanding is supposed to work. The slower forms that once carried difficult subjects, where a person set out a case at length and others replied at length after reading it, still exist but now reach a fraction of the audience the immediate reaction commands. Proponents also argue that the habit transfers. People who spend a great deal of time in a medium that rewards the quick response become less practised at the alternative, and the expectation of an immediate reply follows them into settings where it does not belong. The conclusion drawn is that social media has not merely added a fast channel alongside the slow ones but has shifted the centre of gravity of public talk towards the fastest form available, and that this counts as a degradation of communication rather than an expansion of it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the argument mistakes a change in visibility for a change in quantity. Hasty and ill considered opinion was always the bulk of public talk; what is new is that it is written down where anyone can see it, including the people who previously assumed that the silent majority agreed with them. They add that the slower forms have not simply lost their audience, since long written argument is now read by far more people than any earlier arrangement allowed, and that treating speed as the dominant property of the medium ignores the considerable amount of patient exchange that takes place on it.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics hold that reach decaying with time is a property of particular arrangements rather than of the medium, and that durable long form material is widely read on the same networks. [Rejecting P2] Hasty opinion on provoking subjects was always the bulk of public talk, so its visibility rather than its quantity has changed. [Rejecting P3] People also revise their views in public, and the argument counts only the cases where commitment hardens. [Rejecting C] If the slower forms now reach more people than before, the centre of gravity has not moved in the direction the conclusion requires.