Writing for an unseen audience changes what people are willing to say

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that the central change social media made was to collapse the distinction between talking to someone and performing for everyone, and that the collapse has degraded ordinary communication. In a conversation with a known listener a speaker can calibrate: they know roughly who is hearing, what that person already understands, and what can be said loosely because it will be taken in good part. Social media removes those conditions. A remark is addressed to nobody in particular and read by an unknown mixture of friends, acquaintances, strangers and people hostile to the speaker, all at once and often long afterwards. The consequence, on this account, is a change in what people are willing to say at all. Faced with an audience whose composition cannot be known, a cautious speaker says less than they think, sticking to positions that cannot be quoted against them, while an incautious one says more than they mean, because the reactions that reward a remark come from the part of the audience most inclined to approve of it. Neither produces the thing ordinary conversation is for, which is working out what one thinks in the presence of someone who will say when it sounds wrong. Proponents add that the permanence of the record completes the effect. A spoken remark can be qualified, retracted or forgotten within the exchange in which it was made, and this is what allows people to think aloud. A written remark that remains available indefinitely, stripped of the circumstances that made it intelligible, cannot be treated that way, so the safe course is not to think aloud at all. The position concludes that a medium which makes candour risky and performance rewarding has made communication worse, whatever it has added in reach.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents argue that this describes a particular way of using one part of these networks and generalises it to the whole. Much of the exchange on them is private messages and small closed groups, where the audience is known and calibration works exactly as it does in speech. They add that performing for an unknown audience is not new: public speech, journalism and letters intended for circulation always carried the same constraint, and the skills for handling it are old. On this reply the real change is that many more people now have access to a public, which is a widening of a known condition rather than the degradation of a private one.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Opponents hold that much use of these networks is private messaging and closed groups, where the audience is known and the described condition does not arise. [Rejecting P2] Withholding or overstating in front of an unknown audience is a feature of public speech generally rather than of this medium, and people have long managed it. [Rejecting P3] Permanence has also made accountability possible, and the argument counts only its cost. [Rejecting C] Widening access to a public is not the same as degrading private communication, so the conclusion does not follow from the premises offered.