Can we argue well about religion and politics in performative online spaces?

by Grey Moszkowski

Performance and Religious Disagreement

Performance is an integral part of the internet. On Twitter and on Instagram, on Tinder and on LinkedIn, people highlight certain aspects of themselves to pursue their goals on the platform. For example, on Tinder, people might post pictures of themselves at parties or in swimsuits, while on LinkedIn, the pictures are more professional, matching the goal of professional networking. People are highly aware of their audience online and alter their behavior to pursue certain goals. The aspect of performance is a result of the unparalleled scale of online platforms. As Ian Bogost writes in “People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much,” before social media, the largest audience that our words could reach was determined by circumstance, but usually in the low hundreds. Now, social media makes it possible for anyone’s words to be viewed by thousands or millions of people at any time. This enhanced audience increases the potential value of online self-curation.

The concept of online performance goes deeper than website-specific curation. In Breaking the Social Media Prism, Chris Bail argues that social media incentivize us to perform online not just for website-specific goals such as networking or keeping in touch with friends, but in pursuit of a sense of identity. In other words, it may not be true that our true selves influence our online performance; instead, our online performance may help determine our true selves. On a more basic level, when communicating on social media, we are always aware of the public nature of our conversation. There is no privacy; online, every conversation becomes a performance where the audience can be, in our minds, the entire world.

A brief example can illuminate the difficulties of online communication. Imagine you meet someone in a Chicago coffee shop and have a friendly conversation. During your conversation, you find out that your new friend believes that the Earth is flat. Although you disagree, you don’t stand up and invite the entire coffee shop to laugh at your new friend; that would be uncivil and just plain weird. You decide to try to change their mind. You get your coffees in to-go cups and take a stroll along Lake Michigan, where you keep an eye out for a ship heading into Chicago. Using a set of binoculars, you can see a ship approaching. Due to the curvature of the Earth, the ship appears to rise into view. You show this finding to your new friend. You’ve presented the best evidence at your disposal to someone who disagrees with you, but you’ve done it politely, in a one-on-one setting, and have avoided insulting or embarrassing them. You were not tempted to perform outrage for the approval of an audience; there was no audience. Instead, you honestly addressed your disagreement.

Now imagine this same exchange occurring online. Instead of a quiet table at a coffee shop or the shore of Lake Michigan, this conversation is now taking place in front of millions of viewers (real or imagined). In this situation, it is natural to want the approval and respect of a community represented in that invisible but present audience. Instead of addressing your differences in good faith, then, you might be tempted to crack embarrassing jokes at your opponent’s expense or otherwise insult and belittle them for their obviously wrong opinion. In other words, you could use the other person as a prop in your performance of intelligence. Doing so might win the approval of people who agree with you, giving you the sense of belonging that we all crave. It is also possible that you would engage in reasoned conversation. I do not know you, the reader, or your online habits. I only wish to point out the existence of incentives to perform online, and some potential consequences of those incentives.

These incentives have challenging implications for online communication in general, but especially about inherently controversial topics like religion and politics. Their existence begs serious questions about the compatibility of online communication and serious political and religious discussion. Are we authentically ourselves in online performance? More importantly, can we talk coherently and charitably about religion and politics while performing online, or are performance and discourse incompatible?

Are we ourselves in online performance?

As discussed, Chris Bail is a pessimist when it comes to the possibility of honest discussion in performative online space. Bail disagrees with early optimism surrounding the internet’s potential “to scale up salon culture, creating a massive and open marketplace of ideas.” To Bail, the idea that online communication will support the “crucible of democracy” that salons were often imagined to be is based on the misconception that communication online is the same as communication in person. Bail cites a study by Muzafer Sherif in which two groups of boys, once given collective group identities, immediately developed antipathy for each other. It is this dynamic, not salon culture, that rises to the top in online communication. As Bail writes, “social media are less like an eighteenth century salon and more like a sprawling football field on which our instincts are guided by the color of our uniforms instead of our prefrontal cortexes.” We obtain a group identity in our personal lives and are exposed to contrary identities online; antipathy and distrust follow.

This disagreement is further complicated by the inherent dishonesty built into social media communication. In the public sphere, we feel the need not just to advertise our identities but to alter our self-presentations such that we fit more neatly with our in-groups. This is easier than ever with social media. Bail writes that social media “makes it so much easier for us to do what is all too human: perform different identities, observe how other people react, and update our presentation of self to make us feel like we belong.” In other words, on social media we can and do mold our identities through performance in the public sphere. Thus, social media are “prisms that bend and refract our social environment – distorting our sense of ourselves, and each other” (Bail). Under Bogost’s definition of social media as an enhanced-audience platform, the incentive to perform will be strong, and prismatic performance will become the ruling mode of online communication.

Social media has two salient characteristics. First, it is uncommonly easy to slip into identity-based animosity in online communication, especially given the massive reach of our words. Second, online formats and their large audiences make it possible and desirable to convincingly perform identity in pursuit of increased belonging. The consequence of these characteristics is that reasoned, calm discourse on controversial topics like religion and politics will be extremely difficult online, because many people are engaging in communication as a means of performing an identity, not as a means of learning about other worldviews or interrogating their own. In sum, it might be wrong to say that we are not ourselves online. It is better to say that we become different selves when we communicate on the internet.

Can we talk coherently and charitably about religion and politics in this performative space?

While Bail and Bogost (to a lesser extent) are rather pessimistic about online communication, I argue that there is a way for us to overcome the challenges posed by performative incentives and discuss controversial topics like religion and politics online. Inspired by the work of Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Russell Johnson, and Julia Galef, I propose three general approaches to communication in the performative online space. First, following Haidt and Rose-Stockwell, we could institute changes in the construction of social media spaces that reduce the incentive to perform. Second, following Johnson, we could consciously monitor our communicative voice based on our medium. Third, following Galef, we could embrace the performative attitude but choose to perform what she terms the “scout identity.”

In their article “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks,” Haidt and Rose-Stockwell describe the psychology of online performance. Citing the social psychologist Mark Leary, they argue that “we don’t really need self-esteem… rather, the evolutionary imperative is to get others to see us as desirable partners for various kinds of relationships.” In other words, humans are hard-wired to perform for the approval of others. When we bring this attitude into the ultimate public forum that is the internet, we fall into “moral grandstanding,” or using “moral talk to enhance [our] prestige in a public forum.” Haidt and Rose-Stockwell therefore agree with Bail that social media presents perverse incentives to perform a moral identity, making genuine communication difficult. To address this, Haidt and Rose-Stockwell suggest changes to social media themselves to reduce incentives to perform. Their central suggestion is “demetrication,” or preventing users from seeing how often content (whether their own or from others) is liked or shared. Haidt and Rose-Stockwell believe that when these metrics are hidden, users will be less tempted to perform for the approval of the masses, since they will be deprived of feedback that validates this behavior.

The drawback of the above strategy, of course, is that individual users cannot implement it. We must wait for the technology companies to institute those changes and, given that a large part of their business model is user engagement, it is unlikely that they will do so. Instead, we could self-assess our online communication styles using the taxonomy of communication presented by Russell Johnson in “The Three Voices in the Ethics of Communication.” Johnson describes three “voices,” or approaches to communication, that we often employ. The first is the Civility standpoint, which considers etiquette and ethics to be two sides of the same coin in communication. In other words, behaving decorously is both a moral good in itself and is a prerequisite for genuine communication about controversial topics. Civility is therefore “at the intersection of etiquette, morality, and politics.” The Civility standpoint is in direct opposition to the Victory standpoint, which draws a distinction between morals and values. Values are essentially the goals of communication, while morals refer to the acceptable means by which we are socially permitted to pursue our values. The Victory standpoint holds that slavish adherence to morals hinders the pursuit of values, and that we should therefore disregard our commitments to socially acceptable standards of communication. The final approach is the Open-mindedness standpoint, which views any attempt at persuasion as an act of violence, and therefore rejects any type of communication that seeks to change peoples’ minds.

The Civility and Victory standpoints are most relevant to the discussion of online performance. The Victory standpoint overlaps with online performative communication. In online performative communication, the goal is often not to convince the other person but to win the approval of the audience. The same is true of communication under the Victory standpoint. Adherents to the Victory school of thought are prepared to belittle, insult, and humiliate their conversation partners. This will obviously not convince their conversation partner to change their mind; it is instead designed to win over observers. To reduce the toxic effects of the performative incentives, participants in online debates can intentionally adhere to the Civility approach to communication. By treating civility as a moral good, we can reject the paradigm of performance and make productive online conversation more possible. There will always be adherents to the Victory standpoint online, but the more people intentionally value civility, the more reasoned online discourse there will be.

Finally, we can attempt to use the identity-forming dynamics of performance to improve the quality of online communication. In the final chapter of her informative book The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef describes the benefits of what she calls a “scout identity.” Throughout her book, Galef contrasts the titular scout mindset with the soldier mindset. Under the soldier mindset, we view other peoples’ opinions as enemies to be fought. To do so, we reach for the weapons available to us, which are often abusive language or close-minded attacks. Galef instead advocates for the scout mindset, which is a more open, receptive frame of mind that allows for reasoned discussion and engagement with others’ beliefs. Galef encourages her readers to “hold [their] identities lightly,” since clinging too closely to our identities makes it very difficult for us to enter the scout mindset. Galef finishes her book by offering what I consider to be better advice. Instead of attempting to distance ourselves from our identities, a difficult or impossible task, we should incorporate the scout mindset into our identities. In other words, we can make open-mindedness part of who we are rather than a chore.

Chris Bail pointed out that social media is a tool used to perform identity, but often ends up shaping identity as well. If social media can shape our identities negatively, why can’t it do so positively instead? It may be possible to use the identity-creating and -affirming characteristics of social media to both instill a scout identity in ourselves and encourage it in others. As a means of doing so, Galef suggests spending time in online spaces designed to cultivate the scout mentality, like r/FeMRADebates and ChangeAView.com. Mirroring Bail’s characterization of the internet as an identity-forming space, Galef argues that “the people you read, follow, and talk to online help shape your identity just like the people in your ‘real-life’ communities do.” If we use the internet’s power to construct identity to build a scout mindset into our identities, the negative effects of online performative communication will likely be reduced.

Online communication presents several serious challenges to reasoned discourse on controversial topics like religion and politics. The inherently performative nature of online communication incentivizes discourse designed not to engage reasonably with the interlocutor, but to aid in identity-building by appealing to an audience. In this paper, I have presented three potential approaches this problem. First, social media could be redesigned to reduce the incentive to perform. Second, we could consciously avoid performative paradigms of communication. Third, we could embrace online performance as a means of building an identity that values reasoned discourse and debate. To be clear, none of these approaches are silver bullets, and none of them will ever fully eliminate online vitriol. However, by employing them, it may be possible to productively engage with strangers online about controversial subjects.

Resources

Chris Bail, Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing (Princeton: Princeton, 2021)

Ian Bogost, “People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much,” The Atlantic, October 2021

Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t (New York: Portfolio, 2021)

Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell, “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks,” The Atlantic, December 2019

Russell Johnson, “The Three Voices in the Ethics of Communication.”