A discussion of Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter sparked a long-ago memory of a distinction made between three types of language used on social media:
- the technical,
- the ordinary, and
- the crude.
The idea in a nutshell:
- There are a few professionals who use social media purely in a professional capacity, and they tend to stick to professional discourse.
- However, the bulk of the population utilizes social media as an extension of their social lives, and they use ordinary language when online.
- There are relatively few people who are extremely crude in both their thoughts and their communications on social media, but they seem to be prolific and have a toxic influence.
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Another point was made about “affect” or emotion in relation to language.
The continuum of types of language ranging from the precisely technical to the crude has an emotional parallel:
- Technical language has a certain coldness.
- Ordinary language has a certain warmth and complexity.
- Crude language is used in emotionally heated situations.
In the public realm, crudeness and emotional heat can lead to rapidly escalating conflict.
One sees this on social media.
The problem is not simply misinformation on social media, but the crudeness and agitation that gets users addicted.
Strangely, the academic realm uses cold, precise technical language, but is prone to the same rapid escalation of conflict (because the stakes are so low).
So the proper model for social media might be the ordinary language of the newspapers of old.
But how many people want that?
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It’s time for an experiment.
Let’s try to quantify in the most general way the diversity of language use (and not just for social media).
This deliberately reverts to speculation in order to play out the thought experiment.
Again, it was observed that most language usage involve ordinary language.
Let’s arbitrarily say that normal language makes up 68% of language because that is supposedly how the real world works so often (although we are not referring to the real world in this thought experiment).
Each of the two extremes only makes up 2.35% of the total distribution.
So, perhaps:
- only 2% of people on Twitter are scientists or engineers or economists “talking shop”, and
- only 2% of people on Facebook are calling for violent revolution.
However, glancing at a graph of normal distribution, one finds there are regions between the 68% of people who are engaged in normal behavior and the 2% minority at the extremes.
That is, there are two intermediate zones that each make up about 14% of the population who are somewhere between the normal majority and the extremes.
- 14% of the people on Twitter are journalists or members of the “attentive public” who are very familiar and conversant with otherwise esoteric public policy issues.
- 14% of the people on Facebook are political partisans who are not extremists but they follow the extremes and love (and understand) the memes.
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One idea here is that the 2% of those engaged in crude, toxic discourse on social media largely activate the 14% who are mildly toxic.
For example, there was a YouTube video of a former US military officer explaining his work as an administrator.
He said that in his experience:
- 80% of his soldiers were morally reliable and would always do the right thing.
- 5% of the soldiers were pure evil, and it was his job to identify and eliminate them.
- 15% of the soldiers were generally reliable, but when they came under the influence of the evil 5%, they would very quickly and eagerly switch to evil behavior.
Perhaps Nazi Germany constituted a nightmare scenario in which not only did the evil 5% not get punished or expelled, but they took over a country and its military.
The idea is that if you eliminate the very few instances of pure evil, the moderate badness that is more prevalent will also be held in check.
But Mark Zuckerberg does not want to do that.
And he is not the only one.
For example, in the 2015 movie “Spotlight”, it was stated that researchers found that with great consistency, half of all Catholic priest were sexually active and 6% were child molesters.
The Catholic Church never rooted out pedophiles in its ranks because half the priests were terrified of being exposed for having girlfriends (and children).
In other words, there might in some cases be an institutional reluctance to crack down on rare great evil.
This does not just lead to innocent victims, but to institutional failure — which can potentially include state failure.
The problem is that so often those who are in charge don’t want to eliminate the bad apples for some mysterious reason — even when institutional failure and public disgrace are imminent.
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Another idea here is that the two extremes of technical and crude language are sometimes necessary.
However, they can have a destabilizing effect that ordinary language does not have.
For example, technical language purged of ambiguity is full of jargon for a specialized audience.
If physicians, attorneys, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers used ordinary words, their work would bog down and come to a halt.
On the other hand, there is a tendency for those who use smoothed-over technical language to brainwash themselves (for example, the “droplet transmission dogma” in epidemiology).
Their private professional language that they learned through years of rigorous study can serve as a kind of echo chamber where they only hear the same voices over and over.
Like political leaders who have been in office for decades, they can become detached from reality.
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On the other hand, technical language needs to be protected from bastardization if and when it enters the public sphere.
For example, professors in the humanities and social sciences need to use obscure technical language to protect the uniqueness of their concepts.
For example, the business world often latches onto academic terms like “paradigm”, “synergy”, and “deconstruct”.
Those words then quickly enter ordinary speech and lose the very specific meaning they once had.
In a way, professors are guilty of leading this process of corruption when they continue to use fancy words in the public realm.
For example, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once stated in an interview that he defends his right to use obscure terminology that he invents (for example, the word “habitus” rather than just using the word “culture”).
In fact, he was defending the entirely obscure way he writes, which he claimed was a style borrowed from German philosophy.
In France, there is an insistence on writing with extreme clarity.
Bourdieu argued that the use of clear, ordinary speech would inhibit the growth of new ideas that are not yet clear to most people.
But in that interview, Bourdieu generally used ordinary language.
Rather than throw around fancy words, he very carefully translated his ideas to an audience of outsiders.
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Likewise, crude language has its uses.
The ambiguity of speech helps to facilitate ordinary interactions in the conditions of uncertainty — like when we say “watchamacallit” and everyone knows what we mean.
Sometimes this can be taken to an extreme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_kine
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Interestingly, the extremes of technical and crude language both serve a gateway function that distinguishes insiders from outsider.
If someone in Philadelphia uses the word “jawn” as a substitute for every noun, it shows to other locals that they are a local who is clued in.
Unfortunately, using that kind of local slang has a way of locking people into a way of life that is in decline.
The cool insider using extreme slang is usually a working-class outsider — and they know it.
