Interesting to see the element that gets highlighted on the media and Twitter: the platform is a bad idea. Actually, once you search and listen to the whole interview you find that Ev gets dialectical tension, the issue is not solving the problem or judging the platform to be bad. The issue is seeing that the platform has many simultaneous and seemingly opposing tensions embedded in it. This is the nature of life, this kind of tension is never ‘solved’ in any permanent sense.
“The dialectical perspective is grounded in the notion that we need to examine contrary perspectives that appear as opposites but, in fact, vacillate in nature. Like a tightrope, these “oppositions” are held in tension and only momentarily resolved.” Mara Abelman
As I said when discussing the contemplative construction of reality elsewhere, we forget,
…the importance of a dialectical understanding of reality. The foreground becomes the background becomes the foreground…ad infinitum. Yet, this way of seeing the world is also something we have to cultivate and not something easily seen as we rush around life with its thirst for easy answers to enable faster movement.
Ev talks in the interview about the both-and nature of social media platforms and media in general. What we see depends on where we attend; denying that these oppositions are only momentarily resolved and are part of life is what stops us from seeing the many ways we ourselves are part of ‘the problem’. The problem is only a problem when the ego believes its own propaganda and sets itself up to delete half of our experience from life – this is evident in politics, in education and anywhere humans beings communicate.
Yet, the dialectical understanding of reality is something that needs intentional cultivation. Human beings so crave certainty.
Communication, for example, becomes visible only against the field of silence. Silence is critically important for the construction of reality – and the social construction of reality has a complement, the also necessary contemplative construction of reality.
Sandra Braman in ‘When nightingales break the law: silence and the construction of reality’.
Jenny Mackness and I wrote about this recently in a paper titled ‘When Exclusion Excludes: A counter narrative of open education’. We sought to highlight the way in which language is subject to this dialectical tension and that when we make efforts to foreground only one side of these co-existing oppositions, in this case exclusion and inclusion, we create the very thing that we seek to avoid; assuming that it is possible to ‘solve the problem’ of exclusion is the problem. As Liz Morrish (who we quote in the paper) puts it: “One of the peculiarities of language is that the same form of words can mean entirely different things depending on the speaker/writer, the occasion, the intent and the preceding context of interaction.” This kind of both-and thinking, applied to ‘self ‘ rather than ‘them’, needs a great deal of intentional cultivation, as I learn each semester I teach Insight Dialogue on a Mindfulness Studies Masters Programme.
You can read a pre-pub copy of the paper in Jenny’s blog. And there are 50 free copies of the paper if you follow this link.