Conflict Competence

It’s discouraging. I’ve devoted decades to helping people develop conflict competence. I just wandered into the realm of SideTaker.com, Whoiswrong.com, and other ‘blog war’ sites. These are unmediated interactive sites, lauded as democratic cyberspace, where everyone is entitled to be conflict incompetent for an audience. Post an opinion and wait for the comments that show that others paid attention to your expertise.

Except, it isn’t a kind of democracy that builds individual or collective capacity, or creates social capital. The comments are only for or against a topic. On these sites, personal attacks substitute for informed opinions, sarcasm is used instead of thoughtful analysis, and bullying stands in the place of democratic dialogue. The idea that this could be called a democratic forum because everyone could leave a post, beggars the concept of democracy.

i teach the Theory and Practice of Dialogue, and Deliberative Democracy. Public forum debate is a healthy way for everyone to learn, expand their skills, create community, and change their mind if persuaded by something they hear.

Blog warfare, on the other hand, is an unhealthy public space where angry people can take out frustration and revenge on anyone who disagrees. This has ramifications for the ongoing societal conversations about the kinds of community we want to build and the value of public trust. While conflict managers are working to engage citizens in authentic dialogue about important public issues, these vitriolic websites have the opposite effect:

1, Elections bring much hand wringing about attack ads and laments about the reduced quality of debate in our elected houses. if we are expressing a desire to revitalize a dialogue process that has become dysfunctional, then an “I’m right, you’re wrong” website like sidetaker.com is unhelpful. Nothing in blog warfare will lift more people to a better quality of life. There wasn’t much in the websites I read that speaks words of inclusion, representation, embracing diversity, or community comprehensiveness.  We should be noticing the disconnect between the kinds of communities we find meaning in and what we create in blaming and accusations.

2, the model of side taking debate that is being used is an impoverished example of what public onilne dialogue could be. Dialogue has a well founded theoretical basis of transformational learning, that is, we hear and learn and understand. Attacks on one side in short sarcastic witticisms isn’t enhancing anyone’s skills or lives.

3, public dialogue introduces new information that can create better outcomes by illuminating what others are thinking. Reducing the comments to simplicity reduces our skills in complex thinking. The day I read sidetaker.com, the topic was ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that a man is ungrateful because he does not like the taste of the toast his girlfriend made when he was ill. Commentary included calling him a batch of names and suggesting suitable consequences for his ‘whining’. The comments were spiteful and ridiculing of others’ opinions. At that simple level of opinions, we miss the opportunity to inquire into whether his illness may be affecting his taste buds. Whether he and his girlfriend had discussed some exchange of chores that seemed fair to each. That’s a simple example, but the whole point of blog warfare is simplification, in a world that needs complexity in thinking skills.

The ‘remedy’ for a jaded cynical community is to transform a jaded cynical debate process into a true dialogue of learning from each other, which can be just as much fun as calling someone names and telling them they are wrong.