The Queen, Conflict Resolution, The Algorithm, Deepening Democracy and what we can learn from children.

Is social media more a symptom or a cause of democratic failings?

The conversation below is imagined. I wrote this piece a few days after the death of the Queen and a few days before we returned for the start of term, but I am publishing it now, a few days after her funeral so as not to be disrespectful.¹

Photo by Mark de Jong on Unsplash

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It's a chilly autumn morning and six of our young people and two mentors are already sat in the Lounge, our open sided yurt that we do our morning meetings in, waiting for everyone else to arrive. The 13 year old, who is obsessed with the art, aesthetics, humour and politics of memes is showing some to his fourteen year old friend. Inevitably today they are about the death of the monarch. They are laughing and talking about it and the eleven year old wants to be involved. He rebroadcasts a joke to the rest of the room. It’s anti-monarchy. The three eight year olds are eating their lunch, naturally, as it is not quite ten o’clock. The middle one, from the most conservative family takes offence. They like the queen. It’s a sad day for them and they don’t take kindly to the jokes. The teenagers try reasoning with them. But they are not having it, in fact they are getting more upset. When they start crying the teenagers relent. Amidst the tears they seem to have lost control, panting the words out through the sobbing, but they do seem self aware enough to recognise that there is a minority of one here.

#8 y.o : I don’t want to hear people talking about the queen around me.

#13 y.o : You can’t really ask people not to have the conversations they want to though?

#14 y.o : We’re just talking about some memes, you don’t have to pay attention to us.

#8 y.o : I just don’t want you to talk about it as I don’t find your jokes funny. I really liked the queen and it’s really sad for me that she has died.

As this back and forth continues a mentor, noticing that tensions are rising, steps in

Mentor : Maybe we could discuss this in the morning meeting. Would everyone be willing to pause talking about the queen till we have discussed it as a group?

And so the morning meeting would open with a discussion about talking about the queen. We operate on sociocratic principles in our meetings which means we look for solutions that are safe enough to try and good enough for now, that everyone will consent to. The eight year old might open with their passionate defense. The teenagers might retort that they want to talk about the queen and they don’t see why they should be stopped doing so - the famous free speech argument. Another child might make the observation that as a momentous occasion it is bound to be something people want to discuss. The eight year old might say they don’t mind people talking about it seriously but don’t like the jokes. Someone would discuss jokes and free speech and we might meander around free speech for a while before coming back to the specifics of the queen situation. At this point some of the younger ones will feel the need to involve themselves by stating that they agree with previous comments as they practice voicing opinions in meetings. A mentor might ask the eight year old what they propose as a solution. We might move towards an understanding that they want to play in the clearing of the woods for most of the day and maybe in the yurt. We all know the teenagers mostly hang out in the other covered space, The Lounge, and so a proposal is made that we don’t discuss the queen in the clearing or the yurt. A second mentor might pick up on a young person’s observation that this is a momentous occasion and worthy of discussion and timetable in a structured conversation for an hour where people can explore the topic of the monarchy: it’s history, Elizabeth’s life, the future monarch, royalist versus republican viewpoints. After about fifteen minutes everyone moves on and everyone is happy with the agreements for the day.

As I said this is imagined as we haven’t started our new term yet, but we did meet up yesterday for a planning session and naturally we spoke about the death of the monarch. One of my fellow mentors was seeing lots of comments of disagreements on the royal family on social media and plenty of people saying they had been unfriended because of differences of opinions. I am no monarchist myself but my understanding was that social media was full of monarchists hating on republicans and vice versa. And it got me thinking about social media and conflict. I was once on Twitter, about a decade ago, but gave it up as pointless. Likewise with Facebook. Social media seemed to have enough dry tinder built in to it to stoke the fire of indignation in my belly once too often. Homeschooling two young people is hard work and requires enough of my presence in the real world that I only log in to look at local groups that might help me facilitate that process.

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Twitter itself has recently been compared to a town square. Some have refuted this metaphor, I don’t think it’s a perfect analogy myself, but let’s run with it as it seems safe enough to try and good enough for now. See as I was listening to various overly jingoistic posts being read out to me I felt the need to reply rising in me, to argue back, to, in essence, get on my soapbox and stand in that town square. So I paused and started thinking: why am I bothered? Why are people willing to lose friends over this? Is it really that important? What would our young people do? And then the conversation above came almost fully formed into my mind. Based on that example what solution would work for me? What Facebook and Twitter needs is a way for people to say I don’t want to be part of this conversation, to say virtually you talk about it if you want to just not in the clearing or the yurt. But that is the antithesis of the idea behind the algorithmic feed.

The town square metaphor and free speech brings to my mind the scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian where Brian finds himself preaching with the other prophets in the square. But I think the notion of social media as town square forgets that people don’t come for the prophets, the prophets come for the people. The backdrop to Brian preaching is the market; the social life of the polis itself.

When I was a student I worked as a street fundraiser in Birmingham. Outside the Bullring, in the middle of town, there would be all sorts of extrovert preaching types every single day. But no one got the train into Birmingham New Street to see them, they came to shop. I think people think logging into Twitter is akin to dropping into the town square for a day, meandering around civic life online. But you don’t shop for tomatoes on Twitter, you come for the ideas, the conversation. It’s more akin to coming into Birmingham for a debate with the shouty evangelicals. As someone who has had many a lunchbreak sat on a bench listening to them talk I can tell you that you can’t help but get into it with them once you start. As with social media once you start talking to the Rastafarian with the speaker on his hip and the megaphone on your lunchbreak, given enough time, you can't help but stoke that fire in your belly. If you come to Birmingham shopping you just walk by letting their words wash over you, like water off a duck’s back.

Fire, or water, your choice.

We want to help our young people in conflicts move from the fire to the water. Ideally we want them connecting with each other with sympathy or empathy. One thing that we do in our space to help this process is teach them about needs and wants. And we are, as a community, constantly negotiating them.

The young person who doesn’t want jokes about the queen is not meeting a need, that is a want. But there is an underlying need, the need to feel safe (emotionally) in the space. Their initial want to help them meet that is to ask for no jokes at all. Obviously that imposes on everyone else and no one wants to agree to that. So they have to propose a want that is more acceptable to the group and to do so they have to tune further into their needs. What do I need from today? I need to play with my friends. What do I want? I want to do that in the clearing and the yurt, and so they then have to translate that into a proposal of no jokes where I want to play that other people might agree to.

When the initial conversation occurs and tempers start rising there is no doubt there is the whiff of smoke in the air. The mentor stepping in is acknowledging that and the idea of moving the discussion to the meeting is that the structure of the meeting, with an experienced seven year old chairing it,² helps move people through the same discussion in a different state of mind. Quenching the fire in the belly is the first step towards an agreement.

There is great care and awareness demonstrated in sighing with frustration as a teenager and letting something go because you recognise that the other person maybe has a personality which means they find thinking flexibly in the moment challenging, and also they are much younger and you recognise that is probably hindering not helping the process of flexible thinking. However, you don’t need to change your mind to do so. You can still despair at their actions but realise that the community will appreciate the love you can extend them and will function better that day, and so by stepping back from a disagreement and saying, ok, I can be ok with you having it your way right now and us trying it that way if you want.

Safe enough to try and good enough for now does not mean that the teenagers agree with the royalist eight year old by the end. Fire or water your choice is in reality not a binary. It is more a complex practice; how able are you to be able to quench the fire in your belly enough to move through this situation. The meeting structure is designed to assist this, but the young people still have to do the work and it’s often hard work at that. The teenagers probably couldn’t agree less with the right year old and don't understand why someone would be unwilling to just let them make jokes where they want, but they are able to accept an indifference to that difference and willing to find a solution that works for everyone. Just as people walking past the prophets in Birmingham couldn’t agree less with them, but are indifferent to engaging with them when out shopping. And this is the crux of the problem of the algorithm. It’s lack of capacity for this fundamental part of human life, the indifference to engagement.

It is this indifference to engagement, which in our learning community of young people looks like a willingness to put aside big differences and find ways to navigate the space together to minimise conflict, which the feed and the algorithm can’t measure. It is the essence of human life. If you live in a city you spend most of your life walking around being indifferent to everyone around you, however, what that really looks like is you receiving plenty of inputs without giving out any outputs. Social media is inherently social in that it seems it can only measure the social aspect of civic life, the agreements and the disagreements, and not the unmeasurable but equally information rich “non-social”.

Yet the problem with the algorithm is that it requires inputs and so on social media if you withhold outputs from another person you are also withholding inputs to the algorithm. Unfortunately the algorithm will then tailor your feed to give you different inputs. If that happened in real life it would be analogous to the teenagers agreeing to be indifferent to the eight year old making demands about classical music, the queen, or indoor meetings and then finding he had mysteriously disappeared from their lives. This is the antithesis of community.

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John Dewey, an influential educational thinker, writing a century ago thought the education was important for cultivating democracy. In fact he thought it was so important that he even wrote a book called Democracy and Education. And at our learning community we couldn’t agree more. Not necessarily with the specific conclusions of Dewey but the importance for children to be encultured in an environment where democracy is taken seriously. At Sudbury Schools that looks like having a justice committee that hands out punishments and fines to people who have transgressed the boundaries of the school’s agreements. As per actual jury duty Sudbury replicates the sortition method for choosing jurors and it is mandatory to serve on the committee if chosen. That’s not what happens at our learning community but our meetings are fundamental to the process of creating culture and attendance is one of the mandatory aspects of joining our community.

Alex Khost has written a great piece on self-directed education as a political act. Surveying self-directed education projects that are based on models of trusting children he found they spanned a spectrum from libertarianism through anarchism to socialism. Not that any project was exclusively ideologically one or the other, or importantly that these definitions map directly onto the political philosophies that they take their name from. He argues more that the educational experience as a whole might lend a young person to graduate with a perspective of freedom that could vary across a spectrum of autonomy to community and each setting will influence the development of their framing of the world and consequently their perspective on what democracy means.

In our setting we holding sociocratic meetings that aims towards solutions that everyone consents to. We can technically vote as a backstop if we need to but at the small scale we operate at and with the time we have available to us we have never used it, we often pause debates for a week at a time and when we come back to it we always find a solution that works for everyone. Young people leaving our setting will have a perspective on democracy that is not based on voting, but on seeking common solutions and dialogue in community as the means to achieve that precious end.

Most people think we live in a democracy and that is that. Simple. However, David Graeber made the observation that societies actually operate to an extent according to baseline communism: from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. Each society might vary in where the baseline is, but most of us where I live would help a child to open a gate that has a latch that is just too high for them and that, he argues, is baseline communism.

Yet I would argue that day to day society also operates on baseline sociocratic principles too. If you are on a night out with friends and someone suggests it is time to move on to the next pub and two people make different proposals and then everyone agrees on the Prince of Wales, that is an example of safe enough to try good enough for now group consent. What we try to do is make the process that is natural among friends in low demand situations explicit in our meeting processes in more challenging circumstances.

Of course we do live in a democracy in the United Kingdom, a parliamentary representative democracy to be specific, but I would argue that in its contemporary incarnation democracy is more the performative arm of our society. Much digital ink has been spilled on the intersection of social media and democracy and I’m sure dear reader that by now you must come across convincing arguments for how social media is harmful for democracy so I am not going to rehash them. But let me summarise my argument so far: the main problems I have outlined above are that logging on to an app is like heading to the town square to listen to and debate the prophets and that this intentionality is more likely to cause us to stoke the fire of indignation in our belly. The more time spent on social media encourages an exaggeration of this placing of your attention and it is the aggregation of that exaggeration that is particularly problematic. Furthermore, the indifference to engagement that characterises civic life offline can’t be captured by the algorithm and that is how you get filter bubbles and the need for lessons on digital media literacy on how to avoid them.

Proponents for the democratic potential of Twitter I think misunderstand that our modern Western democracies are mostly performative and Twitter looks democratic because it is explicitly this, performative. But society is more complex than just its performative aspects and social media can not seem to replicate or capture that.

So can social media be saved? This seems unlikely, for the algorithm is the problem and the feed compounds the algorithmic problem and both seem destined to stay. Maybe the first question though should be what lessons can we learn from our young people? And maybe then we can think about how to apply those lessons to social media.

I think firstly our young people demonstrate that having discussions about the queen only in certain spaces is a viable solution to minimise conflict and on reflection we know that this is a totally applicable online solution. It is called Reddit or Quora. Or maybe you could organise a Meetup with a local group to discuss this issue, as we might timetable a mentor facilitated discussion at our learning community. So, there are spaces that provide the solutions that we work towards in real life but we have to navigate across different platforms to achieve them. It seems that currently social media can’t replicate actual social life in its totality on one platform. Maybe that is ok. Maybe we all need to stop using Facebook and Twitter and just use Quora? But that would be misunderstanding the lessons from our young people. It is ok to silo off debates on specific topics, but we don’t want to silo ourselves off. We don’t want to find that the teenagers have disagreed with the eight year old so often that they never see them again. We still need a way to be able to turn up and show who we are to everyone in the community. We still need a feed of sorts.

Henry Mourland speaks to this when they argue that fixing the problem of the algorithmic feed is potentially a philosophical issue: what we need is a social media that can connect the individual element of “this is who I am” to communities both non-local but importantly locally as well, but to have that requires an algorithm predicated on completely different philosophical underpinnings. This probably means not reforming our current suite of social media offerings but replacing them with something different.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Maybe social media can’t be saved. Or maybe to put it another way all these articles that are laying the blame for the fostering of division within society and the corrosion of our functioning democracies are looking in the wrong places. Maybe social media is more the symptom than the cause.

Dewey believed that democracy was not about voting rights, the performative, but also equipping citizens with the ability to take on the responsibility to make informed, intelligent choices and decisions leading to the public good. Maybe there are lessons that can be learned from our young people about how to manage conflicts online, but there is bound to be some translation error from the analogue to the digital. However, maybe the real question should not be is social media capable of allowing us to manage conflict online as a civic responsibility, but are we, the people, even capable of managing conflict in the analogue world as a civic responsibility, let alone translating it to the digital as well?

Direct democracy is hard. I have sat in a number of challenging 45 minute long meetings with young people as they debate issues that are contentious to them. It can be extremely tiring even as an adult. What the philosophical point that Henry is making about social media and Dewey is making about education is that it is requirement for people to take active steps to deepen their practice to democracy for democracy to flourish. Twitter and Facebook and other global algorithmic based behemoths seem to operate from the World is Flat premise of broadening out everything. But you can’t broaden out democracy and expect it to flourish.³ Democracy needs to be deepened and that process needs to be an ongoing one in every generation. The real lesson to be learnt is not how do we apply these principles to the online world. Yes, if you work in computing go ahead and think about how to do that by all means, but the real nub is what democratic hardware are we running our democratic software on? And for that we come back to Dewey, back to the different philosophies of Alex Khost and and our learning community, back to the concept of trusting children explicitly, and the idea that children need to be active participants in democracy as young people for them to grow into civically competent adults. The real lesson is to ask the question how can we help deepen the democratic experience of the children closest to us, in our schools and in our families. Let them into the practice of direct democracy as much as possible. And upon surveying the landscape of education around me and finding it extremely lacking I think I will leave it there as I have to get the early train to Birmingham New Street with my soapbox, my megaphone and my belt clip microphone and go do some preaching about children’s rights to a democratic experience and a democratic education.

1. Disrespectful that is to my writing process of spending a few days writing something, a week of letting it lie fallow, before returning to it to edit it over a further few days before publishing.

2. Sounds too good to be true but it’s not.

3. There is a place for the broad, just not at the expense of the deep. Or to put it more practically, and in terms that Henry Mourland speaks to in his video. Twitter and Facebook allow me to connect to other self-directed facilitators, but if all I do is broadly reach out to other practitioners, what is the point? Reaching out to this non-local community is only useful because it allows me to invest more deeply in the real world community that I work in. Broad accompanying the work of the deep, with the work of deepening democracy in our learning community being the more important of the two.