Why was slavery accepted in the 19th century and is it aberrational today?
That is one of the questions I try to answer in my essay: why suddenly it seems normal to majorities in the most advanced countries that women vote when they have been relegated to the home for centuries?
Did accessing the press liberate them?
Certainly, and the list of key questions that are changing as modernity arrives is very long: why, suddenly, do we also find it aberrational to see eight-year-old children working in the mines when they had been miners for centuries?
Have you found answers?
My small contribution to the story of how ideas change in societies is to look at how they are communicated.
Does the way an idea is communicated determine its acceptance?
That is the hypothesis that I dare to launch: the way and the channels, the speed and the efficiency of the ideas when reaching the people who initially rejected them determine their acceptance by the majority. I believe that the great ideas that shape the values of a society are incubated differently depending on the medium in which they are going to be disseminated.
For example.
Can the ideas that the Pope defends today in a tweet be the same as those that have been debated for years for a council?
The Pope must complete a divine exercise of synthesis to conceive that tweet.
A tweet is sent by anyone right now in five minutes and, five minutes later, another saying the opposite; and a council, on the other hand, required years of preparation to congregate much fewer people than today read that tweet in seconds across the planet: do you think that these ideas of the Pope arrive in the same way and are accepted in the same way and are conceived in the same way? ?
And does that speed of diffusion stop or speed up our progress?
That's where my doubts begin. I fear that there has been a time when the acceleration of the printing press in disseminating advanced ideas among large sections of the population that was decisive for our progress in its day has reached a point where it actually slows it down.
Did the speed of the printing press allow progress, but the speed of the tweet already slows it down?
It may be that such a speed of diffusion of ideas does not allow us the necessary time to decant them, internalize them...
On what basis do you doubt it?
I have analyzed the communication ecosystems of 400, 500 years ago and investigated how the great concepts of progress, such as the abolitionism of slavery or women's suffrage, were taking shape in letters, pamphlets, local newspapers...
Certainly slower than the internet.
But was that an obstacle or a boost to its mainstream acceptance?
You are the one who has studied it.
For this reason, I believe that the ability of a great thinker, leader or intellectual today to send a message to the world in seconds degrades the debate of ideas and makes us go backwards instead of progressing.
How can speed slow us down?
For Silicon Valley, a council would be a huge waste of time; but for that very reason the quality of the debate of ideas there leaves much to be desired.
Does technology replace ideology?
Technology determines, yes, the way in which the great concepts with which we base the values that allow coexistence are disseminated.
Doesn't more speed in disseminating ideas make them better and can make them worse?
I believe that digitization and its ability to disseminate concepts freely, universally and instantly is degrading the quality of our intellectual debate and therefore our progress.
Have you studied a specific case?
That of Black Lives Matter shows that the emotional spiral in the networks of a movement, which in principle was progressive and defended the community from police abuse, ended up degrading and radicalizing it to the point that it even called for the dissolution of the police.
And is that promoted by the networks?
Its acceleration: the activists did not have time for debate, discussion, maturation of ideas... Only for the exasperated motto in the networks, that they were radicalizing.
And do you think it would have been different without networks?
I verified it when interviewing its leaders who recognized –in a calm talk– that, without abuse, the police were necessary. And I believe that, without networks and with analog communication, the Black Lives Matter movement would have achieved greater dissemination of its ideas and greater progress for all. And better police.
