Plastic Interactions

Observing online conversation with the analytical support of AI can serve as an excellent sociological laboratory. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) we gather with Promezio Datarooms correlate sentiment, emotions, demographic data, and multimedia content, providing a snapshot of the contemporary modes of interacting with others.

How We Interact Today

Interactions, especially digital ones, are characterized by immediacy and brevity that often condense and sometimes distort our way of relating. New communication habits, often devoid of the richness of human contact and the complexity of non-verbal language, are reduced to quick, sometimes superficial exchanges where empathy and deep understanding give way to instant and polarized reactions.

Due to habit, this new communication of symbolism, symbols, and unexpressed intentions has extended its influence even to physical interactions. The habit of lacking human contact has also infected forms of interaction that involve it, like face-to-face conversations. This contamination results in fragmented dialogue, a mosaic of overlapping and clashing voices, devoid of identity and trapped in an isolated cycle that fails to communicate with the outside world. A plastic communication, conveying nothing.

Components of Plastic Interactions

Let's summarize the defining characteristics of plastic interactions.

Partisanship

In this public display of intentions, opinions are polarized; pushed towards extremes, leaving little room for the middle ground, for mediation and mutual understanding. In this arena, not taking a side equates to being inconsequential, to non-existence.

Factionalism

Interactions become factional. Groups, parties, each with its own flag and creed. Factionalism leads to harsh, unending competition, a bitter confrontation that results in contempt for the other. There's no room for productive listening, ideals cease to exist, and opinions take their place, becoming etched in stone.

Self-Marketing

In this context, interaction becomes a tool for self-promotion, a showcase where being is reduced to a brand, a product to be sold in the attention market. Can such self-centered communication still be called interaction?

Intolerance

Critical confrontations are poorly tolerated. There is no margin for error, no chance for mistakes. Any deviation from the opinion of the information bubble becomes a reason for violent personal attacks. Hate speech becomes the currency, a way to assert one's position by excluding and delegitimizing the other.

Otherism

Critical confrontations are poorly tolerated. There is no margin for error, no chance for mistakes. Any deviation from the opinion of the information bubble becomes a reason for violent personal attacks. Hate speech becomes the currency, a way to assert one's position by excluding and delegitimizing the other.

Butism

The tendency towards "butism" reflects a conditioned agreement: "I would agree, but...". It's the expression of partial consent, an approval that unsuccessfully hides a reservation, an unspoken criticism. In the absence of ideologies, or rather in the presence of fragmented micro-ideologies, any thematic confrontation is bypassed: either one settles for "butism" or resorts to personal attacks.

Digital Socratic Communication

Socrates, with his maieutic method, is the perfect example of how communication focused at understanding is most effective. He doesn't teach directly but asks questions to guide others in finding the most relevant truth of the context. This way, the interlocutor is stimulated to think and create their own ideology. Socrates believed that true understanding came from inside, not from outside. This approach promotes deeper, more personal learning.

This ancient approach might be a possible solution to the modern problem of plastic interactions, because it's not a technological issue, but fundamentally a sociological one. Humanity and mutual understanding are often sacrificed on the altar of speed and visibility. Socratic communication is practicable both online and offline, in private and professional settings. It's a social approach and simultaneously a will to restore meaning to our words and actions.