Constructive Dialogs – Systemic Interdependencies of Associating and Disassociating Communication

Philipp Belcredi, Tilia Stingl De Vasconcelos Guedes

If you have ever tried to follow a discussion on a controversial topic on any social media platform such as Facebook or Twitter, you may have noticed that even the smallest deviation from the majority opinion can lead to the exclusion of the person from the ongoing discussion.

Terms like cancel culture, online bashing, Twitter storm, etc., also describe this kind of disassociating communication. However, every ostracism decreases the size of the remaining in-group, to the point where society could end up fragmented into multitudes of small social systems.

On one hand, a democratic society in which a dialog is only possible in smaller units tends to be far more complex and thus far less capable of acting than a society that favors a broader discourse. On the other hand, social interaction that allows and incorporates many different opinions, views, propositions, and conclusions seems to require a large effort. For an open-minded discourse to succeed, our communication shall transcend both the content dialog (first-order) and the meta-dialog (second-order) so as to set the dialog in relation to its context.

In this paper we spotlight the differences between associating and disassociating communication. We also use the viewpoint of social systems theory to explore not only answers to questions about the consequences of avoiding responsibility for the quality of our dialogs, but also the solutions a distinction-based approach offers to communication challenges.

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