Is a Return to Public Trust Possible?
Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope by Jeffrey Bilbro (Baylor University Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Stephanie Bennett
Public communication is broken. Seemingly innocent discussions erupt into canceled friendships, expired marriages, distrust of government, and business liaisons that no longer work. Everybody’s talking about it or not talking about it. Does anyone really know how and why our public conversations aren’t healthy anymore?
Although these questions are not posited directly in Jeffrey Bilbro’s new book, Words For Conviviality, the author puts pen to paper to offer readers sound reasons for the apparent breakdown of social trust and respectful dialogue. Within its pages, we find deep historical context and gain a sharper perspective on the roots of the current chaos. Among other things, many observers believed that the emergence of digital media would prove to accomplish something much more encouraging to a participatory dialogue than it has. We were promised a vast sea of information – knowledge without end --- along with an open and accessible internet, greater freedom to make creative choices, and a livelier public sphere. But a healthy public discourse, one that is more conducive to critical thinking, open questions, shared knowledge, and higher participation is not what happened.
Bilbro delves into the reasons for this using a media ecological backdrop to unpack the influence and effects of each era’s dominant mode of public communication. He deftly uncovers layer upon layer of connection between innovation and social change. He lays the foundation for his project in the first section of the book with 26 theses. Though there is no door and no nails, Bilbro reveals his concerns as he hammers out the list of each notion for disputation. With this wink to Luther, the author provides a handy structure that helps the reader gain an immediate sense of what lies ahead. Bilbro’s first thesis sets the tone for the evidence to come, wherein he writes: “Language is primarily a relational (rather than a representational) technology. Words articulate our relationships to God, other humans, our environments, and even ourselves” (25).
Paying attention to language is not only a mainstay in the pursuit of knowledge, but also a way of being in the world: Words are important because they help shape our reality, providing a nuanced response to our formidable anthropology, known also as the human condition. Despite the uncertainties of life, we have two choices: Words can be valued and used with intention and respect to shape a civilized culture, or they can be seen as superfluous, only to be copied, cloned, and turned into data sets, algorithms, and percentage points for decisions to be made with precision, efficiency, and distance from the angst of so much unknowing.
As one might expect of an English professor, Bilbro places weight on the way language is used to shape meaning. Drawing largely from the poets, essayists, and other notables whose work magnified the potential of words, in chapter one we meet Ralph Waldo Emerson who imagined himself as a “transparent eyeball.” Bilbro suggests the visual metaphor is connected to the industrial print culture of which Emerson was a part, where privileging “the visual to the detriment of the body and its other senses, elevates the present at the expense of memory and tradition, and promises unmediated access to truth” (32). This, not unlike the algorithmic hierarchies that have arisen in the present digital culture, has given way to further reductionism of what it means to be human. How does the author make this comparison? “Both grow frustrated with the messy, fleshy, complexity of analogue reality and reduce it – either to an apparition to see through or to a set of abstract data points; they claim such means will allow them to know other people better than people know themselves” (34).
As the book proceeds, each chapter features another notable American literary figure, positing connections between those ideas that became cultural commonplaces and the dominant media that emerged alongside. Bilbro proceeds to unpack the layers of media technologies through the work of these literati, spending a good bit of time early in the book analyzing the connection between Walt Whitman’s poetry and the often-myopic focus the poet had on his readers. Imagining them in a multiplicity of ways, Whitman envisioned his readers as his friends – people who really knew him. Bilbro suggests it was the availability of a pocket-sized book helped to create the perception that Whitman’s readers were capable somehow of assuaging the existential pain of his loneliness. He explains: “The technological capacity to print his book in a format that allowed people to carry it with them as they went about their lives and work enabled Whitman to imagine not just his words but himself travelling with all these prospective comrades” (81).
This cannot help but put one in mind of the mobile phone revolution and the current way we take our office with us, our friends with us, our families, . . . each there, but not there. One example of this is Whitman’s determined belief that he could forge a unified community by bringing together fans of his work. As Bilbro reminds us, the poet’s obsession with his fandom came directly out of the industrial print age and is not unlike the social media of our day. Whitman believed that “books could convey his person to a multitude of readers and thereby forge a unifying and emotional community” (85). Here, the Grove City professor likens the limitations of paper and pen to the current domination of social media and suggests that “no technology can forge a moral community between solitary poet and a mass fandom. Indeed, the early decades of the digital revolution have only reaffirmed the limitations of communities shaped by asymmetric intimacy between a crowd of fans and a celebrity poet, entertainer, or influencer (86).
Bilbro’s argument makes sense when analyzing data collected from across the country by U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, who, in 2023 declared “loneliness an epidemic.” This is completely counterintuitive to some, especially because these digital media offer so many opportunities for connection and conversation. One must wonder how Americans across all demographics can be suffering with incapacitating loneliness. Although Bilbro’s arguments never push toward direct causation, the historical patterns he points out are clear to see. Connection between the dominant media of each era and the changing social strata is not coincidental.
By the time Bilbro nears the end of his treatise, the subtitle becomes clear: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope. In the third section of the book, he attempts to provide some light for the bleak reality of a dark and unhealthy media landscape. His words offer the fragrance of hope, and as that hope begins to waft from the pages, it flows steadily in the direction of personal responsibility. Surely, the public must be more intentional about cultivating a discriminating, critical ear, but Bilbro’s solutions are even more fundamental. Keeping a healthy distance from the high-powered, perception-altering rhythm of social media and artificial intelligence programs is a start. Such distance, he suggests, can keep us from being absorbed by the mind-altering, reality-bending algorithms that are becoming integrated and completely entangled in every sector of society, from family life and education to medicine, commerce, politics, and community life. Being more intentional about our choices is a start, but he goes further.
In chapter10, aptly titled “Walkers,” we see a definitive nod to the work of media scholar and social theorist, Ivan Illich [1996-2002], whose 1973 book, Tools for Conviviality undoubtedly informs Bilbro’s weighty discussion (165). His indebtedness to philosophers of technology and communication continues with mentions of Albert Borgman, Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, and other notable media scholars. Here, Bilbro enters the waters of the emerging tide of media ecology, first situating the problem and solution as dialectical, requiring active resistance to the substitution of technology for human function; then drawing from the work of another social theorist, the French philosopher and theologian, Jacques Ellul [1912-1994]. Ellul addresses similar societal dysfunction. Like Bilbro, he avoids false imperatives such as the Luddite approach of complete dismissal and avoidance of technology, or—on the other end of the spectrum – surrendering oneself to technological supremacy.
Both Bilbro and Ellul inch toward solution by suggesting that along with a step away from total acquiescence to the technological imperative, one’s life choices may offer counterpoint to such extremes. Ellul bemoans the way human subjectivity, mystery, and beauty have become subservient to technical necessity and particularly how these very elements of what it means to be human counteract the thinking that ‘technology will fix itself.’ This thinking is at work in the ideological premise that fosters technique – Ellul’s word for the unrelenting force and enslaving drive toward greater efficiency in all things.
Bilbro continues to draw from a media ecology framework as he calls up Neil Postman’s work, which cautions against the uncritical adoption of new media, and his now classic, Amusing ourselves to Death, (1985; 161) which reminds us to use our technologies with wisdom. To do so, we must keep a healthy distance from the all-absorbing dimension of social media and now, artificial intelligence, which has already become nearly as invisible as paper and pen did once print technologies became dominant. The hope lies largely in walking with a particular mindset, something he calls “sauntering” (167). A return to simpler, less crazed days is not possible, but a revitalization of decency and conviviality in the public sphere is yet within reach. However, the “saunter” is still a precursor to solution.
The actual starting gate is something as basic as true friendship. This is not having five hundred friends on Facebook or TikTok. Rather, it is a way of being in the world that values people over machines, and a major part of this is to regain trust in our fellow sojourners. This means taking time to weave the strong cords of friendship, investing in relationships of depth and meaning rather than clicks, lists, or subscribers. As Bilbro quotes, back in 1974, Kenneth Arrow wrote the following in The Limits of Organization, “Trust is an important lubricant of a social system. It is extremely efficient; it saves a lot of trouble to have a fair degree of reliance on other people’s words. Unfortunately, this is not a commodity which can be bought very easily. If you have to buy it, you already have some doubts about what you have bought.” This, of course, is not very easy in a world where large learning models are mimicking the voices we trust most and the technological mandate of efficiency is touted as the most important value in the land. The reason friendship works such wonders in building the trust needed to live in a dignified, respectful posture toward one’s neighbor is precisely in its inefficiency. It is here Bilbro returns to Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and other thinkers to help present-day readers find our way out of the woods.
In the end, Bilbro charges his readers to take up the role of “cross bearer,” admonishing us to use the emerging technologies responsibly. “If we take up this convivial posture, we will look for ways to use social media and other digital tools to bear witness to our fellow pilgrims of the truths we have glimpsed and to listen in turn, to the meaning that their lives bear” (213).
Full circle we come, sauntering back to Bilbro’s first thesis: “Language is primarily a relational (rather than a representational) technology” (25). The communication breakdown illustrated by polarized speech and disrespect for human dignity is not present because of a lack of eloquence. It is all about relationships. May we be wise enough to know that our technological acumen cannot replace interpersonal communication, and that algorithmic magic will never replace compassion and true community.
