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The splendor of communication imposed on the entire world beginning in the middle of the past century was soon overshadowed by a radical skepticism. The criticisms assumed two directions. The first objected that if everyone were given the right to speak, that is, if in the house, the school, and the community, a dialogue of free and egalitarian truth were promoted, all the authorities would lose power, and consequently, anarchy and licentiousness would ensue. (This was said in the sixties to counter the hippie movement and the so-called “active” schools.)
On the other hand, as for the mass media, it was denounced that the opposite was true of them: they were not free or plural, they were not in favor of egalitarian expression, nor did they facilitate the democratic exchange of ideas. Instead, they were subordinate to economic and political authorities, who manipulated the contents according to their interests. Mass communication was not exchanged among parties, just the unilateral transmission of messages. The only fundamental differences between one television station and another, for example, were those necessary for commercial competition. The viewer could only turn on the device, change the channel, and turn off the device, but had no chance of engaging in an authentic dialogue.
However, this kind of manipulation was more profound than most of the criticisms expressed. The problem went beyond just giving the floor to some and taking it away from others. Imposing on people the thinking of the powerful was not the worst. Much more harmful (and much easier) was to repeat continuously only what the public wanted to hear, i.e., to affirm and reaffirm endlessly what most viewers (the masses) thought about themselves, their families, society, and life in general.
The ever-increasing number of celebrities who appeared on television, radio, or the press, giving advice, and issuing opinions, did not talk about themselves, did not present their actual way of thinking and living. Instead, they were obliged to repeat the rigorously stipulated scripts assigned to them (usually by contract), proscribing what they could say and what they could not. These “personalities” were in no way open to dialogue and confrontation with the ideas, feelings, and values of their “admirers.” They became partisans of popular beliefs and traditions that they often despised and enthusiastically advertised commercial products that they had never consumed or ever would.
The media did not show a world different from the one that the public already knew. They did not include other stories, other dramas, another type of humor, other problems, or other ways of entertaining and having fun. It did not interest them to speak about another possible life. In a word, they disdained all educational roles. It seems that the proclamation of a Mexican television mogul who one day exclaimed, “If people want shit, shit I’m going to give them,” is true (yes, with those words).
Obviously, by giving the viewers what they wanted, they created the feeling of taking them into account, and the viewers returned the favor by depositing their trust in the media. Thus, these media illuminated by their wealth of “stars” became true representatives of the people (coming to be called “the fourth estate”). The public felt expressed through the media, that their own ideas circulated in them, that the media presented how they approved or disapproved of others’ actions. Thus, by consuming the products advertised, the public showed and reaffirmed their loyalty. In short, each spectator was convinced that through the media, he actively participated in social life.
But it was not so. That lack of honesty (an ingredient without which all communication is a fallacy) left the viewer alone with his own ideas, believing that the entire world agreed with him and that his life mattered even to the most famous and “exemplary.” But in reality, he was just communicating with himself without noticing that more and more, he remained alone.
They say that the worst bad is the false good. For those of us who believe (along with the French psychoanalyst Francoise Doltó) that communication is the primary mission of the human being on this planet, few things are more discriminatory and crueler than systematically being made to believe that our point of view matters to them when it does not.
Social Media
In the context of this false global “communication,” the internet was well-received as if only it and its electronic network were missing to complete the expected unity of the world. The height of deception (the deception of a being who, believing to communicate, only hears his own ideas) was attained with social networks. In this tool that would supposedly facilitate the encounter of all the planet’s inhabitants, many saw – and still see – the greatest enemy of humankind in the new century.
I do not exaggerate. In the famous documentary, The Social Dilemma, a real army of ex-creators of these platforms came out to denounce them. They reveal a network where each human being receives a package of truths, stimuli, and satisfiers specially designed for them by an exponentially powerful system that has access to all his information and information about everyone (obviously without realizing any of this). That network only offers the individual what products and services reflecting him; it does not give him anything that contradicts him (at least, not seriously), nothing that requires him to question himself and change, nothing that communicates with him, nothing that educates him in a deep sense.
On the contrary, the system makes his narrow, individual world appear as his whole reality. The social network users believe that they have access to a universal offering of subjects and can choose from among them when, in fact, the social media are restricting the menu without telling them. By immersing himself in the net, one only sees himself. As always happens in front of the mirror, feeling fully confident, he undresses freely, revealing himself as he is (with everything he feels, thinks, reads, looks, desires, eats for breakfast). The system appreciates this and uses it to know him better and continues to recycle to him what, as we say, is exclusively pertinent. Thus, thanks to networks, he is destined to talk increasingly only to himself and become an enthusiastic interlocutor of his own echo.
What kind of community can all of us individuals who live like this create? As the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han explains, through the abuse of “Like/Me gusta” and the networks, we human beings have created a society of people who are together but not united, a plurality of isolated individuals where we are all “me” but not “we.”
What about school?
The school has also been threatened by this tendency of social networks to create individual packets of reality and turn dialogue into a monologue where everything different is expelled. Is it not true that at a certain point, the students of some schools began to talk about teachers being there to meet their demands for knowledge? They (the students) could choose what they wanted to learn, and the teachers had to provide: “I want you to teach me this. Yes, I’m going to tell you what you’re going to explain to me.” Since then, many of us keep wondering if school education could be replaced by a self-teaching in which everyone choose
s only what he wants to learn and can find in electronic media. In such a context, the school would either disappear or simply become an information provider, organized per what everyone requires).
However, considering the new criticisms, we can also think that in such a “school,” students would only believe they were constructing themselves. In reality, they would simply be acquiring skills to be increasingly what the system expects of them, i.e., to “self-exploit,” as Byung-Chul Han says.
Can we really do without an ancestral type of school where communication is understood as an “opening to the other,” a learning community where, in the exchange with others, one goes beyond one’s personality, and where dialogue is the way to strengthen individual identity and social unity? I will continue to talk about it in this series about communication in the school ritual.
(To be continued)
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
Disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The viewpoints expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints, and official policies of Tecnológico de Monterrey.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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