| In a conversation, the influence goes both ways: if you try to persuade me of a political point of view, I can do a number of things: (and whether these are valid or not, they will impact the flow of argument, and the success of the persuasion) - I can suggest you're biased - I can try to change the subject - I can decide you're a bad person for holding the "wrong" views - I can directly argue against your point - I can attack the structure of your argument - I can make an emotional appeal regarding why I must hold my point of view - etc .... In these and other ways, I can push back and modify how much I'm influenced by a one-to-one argument. I won't always be successful, for sure. But sometimes as well the persuasion go will go the other way, and I will influence you. This is not true on social media because another power is dictating which one-to-one conversations may happen in the first place, and then loading the deck with idea before those one-to-one conversations even happen. Further, social media changes the scale of communications. If we worked together, and saw each other regularly, we could mediate each other's influence, place boundaries, etc. With social media, there is always a crowd of strangers: too many people converse with, know, and set boundaries with. There are obviously other distinctions between one-to-one conversation and social media, but I particularly wanted to talk about the key differences here: lack of real back and forth, and scale. |