WhatsApp

Nicholas Carr, author of the excellent Superbloom, argues that:

Texting turns everyone into a semiliterate twelve-year-old, and presidents, prime ministers, and secretaries general are no exception.

In this article, he opposes the widespread practice of conducting diplomacy via WhatsApp. Which, obviously, does not work.

In general, a medium’s speed of delivery is inversely correlated to the thoughtfulness and nuance of the messages it carries. The growing hegemony of the instant message, it seems fair to say, is not fostering eloquence in either private correspondence or public speaking. Texts are great for quick, offhand exchanges. They debase pretty much everything else.

He draws an example from the aforementioned book to demonstrate that speed in communication has long wreaked havoc on diplomacy.

The arrival of the telegraph in the late XIX century was the hope for an end to war. Nikola Tesla and his rival, Guglielmo Marconi, both researchers dedicated to the development of the wireless telegraph, had this expectation.

In 1912, Marconi declared that the wireless telegraph would “make war impossible.” Two years later, World War I broke out.

He quotes French historian Pierre Granet, referring to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870:

The constant transmission of dispatches between governments and their agents, the rapid dissemination of controversial information among an already agitated public, hastened, if it did not actually provoke, the outbreak of hostilities.

If it is difficult for an individual with a great deal of freedom to choose which groups to participate in, imagine how difficult it must be for statesmen and government officials, who have to deal with unpleasant people and make decisions that impact millions of people? As Carr says at the end of the text,

Successful statecraft requires deliberation, discretion, and discernment, qualities rarely evident in messages thumbed out through apps on phone screens.