Activism - Short bites. Episode #10. Richard D. Barlett

Name: Activism - Short bites. Episode #10. Richard D. Barlett
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T20:56:16+00:00
Duration: 1 min 46 s
Channel: Virginie Glaenzer
Description: In this interview segment, the speakers discuss how digital transformation has shifted societies from singular, shared narratives—typified by…

30 Mar 2020 · 2 min

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1:46

In this interview segment, the speakers discuss how digital transformation has shifted societies from singular, shared narratives—typified by small‑village life and common news sources—to a pluralistic information environment where countless individuals generate and consume stories simultaneously. The host reflects on personal experience moving from New Zealand to Europe, illustrating the hyper‑mobile, hyper‑connected world that fuels this change. They argue that the erosion of trust in experts stems from this multiplicity of narratives and that building a tolerant, pluralistic society requires a baseline of shared values—such as not harming one another and caring for the environment—while acknowledging that humans are not naturally equipped for profound tolerance of extreme differences. The conversation concludes that there is no clear roadmap for cultivating such tolerance, making it a major societal challenge.

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I can jump on that question of the digital transformation and what it's got to do with everything else that's happening. My sense is that part of what's happening with— when you point to the lack of trust in experts, I think part of that is about a transition that's underway from singular narratives to pluralistic narratives. So like, I'm 35, which is not that old. And when I was young, me and my family lived in a small village. We went to the same church. We watched the same news as all of the, you know, our village all were kind of consuming the same story or else there were maybe 2 or 3 different stories to filter the world through. And then once we started to get online, And now, I've moved away from New Zealand and I live in Europe, which is a hyper-mobile society where everyone is moving all the time and connecting in different places.
We're getting stories from so many different sources simultaneously, and everyone has the ability to produce their own stories as well.
We're no longer in this broadcast moment.
We're in this interactive— everything's going in all directions.
And for me, with my philosophy, I guess, I prefer to live in a pluralistic society where there's lots of different ways of understanding understanding the world and we don't really have to agree on some fundamental truth, apart from some crucial boundaries. I'd love to live in that pluralistic society, but I don't think that we are born ready for it. I don't think we're born ready for a profound kind of tolerance of extreme difference, for really different values.
Like I say, I think we have to agree on some basics about, let's try not to hurt each other and leave the environment better than we found it. There's a few kinds of things like that, but beyond that, I don't think we're going to really have that much agreement, which means our sense of what expertise is and what kind of stories we can trust, I think really has to diversify.
And that's a big growing up project, and we don't have a very clear roadmap of how to get there.