Last week I participated in a workshop organised by colleagues at swisspeace in Geneva, looking at social media and mediation. Under the #CyberMediation project and linking with the UN’s Digital Mediation Toolkit, we spent two days looking for ways to bridge the complex worlds of peace mediation and social media. Here are some of the thoughts that crossed my mind during the two days:
‘Tech is just a tool’ is a good motto when it comes to defending the need for face-to-face interaction and empathy in mediation, but it takes away the profound impact that social media of all types have had in social communications. Mediators are now part of a world of immediate communications and accelerated social dynamics, where tech is hardly just a tool but an infrastructure. (Disclaimer: I’ve written a whole chapter about this which will come out soon with Bristol University Press).
I think ‘is mediation dead?’, as I sip on my third coffee of the morning. Most of the points we discussed are not related directly to mediation, but more to mediation-support and broader peacebuilding… I think the answer is “absolutely not but maybe yes”. Either the coffee or the tech have blurred the lines: as mediation specialists continue speaking of confidentiality, high-level discussions and linking the different mediation tracks, conversations are taking place online with little to no connection to mediation processes.
Discussing technology and peace often comes with mentions to banning social media accounts, limiting the use of certain words, countering-propaganda and other guerrilla tactics that clash with the deeper nature of mediation. Conversations tend to reach a deadlock when “freedom of speech” and “long-term” come up.
Further, most of the solutions mediators come up with to bridge these two seemingly-unbridgeable worlds are short-term, hard to sustain and extremely demanding of people’s time: coding thousands of Facebook posts to detect extremism, engaging directly with large-scale social media discussions, and so on. Yet when options to facilitate the work such as “artificial intelligence” or “machine learning” are mentioned, mediators often close their doors, scared — and rightfully so — that machines will do away with the necessary capacity for human sensitivity.
We are great at discussing specific examples of success and specific examples of failure in the application of online apps to enhance peace processes. In general, however, we are not great at discussing the big-picture and how social media supposes a change in the way we formulate our identity in a society that has largely deprived us of one. The last two weeks in Spain are a clear example: youth have taken to the streets of Barcelona, Gerona, Tarragona and other cities in Catalonia (as well as Madrid, Vitoria or Bilbao, among others), most of them with one item that keeps them connected: a smartphone. Beyond their informative use, selfies, live broadcasts and tweets about the protests, the smartphone has become a way of reaffirming one’s identity as part of ‘one or the other side’.
Every time we discuss peace and technology I leave with the profoundly unsettling realization that 80% (not a scientific calculation) of our communications go through a single company. 99.99% (still not scientific, but probably just about right) go through 3–4 companies. It is both uncomfortable to think about that, personally, and complex to imagine what it means for a mediation process, professionally.
Discussions on social media, online communications and mediation are in their infancy but rapidly becoming richer and more complex. Meetings like the one organised by swisspeace are step in the right direction: mediators cannot escape social media.
In 2021, mediatEUr became Conciliation Resources EU/mediatEUr.