Who makes more noise on social networks: who shouts or who tells lies?
In linguistics, noise is any interference, barrier, or disturbance that distorts, alters, or prevents the correct transmission and reception of a message between sender and receiver. In a way, we can say that noise is an alteration of the communication channel, so that the message cannot reach correctly from the sender to the receiver. A door in the middle of two rooms is noise. Lack of phone coverage when we are in Son Macià is noise. A parallel conversation at a table of people dining that sounds louder than your own is noise. Cataracts in the eyes that make it difficult for us to read a message on a screen could even be considered noise.
Today, however, we come to talk about a caste of noise. Most debates that take place today are no longer held in forums, seminars, colloquiums, and round tables, nor even at the most informal tables in cafes. Humans have entered a long time ago into a fifth dimension that transcends even Euclidean spaces and we have decided to discuss our misfortunes, and our miseries, with our faces covered and with bile and vomit coming out of our nostrils within the virtual environment. With social networks, it's a bit like with cars. There are plenty of loudmouths in cars. They insult, gesture, shout, protected by the car's bodywork. More or less what social media loudmouths do. They exaggerate, slander, and lie, under the protection of the invisible bodywork of this toxic and depersonalized world of screens.
In this case, noise affects the pragmatic aspect of communication. How the message is articulated and how it is interpreted. Verbal violence on social networks, especially on Facebook, is as alarming as it is disheartening. Hundreds of anonymous or fake profiles preach, criticize, and practice a haterism that amplifies the noise of the discussion in a way hitherto unknown.
The fault is always with this or that politician. It doesn't matter where the truth lies. Ideology always puts lies first. Demagoguery is a mass sport. And disrespect combines perfectly with visceral hatred.
Everyone, from the most undocumented to the most ignorant, dares today to opine and say absurdities on any issue, and very often without thinking about anything more than the object of each one's particular hatred. That such and such a ministry delays that work it had planned, hey!, we blame the mayor, if he's not one of ours. That the Council approves a subsidy we don't like, hey!, we blame the mayor, if he's not our friend.
But what has the most traction on social media, without a doubt, is the most blatant racism and xenophobia, and also linguistic secessionism. There are profiles (we cannot say people) who comment on absolutely everything they see in a racist way. For them, everything has an explanation linked to immigration or to people who are different from the supremacist standard they believe they represent. All this, moreover, with the explicit and generous support of certain media outlets that, willingly and intentionally, link crime and immigration whenever they have the opportunity.
A separate chapter deserves the infinite string of linguistic absurdities that we have known for so long, that the millennial Mallorcan was already in La Roqueta before the arrival of the Arabs, and who knows if before that of the Romans; that the grammar is from such a year or from such another... The defenders of Mallorcan, as has always happened, write in Spanish, and if they write in their beloved Mallorcan language, they parade an army of grave and circumflex accents that they place using an indecipherable game of Russian roulette. They are usually also incorruptible bilinguals who only use one of the two languages they claim to defend.
A well-known Manacor hater on social media once said that he would block everyone who insulted him or disrespected him as a person. He, however, said that he could tell politicians whatever he found: "Retarded" (sic), "stupid", "slow", "useless" and other adjectives are what he publishes day in and day out on his Facebook accounts when a certain decision or a certain attitude doesn't go well for him.
The misfortune of all this, however, is that all this deafening noise that distorts our narratives is beginning to become virtual. “They are dictators and showmen”, Esteban Sureda told the government team last Monday in the plenary session, minutes before a dear lady reminded us, vocally and looking us in the eye, that “Mallorcan was written in 1935”, as if this were the birth certificate of the language of the 21st-century Mallorcan foners.
Faced with all this, it is necessary that we live facing utopia. From contact between people, necessarily, mutual respect flourishes. In the case we are dealing with today, the ideal for which we should strive, however much we knew it was impossible to reach it, is the return to the streets, to the tables, and to face-to-face conversations. It is not the same to insult hidden behind a fake profile, as it is to hear and look into the eyes of your political 'enemy' or 'adversary' and have to argue. Empathy exists, still.