Shut up and dialogue

While waiting at Tim Hortons the other morning for my breakfast sandwich, and after perusing the Ontario government-mandated health warning about its calorie content, I noted an invitation to “carry on the conversation on Twitter, at #myTimHortons.”

I’m old enough to remember when “conversation” meant actually talking to someone. Conversation, when it wasn’t merely “small talk,” used to be cousin to the art of rhetoric, which meant constructing and presenting an argument, then responding to rejoinders. Now, however, invitations to “join the conversation” are either a cover for luring you into social media sites so that you can be marketed to, or — much worse — for bogus political consultation.

One of the most annoying tricks of lazy corporations is, rather than solving their customers’ problems, to direct them to some online “community” where they can chat, and complain, to each other. Meanwhile if you want to have a conversation with Facebook, rather than on Facebook, forget it.

Tim Hortons’ coffee conversation is a fairly innocent marketing campaign. But if you go to the Ontario government website to find out about those calorie figures — which became mandatory for chain restaurants to display at the beginning of this year — you are led into a much-less innocent conversation. “We want your ideas about making health information easier to access,” it reads. “Take our survey.” The more fundamental question of whether governments should be in the health-information business is not up for discussion.

Joining the conversation has become the siren call of the loquacious looter. How can you complain if you get policies you don’t like? You had your chance to put in your two-cents’ worth. The problem is that the policy swamp is so deep and wide that most ordinary people have neither the time nor interest in joining endless political conversations, even if those conversations might have a significant impact on their lives.

The great British conservative intellectual Arthur Seldon noted that the object of politics shouldn’t be to try to involve as many people as possible but as few as necessary, “so that we can get on with the business of improving life instead of perpetually contending about who shall control it.”