It put ideological enemies in a room together, where they spoke to one another in paragraphs instead of one-liners. Sasha Chapin,

Honest disagreement might ruffle some feathers, but the easy point-scoring of social media is no way to have a debate

The charm of Twitter is that you can hear the voices of presidents, imaginary dogs, your funny relatives and your best friends all in the same place. At any moment, epigrams from Ru-Paul coexist with updates about South African firefighters arriving in Alberta. Sometimes it’s a total waste of time, but other times it’s an informative ragbag of shouts and whispers.

Beyond being entertaining, Twitter offers the promise of dialogue with people you’d never otherwise communicate with. Except that promise is rarely fulfilled in a meaningful way. More often than not the dialogue ends up being an unenlightening shouting match.

Let me give you an example: Last month in the Walrus, a story was published that identified my writing as part of a problem. The piece was a criticism of confessional writing about culture — writing that goes “here are my feelings about The Tragically Hip, which I have because of my mother and so on.” It included a brief quotation from an essay I’d written about the intersection of my favourite music and my puny sorrows.

Obviously I had some disagreements with the piece. And maybe, in an ideal world, my peers would have risen to my defence and engaged with the person who wrote the article in a meaningful way.

That didn’t happen. Instead, the author was bombarded with angry tweets which had nothing to do with the piece. For example: some tweets implied that his work was a reaction to the new wave of feminist culture writing, even though the writers criticized in the piece were all men. It was also implied that the author was covertly advancing racist sentiments, because the criticism of cultural autobiography could be a reaction to how people of colour are increasingly writing about their personal experiences in venues that previously catered to a white perspective. No one mentioned that the writers criticized in the piece were mostly white. Most of the criticisms — which were retweeted and liked as though it was a point tally in a video game — were non-sequiturs at best.

Of course, this was just a minor social media tussle that was forgotten as quickly as it emerged. But, it’s still indicative of Twitter’s flawed 140 character format, which is best suited to short, sharp, vituperative cultural commentary. There aren’t enough characters to provide nuance and few have the patience for context — you have to go for the jugular.

That metaphor might seem too primal, but our desire for the kind of social approval that retweets and likes provide is hard-wired into our brain. According to a 1996 paper published by Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, there are two systems in the brain that make rewards feel rewarding: the dopamine system and the opioid system. Dopamine is the neurochemical that makes you like and want things, while opioids are the relief that comes afterwards.

When someone retweets you, your desire for confirmation from your peers is fulfilled. The pleasant sense of relief that follows encourages you to work the virtual room, to offer the most immediate, pleasing platitudes to your friends so that you can gain approval from your social group again and again, and essentially, score more and more points.

This doesn’t make anybody smarter because it encourages beliefs that are unchallenged and almost always on- brand. And opinions that are never challenged, no matter how sacred, are brittle. If we truly want to seek out differing perspectives and challenge our commonly held beliefs we should welcome opportunities to become malleable, to wonder if we’re wrong about stuff, to entertain some flexibility — if only temporarily.

Maybe it’s sometimes healthy to have our beliefs intelligently attacked. At the end of a good disagreement, you come out with a more robust sense of what you believe. This doesn’t mean welcoming men’s rights activists who pelt feminists with juvenile complaints all over Twitter. That’s not intelligent disagreement. It means being aware of how Twitter’s format combines with our own hard- wiring to promote simple ideologies and pat, smarmy barbs. Instead of promising interaction, you get intellectual sniping, which encourages little more than defensiveness.

You might say that this is the way media has always worked. Even when newspapers were still the dominant news medium, people read the ones that promoted the perspectives with which they agreed. But there are strong counterexamples.

Take the vintage talk show Firing Line, hosted by William F. Buckley. Buckley was an ardent conservative who held honest, engaging debates with intellectuals with differing perspectives. He talked with Christopher Hitchens, then a strident Marxist. He hosted Allen Ginsberg, who read a poem written on LSD. It didn’t resemble a conservative ideologue’s Twitter feed in the slightest. It entertained risk. It put ideological enemies in a room together, where they spoke to one another in paragraphs instead of one-liners.

The infrastructure of social media is such that easy fixes of dopamine are constantly on offer. We curate our own feeds to the point where the opinions being offered are completely harmless. Then, we join in the song of the flock of people who believe more or less exactly the same as us, only occasionally pausing to participate in a pecking party against those who don’t.

We’ve created a place where it’s completely rational to never challenge the status quo, to never say anything off- message or off- brand; where notifications on a phone are all one needs to feel the full embrace of all the correct-thinking humans.