SDF

The Beginning of
Change
: Is that REALLY
what you think?

A Multi-pluralizing world, a divided society

In civil discourse today, engagement with the issues has taken a back seat to personal attacks and attempts to undermine credibility. Constructive debate and efforts to find common ground have given way to quarreling and attitudes of mutual contempt and antagonism. Even while “the individual” and “diversity” are championed as more important than ever, partisan dynamics and group agendas persist, with none able to claim immunity to their influence. Hence the prevalence of people who seem exceedingly reasonable with respect to one issue, but on another, prove to be rigidly bound to the logic of their group. While social conflict is nothing new, in Korea – and around the world – it is taking on increasingly extreme, polarizing dimensions. So the question emerges: can we in Korea, and we who share the Earth, learn what it means to live and thrive together?

Smartphones, social media, and algorithms
Sweeping away our time, our thoughts, and our rights

Technological advancements have made it possible for us to freely voice our ideas and connect with people we wouldn't have otherwise, offering mutual support and finding strength in numbers. At the same time, as algorithms continue to feed us automatic recommendations of content tailored to our tastes, confirmation bias is becoming more pervasive, and our existing views more firmly entrenched. Social media is increasingly becoming an echo chamber for interactions among already like-minded people. The media seems more interested in the controversies around issues than the issues themselves. Students at school are learning to compete before they learn to empathize. Giant platforms use their knowledge of our likes and dislikes for profit. What has happened in the meantime to our capacity for interaction with people who are different from us, and to our ability to listen to ideas that do not align with our own? Are we depriving ourselves of the opportunity to be seen and understood by another? More worryingly, are we being robbed of the essential right to live free from coercion and manipulation, in whatever form?

Our troubles are compounded by the fact that we do more and more of our communicating on devices rather than face to face. It is becoming easier to forget that there is a person on the other side of our phone or computer. It is also becoming easier to grow numb to their emotions, and even their suffering. And thanks to the convenience of non-face-to-face communication, people who found the inflexible and at times hierarchical norms of face-to-face communication frustrating are discovering that they don’t have to face “different” people at all.

The search for a new way to live together
Step one: asking the questions that matter

We at SDF 2019 want to press “pause” on our default mode of listening only to what we want to hear, and looking only at what we want to see. Our objective is to confront the conflicts exploding across our society head on, in order to discover the imperatives and the truths that lie at their root. In addition to doing our own experimenting, we will explore the efforts and attempts that have already been made, in the hopes that this will help us discover how you and I, along with the media, politicians, businesses, and schools, can learn to live together in spite of our different views and ideas – not fighting over our differences, but not ignoring them, or one another, either. Change has always begun with the small questions. The time for us to ask those questions is now.