The most fundamental human act, communication, is entering a crisis that is reshaping human relationality. The stakes are not merely cultural. File Photo by Debbie Hill/UPI | License Photo
The most fundamental human act, communication, is entering a crisis that is reshaping human relationality. The stakes are not merely cultural. Digital platforms and the wider ecosystem of information and communication technologies are changing how we live, how we form judgments, and how we recognize one another.
The biologist Humberto Maturana offered a useful warning: human beings are “self-producing” (autopoietic) systems, and our habits are learned and replicated through interaction. That insight cuts both ways. If conversation is learned socially, then the conditions that shape conversation can also deform it. In a real sense, we become what our conversations become.
More connections, thinner communication
The quantitative growth of connections has not produced a comparable improvement in communication quality. When daily attention is trained on the superficial, people adopt a fleeting focus that rarely asks why events happen.
What once could stimulate self-knowledge, clearer perception, and openness to otherness is now reconfigured by algorithms that reward quick, binary reactions. Approval and disapproval are reduced to fast signals. Over time, that pattern can create closed circles of sameness and deepen polarization.
These dynamics help explain why many citizens now speak of “data neocolonialism” and manipulation of subjectivity. They also explain a growing political tension: some want stronger regulation of networks, while others demand maximal freedom. Governments are beginning to send regulatory signals, but the public debate still suffers from limited information and too few research centers devoted to digital society, especially in Latin America.
Online habits and a shrinking vocabulary
The compulsive presence of people on screens, the infinite scroll, has become a daily routine. DataReportal’s “Digital reports, drawing on Global Web Index (GWI) research, estimate that adult internet users spend roughly six to seven hours online each day on average. The larger point is not a precise number. It is the quiet reorganization of daily life. Hours that once supported face-to-face conversation, reading, or unhurried reflection are increasingly absorbed by short, repetitive stimuli.
A second effect is linguistic. Research on Spanish-language development suggests many native speakers use a far smaller active vocabulary in daily conversation than the words they recognize passively, and the gap appears to be widening among young people, with consequences for listening, reading comprehension, and relational skills such as empathy and emotional connection.
Children are exposed earlier than ever. Many begin using screens between 12 and 24 months. The World Health Organization has urged that children under 2 not be exposed to screens and that older children have strict limits. The reason is simple: early development depends on embodied interaction and language-rich environments. When screens replace those environments, language delay and learning problems become more likely.
What kinds of conversations are we having?
Conversations can be described by function. Some are informational, meant to exchange data. Others are persuasive, designed to influence a judgment. Some are negotiations, aimed at resolving interests. Others sustain basic social bonds.
They can also be described by purpose. Superficial conversations are routine and courteous. They dominate daily life and often avoid complex or personal topics. Analytical conversations break information down, test evidence, and search for cause-and-effect relationships. Reflective conversations require time, introspection, and the willingness to integrate multiple perspectives.
A healthy society needs a balanced mix. The problem today is the drift toward superficiality as the default mode.
The culture of banality
The tendency toward the trivial has produced many critiques. Different thinkers use different terms, but they point to the same condition: a culture that replaces the big questions about being and meaning with consumption and spectacle. Reflection is not simply neglected. It is crowded out.
In that environment, passive acceptance of a preconfigured reality becomes easier. Values weaken. Immediate pleasure becomes a habit, even when it carries consequences. Critical thought is displaced by conformism, and well-being is reduced to consumption. When shared truths are scarce, the void is filled by the desire for external validation. Without deeper anchors, thought becomes pliable in the worst sense and more vulnerable to manipulation.
Neurocapitalism and engineered desire
The deterioration of communication is not accidental, in my view. It reflects a neurocapitalism, an economic logic that monetizes human attention and neurological response, moving from “being” to “having,” and now toward “appearing.” This is relational engineering: neuromarketing and persuasive design aimed at the subconscious through strategies that combine big data, emotional cues, and story-driven content.
Consider common tactics that many users recognize from daily life. Notifications create urgency. Fear of missing out keeps people checking. “Social proof” pressures them to align with whatever is trending.
These techniques do not merely sell products. They can also sell identities and attitudes. They limit autonomous decision-making by converting attention into a managed resource. The system thrives on distracted subjects who react quickly and purchase compulsively.
Recovering interiority and dialogue
Against this materialism, a practical need arises: to recover the inner dimensions of the human person within a neurocapitalist ecosystem. Thinking and reflection are not luxuries. They are forms of resistance and self-defense.
Silence is not emptiness. It allows relationships to regain depth. It helps us move beyond banality, whether in harmful or beneficial ways. Public life, too, needs this recovery. Jürgen Habermas argued that communicative action, the search for mutual understanding through arguments and agreements, is the basis for a just and rational society. That vision cannot survive if our public conversation is reduced to algorithmic submission.
The boundary between the human and the technological is becoming blurred. The challenge is to recover the capacity for dialogue, build awareness, and practice self-control. The cure for the paradox of isolation lies in what is often overlooked: human interiority.
If we want to contain these tendencies, we must protect conversation itself and preserve cognitive autonomy. That begins with reflection, critical thinking, and active listening. It also requires concrete choices by policymakers, educators and platform designers: age-appropriate design standards, clearer defaults for minors, and school curricula that teach media literacy and slow reading.
The technology that shapes our conversations need not be ungovernable. But governing it requires that we first recover the inner resources to see it clearly.
Carlos Cantero is a Chilean academic at the International University of La Rioja in Spain and the author of Digital Society: Reason and Emotion. An international lecturer, adviser, and consultant, he focuses on adaptability in the digital society, ethics, social innovation, and human development. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
