Words for Conviviality

Verbal arts for the common good

Ivan Illich’s slim, provocative book Tools for Conviviality argues that as industrial technologies mature, they tend to become dehumanizing. Rather than advocating a return to some particular, pre-industrial state of affairs, however, Illich explores ways that individuals and communities might turn such tools to more communal, restorative ends. My new book’s title, Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope, nods to Illich’s classic. I apply his basic approach to the industrialization of textual technologies in nineteenth-century America in an effort to find wisdom for how we might navigate our own rapidly changing digital media ecosystem. 

As Illich and others observe, when industrial technologies replace traditional tools, there’s an initial inflection point as these technologies produce significant improvements. At some later inflection point, however, as the growth of these technological systems violates various human limits, “the marginal utility of further” professionalization and industrialization decreases. Think of how germ theory led to new medical institutions and practices that significantly improved health outcomes. Now, however, medical costs spiral out of control even as life expectancy plateaus or declines. Illich traces similar trajectories in other spheres such as civil engineering and education. 

Crossing the second inflection point causes real disorientation as the optimism that the earlier improvements generated now leads many to overlook the growing problems. Consider, for instance, how this pattern plays out in the context of digital communications technologies. As the Arab Spring swept across the Middle East in 2011, some commentators proclaimed that social media would inaugurate democracy around the world. A few years later those hopes were dashed. As activist Wael Ghonim admitted in 2015, “I once said, ‘If you want to liberate a society, all you need is the Internet.’ I was wrong.” Now the conventional wisdom seems to be that Facebook will destroy democracy.

The truth, however, is that the internet will neither save democracy nor destroy it. It will neither ineluctably spread truth, universal understanding, and love nor ineluctably sow misinformation, polarization, and hatred. When we’re blinded by technological determinism—in either its optimistic or its pessimistic variant—we neglect the possibilities that always exist for more convivial technological practices and arrangements. As Illich argues, “convivial reconstruction” remains possible in a highly technological society; it depends not on “the regression to inefficient tools [but] on the degree to which society protects the power of individuals and of communities to choose their own styles of life through effective, small-scale renewal.” 

Illich’s conviction is that while technologies developed in an industrial context tend to concentrate power, reduce personal freedom, and amplify inequalities, alternative technological and social arrangements remain possible. In particular, it is possible to use even advanced, powerful tools to enlarge “the range of each person’s competence, control, and initiative.” He names this “modern society of responsibly limited tools” a convivial one. In doing so, Illich gestures to the word’s Latin root, referring not just to feasting together but also living together. Such a society requires its members to discipline their use of tools in order to foster “personal relatedness,” “friendship,” and “joyfulness.”

Using powerful verbal tools in a convivial manner requires shifting away from the industrial mode or the device paradigm and taking up verbal work in the more disciplined manner of those who engage in focal practices. This distinction between a device paradigm and focal things or practices comes from the philosopher Albert Borgmann (who is in turn drawing on Martin Heidegger) and parallels Illich’s contrast between industrially structured technologies and convivially organized tools. Under the industrial device paradigm, users value tools and techniques that make accomplishing tasks easy and frictionless. By contrast, focal things and practices reward disciplined, skillful, and responsible engagement. 

Think, for example, of the difference between streaming music on Spotify and playing a violin. Or the difference between prompting ChatGPT and actually writing an essay. Or the difference between consuming a TED talk and wrestling with a Socratic dialogue. Or the difference between following someone on social media and conversing with that person over a meal. The distinction is not between “advanced” and “primitive” technologies: Violins are incredibly sophisticated instruments, and digital composing and publishing technologies can facilitate genuine conversation. While the device paradigm situates persons as passive consumers who simply have to master a technique or purchase a machine to achieve their desired outcome, convivial modes of engagement require disciplined, skillful persons and, in turn, enable these people to exercise freedom and responsibility as they deepen their relationships with one another and the world. 

In pursuing this line of analysis, the first section of my book considers several metaphors proposed by authors who were optimistic about the power that new communications technologies offered them. The second section then examines metaphors developed by those who were largely pessimistic about the effects of these new technologies. These first two sections are largely diagnostic: They seek to name and reveal the kinds of relationships that powerful verbal technologies—whether print-based or pixel-based—invite us to inhabit. In the third section, though, I turn to prescriptive, aspirational metaphors that suggest more convivial practices by which we might relate with each other, our world, and perhaps even God. These include Henry David Thoreau’s notion of wild walking, Margaret Fuller’s modes of conversation, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s understanding of the art of friendship, and Herman Melville’s vision of cross-bearing pilgrims. These convivial metaphors and the practices they entail may always be marginal to a technocratic society, but they enable us to imagine the possibility of making do within the world in which we find ourselves.

To wield verbal tools in convivial ways requires disciplined and skilled persons. Rather than trusting the technology itself to spread truth or to exert power, convivial readers and writers have to cultivate a range of studious virtues in order to wisely discharge the responsibility these tools grant them. Anyone can stream music on Spotify, but it takes practice to play the piano. Anyone can respond to the prompt on Twitter—“What’s happening?”—but it takes practice to contribute to a public conversation in ways that deepen relationships among the participants and lead them toward a richer participation in truth. The metaphors and practices I consider in this book can help us to shift from seeing reading and writing as techniques, for which we just need better tools to ensure a more successful and efficient outcome, and toward verbal arts, by which—if we learn to cultivate them lovingly and skillfully—we might seek the truth alongside our fellow pilgrims.

Jeffrey Bilbro is an Associate Professor of English at Grove City College and website Editor-in-Chief of Front Porch Republic. His books include Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, Loving God’s Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature, Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place (written with Jack Baker), and Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry’s Sustainable Forms.