Chill-Chat

More and more people feel the urge to get personally involved, to engage in direct political debate – but also to seek in-depth dialogue. The deepening rifts in our divided society have become all too alarming, and the general tone of discourse has become all too toxic and disrespectful, whether in the German Bundestag, on social media, or in everyday life.

Young people and school pupils who are particularly internet-savvy would also like to get involved online. This is because many of the chat groups there, especially in the gaming sector, are rife with anti-democratic and authoritarian statements and hostile sentiments. Repulsive insults and a general contempt for women – as well as for transgender and homosexual people – are often the unchallenged norm there. One asks oneself, shocked: What on earth can one say to that? How can one still respond and intervene effectively without the interaction immediately escalating or breaking down?

Similar questions arise in the case of statements that are not so crude, but rather eloquent or linguistically inconspicuous, yet are nonetheless hostile to human rights and directed against a democratic, liberal society, such as a chat post like: “Well, this ‘Germany’ of today never actually existed historically. It is a perverse construct of the victorious powers of the Second World War, formed through murder and expulsion”, which, unsurprisingly, is followed by the recommendation: “When we speak of Germany, we should never give up the eastern territories”.

Participatory, outreach-based political education online

For the increasingly important field of ‘outreach-based political education’, we must identify meaningful strategies and effective techniques for engaging in dialogue within the online world – and disseminate these techniques widely across civil society to foster a broad capacity for dialogue. For this knowledge must not remain the preserve of specialists alone. Rather, we should – in a participatory manner – swiftly reach a point where a great many citizens can implement and further develop these dialogue strategies and techniques. This requires that they come naturally and easily to them and, despite the toxic and distressing content, also provide sufficient engagement satisfaction. Only in this way can a vibrant democratic society as a whole acquire and cultivate the fundamental competence that enables it to sustainably curb hostile, cynical, malicious, and anti-democratic chat threads through moderation and dialogue. –This would also identify a key factor for a new and timely democratic culture, which should initially be fostered above all among children and young people.

The recently completed one-year pilot project “Chats, narrative! – engaging in narrative dialogue in (gaming) chats and countering (self-)hatred” has developed such strategies and techniques. These were incorporated into an empirical research context as part of the OppAttune project, which resulted in an entry for the “strategy of attunement for social media and gaming portals” in the OppAttune Toolkit. Furthermore, these strategies were informed by input from the fields of narratology and biographical research, narrative interviewing and dialogue techniques, psychodynamic and systemic (group) therapy, the methodology of bridge-building conversations, and dialogical first-responder skills; they were adapted accordingly and tested in relevant chats on Telegram, Reddit, and X.

The task of “Chill-Chat” will now be to build on this foundation to create workshops, further training courses, and formats for educational practice support for young people. A Chill-Chat training programme and on-the-job coaching are being piloted to encourage and support young people – both in and outside schools – to participate in online groups characterised by anti-democratic and hostile rhetoric, using the newly developed dialogical interaction techniques. Through coaching, they are supported as outreach online dialogue facilitators to intervene in these chats in a measured and effective manner, acting as moderators and promoting pro-social behaviour. In particular, young people are encouraged to try, in the chat rooms …

 

• to curb hostile and malicious-cynical sentiments
• to broaden narrow-minded perspectives
• to support a mediating, possibly humorous, role between conflicting parties
• to offer measured opposition depending on the situation
• to point out factual information casually – or, where possible, emphatically
• to promote liberalism and alternative views wherever possible
• to gently encourage a change of perspective and empathy towards others
• to show attention to users' everyday experiences and latent personal accounts from individuals – and to build on these
• demonstrate a willingness to share personal information and recount experiences in a trusting and considerate manner
• generally signal appreciation, fundamental trust, and confidence.

An Education Policy Perspective – What is digital literacy really, and how can it be trained in schools?

What matters here is not so much the immediate impact generated within the online chat groups. More important are the young people themselves, because through this activity they can acquire essential experience and skills in dialogue-based, bridge-building interaction, both in online chats and offline. In doing so, the young people expand their emotional political intelligence and communicative skills in a way that is particularly important for the current social climate and the viability of today’s democracies: their ability to deal effectively with those situations of political overheating, escalation, and the looming breakdown of relationships that have become so commonplace and yet often leave us feeling helpless.

For this reason – and because, as mentioned, the aim is not merely to develop specialist know-how but a fundamental civic skill! – The Chill-Chat project also engages in systematic advocacy within state ministries of education and youth, with the aim of achieving institutional piloting and the establishment of the Chill-Chat methodology within school-based media education. For, the much-vaunted ‘digital literacy’ does not consist solely of technical and analytical proficiency online, but is based above all on the frequently underestimated emotional and communicative ability to engage with online content and to enter into intelligent and meaningful dialogue with it.