Social Media is not normal. Let’s look at how the three challenges to communication impact social media.
Episode 42 of the Make Saints podcast: “Social Media Scrambles Thinking”
the episode script
I was supposed to be done. Then I sent a half-formed tweet. Welcome to part 5 of a 3-part series.
The Public / Private reality of Twitter
As part of the masses without a blue checkmark, offering a podcast to, what may charitably be dozens of listeners, I use twitter like most people who are actively trying to limit their social media exposure do.
I either scroll for a couple minutes when I’m bored or I log on to tweet something I’ve been thinking about.
Last week, I did the latter.
We all tend to forget something true about Twitter: it actually functions like private table conversations in a big public room. You really do spend most of your time talking to the people at your own table.
But…
Sometimes someone walks by and joins the conversation.
And just as much as we know this is such a public place AND we do treat it like anyone could walk by, we also get used to the fact that so often no one actually does. So we tailor our communication to the people in our orbit.
So here’s what happened.
I wrote a tweet based on the conversation I was having in my own head. It was something about which millions of hot takes are made by millions of people on a daily basis.
Then I hit send.
When I checked back later, replies were flying in, so I went back to the original to see why. I playfully responded by naming my mistake with the snarky ribbing I’m used to using and receiving on Twitter. And before long, it was bonkers.
The Reason
The reason for the strong response was quite obvious. My words, in their most obvious, literal, and decontextualized readings would clearly indicate that people shouldn’t love something they do.
In other words, a pretty classic case of miscommunication. Lots of people heard what I didn’t attempt to communicate.
When this happens with friends, the response is really quite simple: you sit down and hash it out. You talk with them about it. Sometimes this includes a process that looks a lot like reconciliation: mutual confession, absolution, restoration.
Social media scrambles the whole thing up and puts us in a whole new place.
So, as the final episode (for now) about the challenges to communication, I want to share how the three challenges I’ve been talking about fit into a social media world.
Challenge #1: Time
All social media is essentially asynchronous, meaning none of us is making any real-time connection. And worse, our whole sense of time gets scrambled.
I write a tweet while getting my kid ready for school. I shut it down and leave to drop him off. I make breakfast and check back into twitter to 20+ notifications.
Then, over the next 8 hours, I find myself checking and reading and sometimes responding. Then I check out for 24 hours to get some clarity. But the weight of it is still there. And stays with me.
Over the weekend, I still get notifications. Some from people still discovering it. A few calling me stupid or dismissing me for pronouns in my bio.
All of this is happening in our chronological sense of time, but none of its participants is in concert with that real time. None is there for it all. And none of us is talking. All of us are writing. And we’re writing missives back and forth on different threads about different things.
None of this is synchronous. And none of it actually makes sense. And worse, it breeds greater contempt from everyone involved.
Asynchronous modes of communication are great for passing information along, but are terrible for conversation. And this is one of the mistakes I always make. That’s why it’s #1.
Challenge #2: Mistaking broadcast for communication
As I said at the top, Twitter has a particular way of encouraging asynchronous dialogue. And just as much as I forget that a lot of people don’t use Twitter that way: making it all statement, clap-back, end: a lot of people use the reply to, themselves, broadcast. So we can understand that there is a kind of two-way character to Twitter, but in-practice, many of us reinforce a vision of communication that is only broadcast, ignoring that our reply is to another person who would benefit from a dialogue rather than a teaching or a scolding.
To put it plainly: Some dude wrote something I don’t like. I’ll quote him and say something myself.
That we’re all craving connection and genuine dialogue with one another, the temptation to see all communication as an individual broadcasting out to the ether doesn’t just hinder our social media connections, but it hinders our ability to connect with others in general.
Because what happens on social media does feel real. Which ensures that it is real.
Challenge #3: Hidden (and Faulty) Expectations
That one was everywhere here. Expectations of what I said, who I am as a priest, as an Episcopalian, as a Christian. Who they are, replying, quoting, responding. Tone. Language.
Lots of people felt that I dismissed them.
And I felt dismissed.
And strangely, because of the original tweet, I felt utterly unheard because I wanted to fix it. Change it. Get in there and make things right with actual people. But there isn’t a way to do that.
With social media, the whole thing isn’t centered on two persons and their relationship. It is centered outside the body. On a tweet, a post, a meme, or a video.
And there can be no reconciliation, because there is neither synchronous engagement, nor a capacity to truly utilize that tweet to retrace it to the very beginning.
We’re outsourcing responsibility
This is the flaw at the heart of how social media works and how we endeavor to engage with it.
When we outsource the problem in a relationship from the relationship or from the individuals in the relationship, and from what each of us can do to genuinely repair it, none of us is actually on the hook for any of it.
We used to blame this on the anonymity of the internet. But it continues to happen with real people. Because these three factors all play up within social media and impoverish our ability to truly connect.
What we can do.
- Expect more from social media companies, who are financially incentivized to encourage outrage and miscommunication.
- And expect more from ourselves. This includes learning how to de-escalate and refrain from joining into new opportunities to confront others.
- Limit time and attention on social media or curate your feed to avoid the negativity.
- More than anything, understanding how social media scrambles our thinking, our ability to communicate, and even how we express our core values is essential.
Because refraining from using it is good for you. But knowing why it does that to you can do even more to improve all of our modes of communication.
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Thanks for listening to Make Saints. Because (eternal) life is hard. And we could use all the help we can get.
Be well, and we’ll be back next week.