Radical Listening, Part 2: Listening into the Online Void
Check me out, I’m ripping!!! Oh wait. I’m supposed to be encouraging meaningful connection here.
Social media is the antithesis of listening. It’s set up for bragging, showing off, telling, selling, and virtue signaling. By posting, we hope for pats on the back, affirmations, likes, payouts and positive attention, and yet sometimes we (unwittingly or not) provoke judgement, negative reactions, knee-jerk comments, or awaken the greedy trolls. We “share,” hoping to elicit a desired response, a soothing dopamine hit straight to our jangled nerves, taking the edge off of modern day life. Or at least it feels like it for a brief second. Soon enough, though, it’s back to wondering why we feel so fragmented, disconnected, and lonely, when we’ve been trying so hard to nurture these supposed connections.
Yet, it’s nearly impossible to have true connections without listening and being heard. So often online, as in real life, I glance at a post (or nasty comments under a post) and immediately have a hot take negative reaction—FOMO, envy, anger, annoyance, shame and guilt, to name a few. If my feelings are of this negative variety, it’s easy to immediately spiral into my own head, feeling inadequate or unsettled.
The confounding thing about social media is that I don’t always get to choose exactly what I want to see, even if I am extremely selective about whom I follow. I may go on there hoping for a pleasant few minutes of distraction, or to masochistically see how much new snow Tahoe has gotten this week, or to be entertained, but inevitably something will pop up that catches me off guard.
Yes, there are the posts that are funny, entertaining, encouraging, or merely make me smile to see a friend’s face, but those don’t keep people on the app—those we simply doubletap and move along. Innocuous posts aren’t great for business, and so the clickbait posts rise to the top, the ones with the nasty comments, the shaming, and the provocations. Hey, it’s all about engagement, right?
Chasing the ever elusive connection.
Right off the bat, the word “engagement”—the desired end goal of most social media posts—is a red flag that listening isn’t what social media is after. Engagement is like fight club, the rules of engagement, firing shots back and forth, engaging in a battle or a skirmish. If true connection was the goal of social media, rather than the carrot dangled just ahead that we chase while forfeiting our precious attention, genuine conversation would be encouraged and promoted above flame wars and troll fodder.
I think some of this is baked into the social media itself, but I also think that there is a lot that we can control about how we engage in the media itself that can improve the connection factor. And for me, it all starts about being intentional about how I share and how I “listen” on social media.
I like to think of it a bit like my daughter’s Sharing Day in her first grade classroom each week—the modern day version of Show and Tell. Most Wednesdays, she insists on bringing a stuffy or toy, and always wants it to be something new and shiny to show off. We have hundreds of stuffies. But on those days when she brings a toy, she reports back that Sharing Time was “fine.” Recently, she asked me to send her teacher a picture of the beach after a hurricane, from a trip we took last fall, so she could talk about the hurricane for her Sharing Day. When I picked her up after school, she was beyond excited, and said that Sharing Time had been “amazing.” “Mom,” she enthused, “People had so many questions for me afterwards!”
Here I’m actually trying not to land on my husband who is taking this photo, and I’m also concerned I’m about to knock a massive amount of snow down on him. But it all worked out!!
When I read something about someone’s experience on social media, from their own perspective, I am better able to receive that story. I’m likely to connect in a meaningful way with them—I will leave a purposeful comment or ask a question or send a DM, rather than replying with a half-assed emoji or nothing at all. No one likes being told what to do (as someone who recently had two toddlers in the house, this is especially apparent), and hearing people’s stories is so much more powerful than seeing their shiny new thing or just a standard show-offy photo. A little insight into the photo, video, or post goes a long way towards opening up the ears and minds of the audience.
Conversely, when I am browsing posts, it helps me to try to experience them purely as a listener. That means removing my own reactions from my scrolling and focusing on purely listening and hearing what they are trying to put out there. Shiny photo of them looking hot, with a glib caption? They want to be seen, perhaps. Someone expressing frustration or judgement with others’ behaviors? They are angry, and it is all from their own experience. All I need to do, rather than feel guilt or shame or blame, is to hear that they are angry, and something in their life is not meeting their needs. The more I am able to put on my mental hazmat suit before entering the very much not IRL online world of social media, the more I can focus on listening and not allowing someone else’s anger, frustration, shame, blame, or shiny new thing or accomplishment affect my own feelings IRL.
It’s hard to keep it all at arm’s length when it feels so real and immediate, but that’s the exact reason social media has such a hold on us. It hold the power of the promise of connection, keeping just out of reach what we all want so desperately, and what being online very rarely delivers. Yes, it gives voices to many who otherwise wouldn’t be heard, and is an excellent source of entertainment, instruction, and democracy. But when we allow it to overtake ours and our kids’ energy, feelings, and attention, we will continue to miss out on real connections right in front of us.
Intentional listening, for me when I’m online and social media is imperative in an attempt to maintain a healthy mental outlook in real life. And it frees up my energy and attention for more important things, like cleaning up stuffies.
Listening to social media without letting it take over my energy or feelings frees me up for more important things, like drawing with kids.
