Social Media

Several years ago, my boss sent me to a communications workshop on conducting public meetings.  I don't conduct many public meetings, so I'm not sure why I was nominated to attend, but I learned some interesting things about communications in that seminar so I considered it to be time well spent.

One particularly useful nugget of information stuck with me, and I've found it adaptable to many different situations.  The concept is this: in a given group of people discussing a particular issue, you will have at least three divisions- the people who already agree with you, the people who are undecided, somewhat pro-or con, or neutral about the issue, and the people who will never agree with you no matter what you say, unless you change your mind and agree with them 100%.  You don't need to convince the people who already agree with you, and you'll never change the minds of the people who are strongly opposed to what you are saying, so your job is to convince the undecided.

Later (much later), it occurred to me that social media is really just one big wild and crazy never- ending public meeting, albeit one with no set agenda, no actual ending, and often, no facilitators. 

I know, because I've been there, that it can be supremely tempting to get into a knock-down, drag-out verbal brawl with someone who has strongly different opinions about controversial subjects than you do.  Changing that person's mind becomes a challenge almost impossible to resist.  You post your facts, they post their facts.  You refer to your life experiences (or the "I know someone who").  They refer to theirs, which are exactly opposite yours (they also know "someone").  The conversation starts to go downhill, if it ever had any hill to go down.  In the end, no one is convinced and no minds are changed; essentially, everyone just wasted so much of their lives achieving nothing except elevated blood pressure.

My personal observation is that if someone is posting articles from very slanted "news sources" to prove their point, or using made up words that end in the suffix "-tard" to insult the other side, continually bringing up things that never actually happened, or posting tired memes to make their argument for them, engaging in any kind of debate is really an exercise in futility. 

The second part of my thinking is this: remember all those people out there who are undecided or neutral? They're reading the discussion too, because this is on social media and nothing is really private on social media. Responding to a jerk on Facebook by being a jerk on Facebook isn't convincing anyone else that your perspective is the righteous one.  To everyone else, it looks like two jerks fighting.  I don't actually know the magic formula for changing peoples' minds, but I feel sure that it probably doesn't include being a jerk on Facebook.

Often, it's probably better just to walk away from the computer or put the phone down, go outside, take some cleansing breaths, and then go do something else for awhile.

All this isn't to say that hateful comments should go unchallenged, but when you feel called to challenge something hateful,  go into it knowing that nothing you say will change the mind of the hater. Your actual audience is everyone else reading the comments.  I don't think that there is only one good way to do this, but responding with equal levels of hate probably isn't the advisable method.

You might read this and think that you don't agree with anything I've written, and I'm fine with that.  However, it seems like social media has taken the place of the backyard conversations among neighbors and the water cooler discussions among co-workers. Because it's easier to be nasty to people you're not actually looking at, the discussions can deteriorate quickly.  I don't know how to fix the increasingly polarized society I find myself living in, although I wish I did.  However, I also believe that there are two small things that could help: civility on social media and more face-to-face discussion. It is a lot harder to be mean to people when you are actually looking at them.