As Jon Alexander, author of CITIZENS: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All Of Us, wrote in a recent LinkedIn post: “There are elections in 50 countries this year, with 2 billion people going to the polls.”
With elections looming, it’s a good time to think through how we want to navigate digital encounters with political posts — especially ones from people we know and love, but with whom we strongly disagree. How do we share the world we want to see, while also maintaining relationships we value? My books are a good starting point, and I’m honored by leaders who have already reached out to purchase copies for their teams. If these are resources that may be a good fit for your purposes, please let me know.
[TRANSCRIPT]
We can’t expect unity to come from structures based on forced binary options. It’s up to us to look for the commonalities obscured by elections and ignored by those who thrive on reducing us to distinct groups.
Hi everyone. Welcome to Digital Hope Talk. I’m Lauren Hug and I thank you for listening and being willing to explore better ways of navigating our digital world together.
This is Episode 11: Elections Divide Us, But Digital Connection Can Unite Us. Finding the common ground obscured by binary political choices.
“How could anyone vote that way?”
This question, in various forms, appears all across social networks all the time. It’s inevitable given political structures that force us to pick sides. Elections involve complex concepts and, in the words of activist and strategist Daniel Hunter, “all of us are impacted differently and unevenly based on our backgrounds, identity, and our state of being.”1 But our choices are limited to one candidate or an overly-simplified “yes” or “no” on extremely complicated issues.
Election outcomes obscure nuances in individual voters’ positions, preventing us from seeing areas of shared values, experiences, and vision between the people who voted “yes” and those who voted “no” — or the people who voted for Candidate A and those who voted for Candidate B.
As the late Hans Rosling says in Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think:
“Dividing the world into two distinct sides … makes us imagine division where there is just a smooth range, difference where there is convergence, and conflict where there is agreement. In most cases there is no clear separation of two groups, even if it seems like that from the averages. We almost always get a more accurate picture by digging a little deeper and looking not just at the averages but at the spread; not just the group all bundled together, but the individuals. Then we often see that apparently distinct groups are in fact very much overlapping.”
Unfortunately, division is built into our political systems. It’s not surprising that we evaluate issues differently and reach different decisions about which of the limited political options we’ll choose. But we have no way of communicating our personal reasons, caveats, and reservations on the ballot itself. We don’t have the option of indicating which parts of a candidate’s platform or a ballot initiative we agree with and which parts give us pause. We currently have no political mechanism for finding and building on the overlaps.
Our systems enshrine conflict and separation.
“People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way, but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative,” said Grace Lee Boggs, a community leader and believer in the power of small groups to create positive social changes. She continued: “We need a vision that recognizes we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.”
We can’t expect unity to come from structures based on forced binary options. Much like it’s up to us to navigate social media in ways that avoid and diffuse outrage, it’s up to us to look for the commonalities and overlaps obscured by the electoral process and ignored by institutions, power-brokers, politicians, strategists and commentators who thrive on reducing us to distinct groups. Says Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody: “[We] are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.”
Social networks allow us to connect with people we might never encounter in our physical world, listen to their feelings and experiences, and grapple with their thoughts. If we interact with lots of people — or at least pay attention to opposing views posted in digital spaces — we’ll have a pretty good sense of why people vote the way they do. “By exposing people to each other, and each other’s ideas, [digital expression] expands the range of acceptable discourse, feeding a hungry public who wants to talk about issues that in previous eras might not have been discussed openly,” says An Xioa Mina in Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power.
These connections are vital to a functioning society because they enable us to understand, value, and trust people who are different from us, instead of dismissing or vilifying them outright. As pollster Anthony Salvanto says in Where Did You Get This Number, “if you hang around with people who think differently than you do, you’re more likely to see them as having shared values outside of politics. If they aren’t around, they’re different. They’re abstractions.”
But we have to look past the never-ending, round-the-clock political coverage and non-stop political ugliness flooding social networks to seek out connection instead of reinforce division.
Using digital media to explore the viewpoints of people who vote differently from us is one answer to the question asked by Sharon D. Welch in After the Protests are Heard: Enacting Civic Social Engagement and Social Transformation: “how can we shape our new forms of communication to counter, rather than reinforce, polarization and sensational, simplistic thinking?” Genuine curiosity leads to inquiry and dialogue about the ways we differ as well as the ways we agree, opening our eyes to new ways of understanding our present, interpreting our history, and imagining our future.
As Isabel Wilkerson says in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent: “If each of us could truly see and connect with the humanity of the person in front of us, search for that key that opens the door to whatever we may have in common, whether cosplay or Star Trek or the loss of a parent, it could begin to affect how we see the world and others in it, perhaps change the way we hire or even vote…. Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean.”
Digital media enables us to share and amplify our connections and discoveries, connecting us with ever more people interested in creating a better, more inclusive world. “[T]he brave new world we seek to create has existed before, and could exist again” say David Wengrow and the late David Graeber in an essay adapted from their book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. “All we are lacking now is the political imagination to make it happen.”
Meaningful conversations in digital places can spark and grow that imagination.
Ideas gain momentum when multiple individuals transmit overlapping and reinforcing messages in digital spaces. With enough momentum, ideas become movements that transform societies.
Elections are important. Hugely important. And many important elections are happening this year. Please vote like your life, the lives of others, and the future of this planet depends on it — because it’s true.
AND let’s go beyond talking solely about the immediate election cycle that continues to present us with woefully limited, inadequate, and disappointing options and use our voices to spark mindset shifts and engage in collective actions that will transform our world into a place where everyone thrives.
quoted in How we Win: A Guide to Non-Violent Direct Action Campaigning by George Lakey.
[AUDIO] Bridging Political Divides through Digital Connection