[TRANSCRIPT]
LH: Hello everyone and welcome back to Digital Hope Talk. I'm Lauren Hug and I thank you for listening and being willing to explore the upsides of our digital world. This is where we talk about the good things in social media. The way it connects us brings us together and helps us learn about our world. Instead of all the bad things that we always hear about.
This is Episode 3: Can we forgive people for what they post? Navigating the digital frontier as pioneers instead of as adversaries.
“I realized I have to forgive people.”
While talking about online ugliness with a new friend recently, she opened up to me about her shock over the past few years at the things some friends have posted in online spaces – things that deeply hurt and disturbed her – things that made her question how to respond and whether she wanted to associate with anyone who could think that way.
Her response to the hurt, however, was different than most I’ve encountered. When people hear I’m passionate about advocating for digital kindness, many feel compelled to explain the understandable reasons why they’ve blocked, unfriended, and even cut physical ties with those whose digital conduct shock and hurt them. (Not that I’m in any position to judge their decisions, nor want to.)
But she chose forgiveness. It’s a decision in keeping with everything I’ve learned about this warm, patient, loving person, who is thoughtful about where and how she can create meaningful change and do good for others.
“Lauren, I don’t know how she can think these things. It is beyond me. But I have to remember she was my first friend when I moved here. She makes sure I have a place to go every Thanksgiving. That’s who she is. And I have to forgive her for the things she posts.”
Her words reminded me of this passage from Digital Kindness:
It’s possible – even likely — for a person to say vile and hateful things in one breath and helpful, healing things in another. The person who disagrees with us most loudly on politics may be the only person who brings soup when we’re sick. In a world that seems to be becoming more and more polarized, it’s important to recognize an enemy on one issue may be a strong ally on another. Just because we can’t see eye to eye on one topic doesn’t mean we’re on opposing sides of all topics … or that we can’t find some common ground somewhere.
I wrote those words a few years ago. I stand by them, but I confess it’s been a struggle to live them lately. The years 2020, 2021, and 2023 have been overloaded with tough conversations about everything from systemic racism to the proper role of government and individuals regarding public health to the impact of political positions on human beings whose fundamental human rights remain at stake. How does one forgive those who broadcast dangerous, false, and hateful views across social media? Perhaps more importantly, should we forgive the people we know who do?
There isn’t an easy, one-size-fits all answer. We’re all figuring out what it means to be human in a digital world. No one before us had to think about how to conduct relationships in digital spaces and what to personally broadcast on multiple mass communication channels – or what our digital behaviors tell others about us and about themselves. We are all navigating a new frontier.
“Teaming up at a frontier, surrounded by unpredictability and doubt, encourages an urgent kind of empathy that goes beyond the natural sensitivity to the point of view of the other,” says David Edwards in Creating Things that Matter: The Art and Science of Innovations that Last. “It is closer to the empathy we have when we need to lean on one another to survive.”
What if we choose to think of each other as fellow pioneers exploring new digital territory and finding ways to live in this new digital land, instead of as enemies fighting over the remnants of the old world?
Approaching social media with a commitment to forgiveness is powerful protection against the heightened state of anger fostered by engagement-maximizing algorithms. It not only minimizes our own outrage, it dilutes and blocks the outrage festering and flowing throughout online spaces. Seeing repeated messages of outrage is enough to create emotional contagion, making people feel outraged themselves, says research cited by international relations scholar P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, Senior Fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council in LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. NOT repeating outrage automatically reduces contagion. Going further, and injecting messages of kindness, grace, and forgiveness, turns the tide of emotional contagion in a positive direction, because seeing repeated positive messages is enough to make people feel joy and peace as well.
For months I was torn between following up Digital Kindness with a book on digital grace or a book on digital advocacy. Both topics move and animate me. Both seem more relevant than ever. Depending on the issue or the person, I gravitate more toward one or other. Grace and forgiveness are much harder for me to practice than advocacy, though, so that’s why I finally decided to focus on grace first. “I’m a vengeance girl at heart,” I said in my TEDx Talk The Power of Kindness in Our Digital World. “But vengeance only leads to more hurt. And I want to heal.”
Grace involves acts of clemency … and the concept of leniency and forgiveness in digital spaces is woefully lacking in a culture of outrage and cancelling.
As I research and write, however, I increasingly see grace and advocacy as two sides of the same coin. As Farrah Alexander says in Raising the Resistance: A Mother’s Guide to Practical Activism, “In practicing activism, we have to be fiercely compassionate. We have to, by default, show others the empathy and compassion they deserve.” If we want people to see the world differently – to see it through our eyes or the eyes of others – we must be willing to see it through their eyes as well. And in the best possible light.
People do things that make sense to them based on everything they’ve seen, experienced, and been taught. When grappling with perspectives that seem wrong and strange, “be curious and humble, and think, ‘In what way is this a smart solution?’” says the late Hans Rosling in Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Embrace the complexity of our rapidly changing world, translate and fuse ideas, and, whenever possible, seek to find a way forward together.
We all have to decide what’s best for our own health and well-being when interacting with people whose views are toxic to us. We find some issues and some people more intolerable than others. There are some things we simply cannot stay silent about and some people we refuse to allow in the digital spaces we manage.
The issues we feel compelled to speak up about and the people we feel compelled to distance ourselves from won’t be the same for everyone – not even those on who share most of our viewpoints and beliefs. Forgiveness acknowledges that, and makes room for the different ways those we know and love present themselves online. It allows for a breadth of responses and reactions to the complex world we find ourselves navigating, without compromising who we are and what we stand for.
Forgiveness allows us to stay on the same team — pioneers exploring a new frontier, simultaneously learning about it, ourselves, and others.
[AUDIO] Can We Forgive People For What They Post?