Thanks for checking out another episode of Digital Hope Talk! I’m learning more about creating audio content — especially the frustrations of unwanted noises impacting the recording. I tried my hand at a bit of super basic editing. Maybe I’ll be able to figure out how to add theme music in future episodes! As always, a transcript of the episode is below.
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 consider the upsides of our digital world. This is where we talk about the good things about social media — the way it brings us together and opens our eyes — instead of the bad things we’re used to hearing about.
This is Episode 2: Outrage, Abandonment, or Connection? Choosing how we interact in digital spaces.
We are living in a time of transformation. All around us we sense—and often see—the growing pains of many voices and many perspectives vying to be heard and to have a say in where we go from here. There is an urgency to the conversations as nearly everyone these days confesses some degree of fear or hopelessness about what comes next.
Transformational conversations are hard and often uncomfortable because they force us to think about things in new ways – and they show us where we and those we know and love don’t align. They cover unfamiliar territory, introducing us to words, concepts, and names we haven’t encountered before. And, while the internet contains information on almost everything, it can be far from clear which sources are credible.
We also happen to live in a time where much of our communication occurs in online spaces, but we haven't yet developed the etiquette we need to navigate those spaces in civil and productive ways.
There’s a lot going on, it’s putting a lot of us on edge, and digital media is frequently blamed for it.
It’s understandable why. Digital media undoubtedly serves up heaps of ugliness. “What captures the most attention on social media isn’t content that makes a profound statement or expands viewers’ intellectual horizons,” say international relations scholar P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, a Senior Fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council in LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. “Instead, it is content that stirs emotions.” This means social network algorithms that prioritize engagement also prioritize hateful, divisive, extremist content. In the words of Karen Hao, senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review, “put simply, people just like outrageous stuff.”
Because people tend to engage more with “outrageous stuff” in digital spaces, we see ugly parts of people we might not otherwise ever encounter in physical spaces. It raises tough questions for us about whether we should respond to or refute the ugliness. If we respond, what’s the “right” or “best” way to do so? Many of us worry about what will happen if we do respond. Will it open us up to attack and vicious interactions? Sometimes, the behavior of others in digital spaces leaves us wondering whether we want them in our lives in any capacity.
We may engage in some ugliness ourselves. Social media “drench[es] the general population in levels of outrage the human animal has never before experience and is not adapted to,” says journalist Will Storr in Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us. “Our irritation pushes us into a place of fiercer opposition. The more emotional we become, the less rational we become, the less able to properly reason.” We sometimes feel compelled to fight back by commenting on content that outrages us or by posting counter opinions on our own feeds. The surrounding circumstances, experiences, and relationships contributing to our urge to post aren’t known or readily apparent to everyone encountering our content, so our posts add more frustration, fear, and outrage to the sea of emotion.
There is a big difference between having hard conversations in person and having them online. “Studies suggest that experiences of moral outrage in normal ‘offline’ life are relatively rare,” says Storr, “with less than 5 percent of us experiencing it on a daily basis.” This is largely due to the fact we have a commonly shared understanding of what outrageous behavior looks like in person and a general desire to avoid behaving in outrageous ways. We’ve also developed in-person communication etiquette and ways of decreasing or defusing outrage when we encounter it. When speaking one-on-one or in small in-person groups, we have some sense of who we are talking to, and the context of the conversation is clear to everyone involved, so most of us naturally pick up on social cues, adapting our tone, words, body language, and facial expressions to suit the audience and occasion.
A few months ago, I was at lunch with friends to honor and celebrate a wonderful woman who had embarked on new professional pursuits. Some very controversial topics came up at this friendly lunch among diverse women. Impassioned disagreements were contextualized by mutual affection and admiration as well as surrounding conversation about the everyday challenges and joys of family, friends, work, and adventures going on in each of our lives. Verbal acknowledgments of the value of our friendship, smiles, hand squeezes, and reassuring hugs all provided powerful reminders of how much we care about each other even when we disagree.
There are lots of ways we deescalate potential outrage in offline life: smiling kindly, lowering our voice, using a more gentle tone, listening instead of talking, seeking intervention and assistance from others to name just a few. But in digital spaces we tend to act as though our only options are walking away or diving into the fray.
When we abandon physical public spaces they become scary and unsafe – places only nefarious, shady, dangerous people want to be. The same is true of digital spaces. To avoid being “drenched” in outrage, many well-intentioned people have fled online interactions, which means, in the words of Virginia Heffernan, “Bullies, hucksters, and trolls roam the streets.” As she says in her book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, “An entrenched population of rowdy, polyglot rabble dominates major sites.” Other well-intentioned people have become bullies and trolls themselves, seeing no other way to be heard and survive in the digital jungle.
What if there’s another way?
Facebook has long been under fire for perpetuating the use of engagement-maximizing algorithms that, according to whistleblower Francis Haugen, “harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy.” She along with many others believe social networks will not, on their own, choose to facilitate “safer, free-speech respecting, more enjoyable social media,” so they are asking governments to regulate and hold social networks accountable for better digital spaces.
I, too, believe regulation is a crucial part of cultivating a more beneficial digital world, but I also believe we can consciously create and maintain safe and welcoming digital spaces through our online choices and interactions. And I believe it is dangerous to focus only on the downsides when discussing regulation while discounting, ignoring, or overlooking the immense amount of good that social networks make possible.
We now know algorithms prioritize engagement, allowing us to be mindful of how the content we’re seeing is impacting us, deciding not to add outrage-inducing content to the mix, and demonstrating grace in our digital interactions. Here are a few things to consider …
When we encounter content that outrages us, there’s a good chance it has made its way to our feed because of an engagement-maximizing algorithm and not because it is deeply-reasoned, meticulously-researched, quality content. If we’re seeing it because of a share or interaction by someone we’re connected with, they, too, likely saw it because of algorithms – not because they searched it out themselves and spent considerable time trying to find the most thoughtful take on a hard issue. The fact that they shared or interacted with it doesn’t necessarily mean they believe and accept everything in the content, but rather that something in the content resonated with them at the moment they saw it. Remembering this may help contextualize the content, our reaction to it, and help us determine a healthy and beneficial way of engaging with the person and/or the problematic aspects of the content instead of the outrage-inducing content itself.
Interacting with outrageous content in any way – even to refute it or share it as an example of faulty thinking or bad digital behavior – only feeds the engagement-maximizing beast. The content will be served up to our network, and will appear to carry our personal stamp of approval because our name will accompany the content. In studying how information disseminates across digital spaces, “The best predictor is not accuracy or even content; it is the number of friends who share the content first,” says LikeWar. Another sobering research finding: we are more likely to believe a headline if we’ve seen a similar one before. It doesn’t matter whether we’ve seen it because someone in our network shared it to debunk it; familiarity is what counts most. “The more often you hear a claim, the less likely you are to assess it critically,” the LikeWar authors say. Starve the outrage machine by having in-person and private online conversations with those in our network who are falling prey to it.
Rational, balanced, kind, thoughtful, complicated content is unlikely to garner a ton of engagement, but it’s vital to transform digital spaces from outrage factories to places of positive human connection. People crave safe places to connect. We can seek out and direct people to online communities that require members and contributors to treat each other with dignity and respect — or start an online community imbued with those values. We can model relationship-building digital behaviors, making it clear that our corner of the online world is dedicated to connection and sincere, civil dialogue. Less people may see our uplifting, connection-based digital activity than will see extremist, divisive posts, but every example of how digital technology can bring us together rather than drive us apart presents people with a new way of approaching online life.
If we chose to turn away from outrage and ugliness and embrace the ability to connect directly with a huge variety of our fellow humans, we can model and contribute to ongoing dialogue and collaborate on innovative and inclusive solutions to the challenges we’re all facing.
[AUDIO] Outrage, Abandonment, or Connection?