“We welcome everyone to visit their local library to browse the collection, where parents and caregivers can make selections without inhibiting another parent’s right to choose what’s best for their own family’s circumstances, views, and educational goals.”
That’s a quote from several current and former members of the Board of Trustees for my local library district responding to a recent editorial in the daily newspaper. I tweeted it along with a link to the entire response because I agree with the sentiment that libraries should serve everyone in the community.
And then I second-guessed tweeting the quote.
As I confess in Digital Grace:
I agonize over almost every post I create in digital spaces. I truly want to be compassionate, understanding, and kind, so I consider multiple ways my words could be interpreted. I look for blind-spots and potential insensitivities. I edit and rewrite to use more inclusive language and examples. After several attempts, I often decide not to post at all. I’ve gotten it “wrong” before, and I fear getting it “wrong” again.
While it’s certainly true I’ve gotten it “wrong” before — we all do on occassion — I’ve recently realized my second-guessing comes more from fear of being questioned about my commitment to open and respectful discourse whenever I post about potentially controversial subjects. When people who know me well say something I’ve posted forecloses conversation, it catches me off guard and sends me into a spiral of rethinking and reconsidering my motives and biases behind posting.
Was I truly communicating in good faith? Was I engaging in “discourse oriented towards mutual understanding and coordinated action, with the result of increasing the faith that participants have in the value of communicating” as defined in The Endgames of Bad Faith Communication, an excellent article by The Consilience Project?
Or was I communicating in bad faith, defined by Endgames as “intending to achieve behavioral outcomes (including consensus, agreements, ‘likes’) irrespective of achieving true mutual understanding, with the result of decreasing the faith participants have in the value of communicating?”
The good faith definition sounds more like me. The “about” section for this newsletter states: “I’m consciously making room for new stories and new ways of thinking to understand where my perspective has been limited and to find ways forward together that include and benefit all.” I believe in the power of connection and conversation to help us better understand our shared humanity.
I’m usually pretty good at encouraging and facilitating hard conversations in respectful and mutually affirming ways. I’ve spent decades honing my skills in fostering dialogue and it’s one of the main services my business is known for. So why do responses questioning my commitment to dialogue in digital spaces leave me questioning myself?
Thankfully, Endgames helped me unravel some of what’s happening when my good faith attempt at communicating is met with a response that accuses me of shutting down discourse while demonstrating no attempt to find common ground. These are bad faith responses masquerading as good faith communication. They’re presented as concerns about my willingness to make room for different perspectives, but in reality they’re deployed to silence dissent from their own views.
“Bad faith communication has become normalized,” says Endgames (emphasis in the original). Due to decades of culture wars and the amplification and incentivation of bad faith tactics on social media platforms, communication “has degraded to the point where it is widely believed that calls to good faith … are themselves acts of bad faith, undertaken only by those interested in controlling the discourse.”
Giving the benefit of the doubt, I don’t think most people intentionally engage in bad faith communication. It’s just the water we’re swimming in these days. I spend a lot of energy and effort trying to ensure I’m communicating in good faith, but I still catch myself thinking bad faith responses all the time.
It’s impossible to have meaningful conversations in digital spaces without bumping up against different perspectives. Good faith communicators engage in conversation, ask questions about where people are coming from, and express appreciation for learning about the lived experiences of others. They demonstrate curiosity, humility, and an eagerness to explore nuance and new ideas, rather than stifling discourse by accusing others of being closed-minded or one-sided. “Courageous dialogue listens to the issues beneath the expression and focuses on true understanding,” says conflict transformation specialist Melody Stanford Martin in Brave Talk: Building Resilient Relationships in the Face of Conflict.
After re-reading the quote at the beginning of this post, I decided once again that it accurately conveys my perspective that a library’s purpose is to provide resources for all members of a community. While I prefer not to offend people with a different view, the notion of who is worthy of being served by public institutions is an issue of vital importance to me. I’m not willing to stay silent in order to maintain what Martin calls “cheap peace” that “robs us of chances to become better thinkers, better neighbors, and better leaders.”
In tweeting the quote, I’m trying to contribute to increased understanding by sharing my perspective. I welcome respectful disagreement and am open to changing my mind based on new information. If I’ve misstepped, I ask other good faith communicators to engage me in dialogue and kindly and graciously help me have better conversations online.
Have you experienced “bad faith communication?” How did it make you feel? How did you respond?
ALSO BY LAUREN HUG: Digital Grace: Pouring Benevolence into an Outraged World and Digital Kindness: Being Human in a Hyper-Connected World.
REVIEW OF DIGITAL GRACE: “I spent much of my time with this book highlighting and rethinking my own role in digital interactions. I agree with the author about the need to give grace in these spaces and open our minds to see the value of diverse perspectives, even if we disagree. We can respect each other without agreeing on every topic.” (Click to read entire review.)
Digital Hope is a newsletter where I embrace the upsides of social media and explore how to be human in our digital world.