Digital Responsibility
What role do we play in the on-going conversation?
Social media is far more than a broadcasting platform. It’s a multi-way communication tool: a means of connecting with people and connecting them to each other.
Posts are public and personal at the same time. Messages can take many forms and reach large numbers of people. Anyone who sees a message can react, comment, share, or modify it.
Digital conversation is open to anyone with access to a social networking platform. According to Statista, a provider of market and consumer data, as of January 2020, nearly 50% of humans were using social media. The number of users is expected to grow as cheap mobile devices become more available in regions catching up on infrastructure development.
A lot of people have the opportunity to impact and influence how we all understand our shared humanity and world — not just the select few people who’ve had the power and influence to decide – based on their own experiences, preferences, education, and interests – which subjects and perspectives are worthy of being explored.
But only a small fraction of people on social media use it to actively connect with people and participate in digital conversation. Most merely consume the content that comes across their feeds.
Anyone creating content and engaging in conversation has significant influence over what others are seeing in their feeds.
We have a responsibility to at least consider what we’re directing others to see.
We have a responsibility to let others know when they share the kind of content we appreciate and want to see more of.
We have a responsibility to make digital spaces safe and welcoming for courageous dialogue.
The more that we intentionally use social media platforms to share our lived experiences and to make it welcoming and safe for others to share theirs, the more complex and rich the digital conversation becomes.
As people share their lived experiences in social media spaces, those experiences became amplified, allowing more and more humans to see themselves reflected in the stories of others. More voices give us the opportunity to better understand and appreciate both the breadth and the universality of the human experience.
How do you choose to participate in digital conversation?
FREE EBOOKS!
To encourage people to become positive voices in the digital conversation and provide suggestions for how to do so, both of my books on the topic are available for FREE download through Saturday, July 16.
Get your copy of Digital Grace: Pouring Benevolence into an Outraged World and it’s companion Digital Kindness: Being Human in a Hyper-Connected World today!
Please share these books and this newsletter with anyone you think might be interested in ways we, as individuals, can harness the power of social media to collaborate on designing a kinder, healthier world.