Hard Conversations in Digital Spaces

How to foster healthy digital discourse

Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash

Can courageous, complex discourse be healthily conducted in digital spaces?

There appears to be a strong societal consensus that hard conversations and complex concepts are incompatible with social media. In High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, Amanda Ripley says many social media platforms are “designed to play into our worst conflict instincts” as part of “a vast conflict-industrial complex” that includes cable television news, our adversarial legal system, and the American winner-take-all political system.

Many thought-leaders hold out little hope for productive, healthy, and nuanced dialogue in digital spaces. “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, 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.” They point out the erosion of complexity in presidential messaging from George Washington’s first inaugural address to Donald Trump’s tweets, saying, “the more accessible the technology, the simpler a winning voice becomes.” And the issues we collectively face today are anything but simple.

Social media is largely believed to increase division, due to a flood of inflammatory diatribes. “[E]very day, millions of us are needled and outraged by the hysterically state views of those with whom we don’t agree,” Will Storr observes in Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us. This “needling,” he says, leads us to retreat from disagreement and create echo chambers where “we become yet more convinced of our essential rightness … pushed even further away from our opponents, who by now seem practically evil in their bloody-minded wrongness.” In Selfie, Storr offers no exploration of social media as a space for healthy disagreement and eye-opening, sympathy-expanding encounters.

“Internet outrage has become a fact of life,” Sarah L. Kaufman laments in The Art of Grace. “[T]he offended take to Twitter, the defenders counterattack, the bloggers repost, a Facebook fight erupts, and after all the time invested in following this trail … there’s a new dumb thing to get mad about.”

This bleak view of social media is mined to comic (and depressing) effect in Don’t Look Up, a recent Netflix comedy/disaster movie. It depicts a world where crucial information is drowned out and distorted by factional barb-throwing, derogatory memes, and frivolous celebrity gossip. I found the movie hilarious as observational humor, but rather hopeless in its acceptance of this digital state of affairs.

We can’t keep lamenting (or lampooning) the ways social media stokes outrage and divides us without simultaneously working on ways of improving digital discourse. “Like it or not, social media now plays a foundational role in public and private life alike,” say Singer and Emerson, “it can’t be un-invented or simply set aside.” We have to change the way we interact in digital spaces, developing tools for courageous, complex, healthy discourse via social media networks.

So, I’m curious and I’m asking you for help: How can we do it? How are you already doing it?

If you’ve been reading Digital Hope – or have read Digital Kindness – you already know I believe social media can smooth the path to positive discourse by seizing the opportunity to listen to perspectives different from our own.  

In Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit Lyanda Lynn Haupt recounts a tale about Saint Francis of Assisi approached by villagers living in fear of a dangerous wolf. Most commentators say Francis helped the villagers by taming the wolf, but Haupt’s research into the fable reveals Francis solved the conflict by listening to the creature. Francis “stood in the wolf’s presence, respected the animal’s wildness, apprehended her story, called her Sister.” By listening to the wolf, Francis learned she had been hurt, abandoned by her pack, and was hungry and acting in self-defense. “Armed with Francis’s understanding,” Haupt says, “the townspeople helped the injured wolf find food, and they co-existed without fear.”

Listening in digital spaces to people with differing views and experiences has changed my mind regarding many things. But it’s a private and somewhat passive activity. “[W]hat name did it used to go by, this practice of anonymously sitting back and taking in long sequences of words without producing any yourself?” asks Virginia Heffernan in Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, concluding, “Hey, wasn’t it once called ‘reading’?” And reading literature that humanizes others has been a “key factor in the expansion of sympathy in the past,” says Sharon D. Welch in After the Protests Have Been Heard. Unlike fiction or autobiographies, however, digital media gives us the ability to see real humans as they choose to communicate and present themselves in real time.

Healthy digital dialogue requires more than listening, though. It requires interaction as well. Acknowledging that we’ve heard and considered the perspectives of others, is an important part of productive online discourse. It can be as simple as saying something, “thank you for sharing,” “I’ll give that more thought,” or “tell me more” (one of Ripley’s favorite ways to foster connection instead of conflict). “Once we feel understood,” Ripley says, “we see options we couldn’t see before. We feel some ownership over the search for solutions. Then, even if we don’t get our way, we are more accepting of the result because we helped build it.”

I’ve gotten pretty good at listening to and acknowledging different perspectives on social media, but I’ll admit engaging is more challenging. Entering into conversation with “the other side” in digital spaces leaves us vulnerable to misinterpretation or attack by “their side” and even our own.  

No one knows when we are privately and passively perusing the thoughts and perspectives of “the other side.” But when we engage with “others” in curiosity and humility, we validate their humanity and announce ourselves open to the possibility of incorporating their experiences and perspectives into our own. This can be threatening to those on “our side” who believe the other “side” has nothing of value to offer or learn from.

Because of the public nature of digital dialogue and the limited ways of communicating positive intent, I fear being rejected by own “side” for curiously and openly asking questions of “others.” And I’m struggling with how to ask questions about conflicting viewpoints or opposing beliefs without being perceived as insincere or spoiling for a contentious debate.

These fears and challenges only emerge for me when tackling complex subjects online. My consulting practice involves facilitating hard conversations and helping diverse parties listen to each other, respect each other, and understand each other – whether or not they end up finding ground. I ask sincere questions about controversial and complicated things in-person all the time. But it’s significantly harder for me in digital spaces (is that your experience too?), so I’m working to identify and develop ways of making it easier, or at least more manageable.

One concept I’m exploring is how to apply Melody Stanford Martin’s notion of “disagreeing well” to digital spaces. “When someone disagrees with us well,” says Martin in Brave Talk: Resilient Relationships in the Face of Conflict, “they’re offering a kind of gift. The disagree-er is making time for us. They are investing, going out on a limb. It’s an utterly vulnerable act. If someone disagrees, they are regarding their audience as a worthy conversation partner and opening up important lines of communication.”

I wrote something similar in Digital Kindness about the power of connecting with people on social media, though I didn’t have disagreeing in mind: “the impact of letting people know you see them and think them worthy of your time and attention is huge. The exchanges may be small, brief, and simple, but they mean the world to somebody.”

What if we perceived our disagreement as a gift we shared with those we encounter online? What if we used disagreement as an opportunity for meaningful interaction in digital spaces, offering our time, energy, attention, and courage to people who differ from us? Yes, it leaves us vulnerable. And there is always the possibility it will be perceived as a threat. But approaching disagreement as a gift can change our attitude toward online engagement, replacing our own outrage with a sense of curiosity about fellow humans and creating opportunities for ongoing dialogue that increase mutual understanding and ownership of solutions.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to create a digital culture of courageous and courteous conversations. And please share with anyone who wants to be part of the discussion.

Thank you for caring about kind, welcoming, and positive digital interactions! We’re all in this together, and together we can build a world where all flourish.

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Also from Lauren M. Hug — Digital Kindness: Being Human in a Hyper-Connected World and NOW AVAILABLE Digital Grace: Embracing Benevolence in an Outraged World.