“Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material.” -Clay Shirky
Last year was hard. In March I wrote about the overwhelm I was feeling because of the “never-ending to-do list required to exist (much less thrive) in the world we find ourselves in.” And that feeling never let up. Things got more and more overwhelming as the year progressed.
I want to focus this newsletter on hope, so I’ll give you just one example of something contributing to my weariness. I spent four and a half months trying to get my local school district to enroll my autistic young adult student in the vocational program of his choosing. He lost an entire semester of instruction to the slow-moving wheels of bureaucracy and a structural and philosophical inability to grant agency to students. This happened against the backdrop of a school board race where hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on political messages hostile to equity, inclusion, and anything related to the LGBTQ community. Real students are going without educational access while a small subset of people direct attention to imaginary issues made up to create fear, outrage, and division.
This example isn’t unique. All over social media people are sharing their experiences with poorly designed, broken, and/or intentionally inhumane systems, asking others to see what they are enduring. Beyond the everyday frustrations and difficulties, incomprehensible violence, death, and destruction is filling our feeds.
Everywhere we turn, a small subset of people are maintaining and creating conditions that negatively impact all of us.
It’s exhausting and sometimes feels hopeless.
Then a friend’s feed displays this bittersweet artwork by Mira Jacob, and I’m buoyed by hope once again. People who long for unity, peace, and a world where our whole planet thrives are finding each other, feeling with each other, forming bonds, and calling for systems rooted in love. What if we can, in Jacob’s words, “grow a new organ that will recognize how deeply our futures are intertwined, allowing us to reach our full potential by finally bridging the gap between our limited imaginations and our collective survival.”
A common criticism of social media is that we aren’t equipped to deal with and sift through all the content coming at us in our multi-channel, 24/7 communication landscape. But what if our new interconnectivity and rising awareness of each other — of all of us — is evolving us into a more compassionate, connected, and collaborative species? A species that no longer expects nor tolerates cruelty, exploitation, oppression, or domination.
Consider these thoughts from Jeremy Lent, a former tech entrepreneur who now investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future, in The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe:
The rise of the internet, which is still in its infancy, may turn out to have as profound an effect on our group identity as the emergence of language back in the Paleolithic era. In the same way that bacteria learned to transfer genes to each other to create a virtually immortal quasi-superorganism, so humans are developing the ability to transfer ideas to each other and participate in forming a global consciousness. Can we wake up in time to appreciate our collective identity and participate in something greater than our fixed selves?
He further hypothesizes that our planet could become one where a technologically networked and cognitively enhanced species learns to integrate deeply with the rest of the planet’s cohabitants to create a comprehensive planetary intelligence: an intelligence that is devoted to the mutual flourishing of all humans and non-humans.
It’s wearying to be dealing with our own struggles while being inundated with stories of brokenness and hurt. But I see glimmers of hope that sharing and accessing all these overlapping stories are changing many of us for the better — opening our eyes to our interdependence … and tethering us together in the mutually beneficial ways Jacob and Lent articulate.
Social media show us we aren’t alone.
Whatever we’re going through, someone else is going through (or has been through) something similar, and is providing camaraderie, support, and resources through digital connection. Even if we aren’t actively participating in digital spaces by sharing our own experiences, we can access the validation, compassion, and insights of others in similar situations by reading and watching their content.
A personal example: in the midst of my divorce, I never publicly posted about my experience, but I consumed a lot of content from women who talked about the ups and downs of the process and the aftermath. Their vulnerability helped me feel less alone. It gave me hope that I could and would get through an incredibly painful and scary phase of life. Now, many years later, I find myself posting words of encouragement to women who are sharing their fears and feelings about navigating divorce. We are unlikely to ever meet in person and our connections are often fleeting, but we are forever bonded by shared experience, kindness, and mutual understanding.
The more we see the many ways we are connected to everyone, the stronger our bonds with all of humanity grow.
Social media shows us our fellow humans care and are willing to help.
One of the most bittersweet spaces in my digital landscape is a mutual aid group for my local region. On the one hand, it’s sobering to see how many people are in need of assistance with the basic necessities of life. The vast majority of posts are requests for information about where to find help or immediate odd jobs to perform to earn money to cover food, rent, gas, laundry, utilities, etc. On the other hand, it’s uplifting to see nearly every request met with a flurry of people not only offering links to resources, but offering to fill the need or contribute in whatever way they can, even when it requires inconvenience or sacrifice on their part.
The eagerness of people to help strangers on the internet is strong evidence that the current dominant narrative of the selfishness of human beings isn’t accurate. Most of us have always been willing to help strangers, but our ability to show our love for fellow human beings beyond our physical circles was limited to participating in efforts led by institutions, on their terms.
“[N]ow we can do things for strangers who do things for us, at a low enough cost to make that kind of behavior attractive, and those effects can last well beyond our original contribution,” writes Clay Shirkey, a leading voice on the social and economic impact of internet technologies, in Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organizing without Organizations. “Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material.”
With social media we can coordinate to fill each other’s needs and to accomplish things together that we can’t accomplish individually — things we used to have to rely on institutions to organize and lead, often without our input. As Alissa Quart explains in Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, this is “part of the broader story of interconnection, countering mantras that … we should ignore or deny our need for others.” It isn’t charity. It’s people helping people in ways that result in “change for the givers as well as the receivers.”
Our ability to help each other directly is changing how we think about us and what we are capable of doing together.
Social media shows us our needs and interests are aligned.
In the local mutual aid group I mentioned, there used to be a lot of judgmental comments mixed in with the offers of help — people chastising those in need for not making the “right” decisions in life or not being responsible enough with what they have. There also used to be more suspicion that those in need were actually scammers. Recently, however, I've noticed the number of those comments diminished.
More and more people are acknowledging they too are struggling in some way. (Another example of how social media shows us we’re not alone.) Each shared experience and increasingly relatable request for help from fellow humans chisels away at what Heather McGhee in The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together calls “the dominant story that you’re on your own, responsible for all your own successes and failures.”
There seems to be a growing understanding that many of us simply cannot be as “impossibly self-sufficient” (Quart’s phrase) as our domninant narratives and systems require. Shaming and blaming people for needing assistance to meet impossible standards doesn’t make any sense.
Social media is dissolving old narratives that pit us against each other and equipping us to find ways around structural barriers to collective action. We are on the path to discovering what happens when we, in the words of McGhee, “stop buying the old zero-sum story that elites use to keep us from investing in one another.”
What we do in digital spaces matters
When we’re weary and overwhelmed, it’s tempting to think there’s not much we can do to make a meaningful difference in this broken and inhumane world. After all, we’ve been fed a steady stream of stories about “heroes” who seemingly single-handedly brought about change. But in the words of Ellie Meredith, an 18-year-old speaking to The Wildlife Trusts last November: “We don't need 100 perfect changemakers. We need 1 million imperfect ones.”
Meredith was inspired by the work of Jon Alexander, co-founder of New Citizenship Project and author of CITIZENS: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us. Both emphasize that we don’t have to carry the burden of creating change all by ourselves. Lent agrees: “[E]ach of us can be most effective in transformative change when we connect with the existing network of life-affirming groups already operating around us.”
Social media gives us tools to connect with whatever networks and groups are meaningful to us and to change-make in ways that fit our unique situations. It truly can be as simple as telling part of your story, interacting with others, posting accurate information, sprinkling things you love throughout digital spaces, and sharing glimmers of the world you want to see.
My hope for us all in this new year is to acknowledge our weariness while also embracing the notion that what we do in digital spaces matters.
The future is “something we are all co-creating as part of the interconnected web of our collective thoughts, ideas and actions,” writes Lent. Our contributions impact what others know about the world and believe to be possible!
Digital Kindness Journal Prompt #1
How do you feel about social media?
Answer this prompt wherever you journal or the comments section to particpate in a community discussion. If you’re interested in a dedicated journal for exploring your social media attitudes and behaviors, the Digital Kindness Journal: a year of guided reflections for compassionate social media use is available for purchase on Amazon.
MISCELLANEA
The series finale of Reservation Dogs on Hulu includes a beautiful explanation of community and how pieces of who we are and how we navigate the world impact others.
I’m reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson — a book exploring racism in America as a caste system — for a community conversation next week. It will be interesting to see what participants choose to share about the conversation experience and the book in digital spaces in the months to come, especially with Martin Luther King Jr. Day on January 15 and Origin, a movie about Wilkerson’s journey writing the book, coming to theaters on January 19.
Youth are capable leaders with important perspectives and valuable ideas we would all benefit from listening to. (Like Ellie Meredith, mentioned above.) I’m currently part of the Honorary Commander Program at the United States Air Force Academy. USAFA is a powerful example of the incredible things youth/students do when surrounded by people who believe in their potential and expect them to lead. I got to tour the 306th Flying Training Group housed at the Benjamin O. Davis Airfield at USAFA. On an annual basis, the 306th trains more than 4,000 cadets and officers in soaring, parachuting and powered flight, while operating the U.S. Air Force’s busiest visual flight rules airfield operated only during daylight hours. Two out of every three instructors are USAFA cadets!