We no longer see the Web as a vast global library we visit to read the enlightened wisdom of experts. It is no longer a place we go to sit quietly and listen to others or engage in respectful and informed debate with experts. Instead, we see it as a broadcast booth through which to force our own thoughts upon the world, no matter how uninformed they may be. The digital world is no longer about expanding our own horizons by learning from others with different experiences and expertise and engaging in two-way debate and thoughtful dialog. It is merely a place for us to speak to the world and leave without listening. How is this shift from listening to talking changing our world?
In its brief quarter century of existence, the Web has transformed society. Yet in the process that same society has transformed the Web. While we have focused most of our attention on the former, it is the latter that offers greater insight into our future.
Nowhere is the transformation of the Web more apparent than in its existential shift from library to publisher.
The early Web was an expensive and technically demanding publication medium. This meant that to the average person it was a place to passively consume gatekept content, from news and academic research to commentary and entertainment that was produced by traditional elite curated voices.
The rise of social media over the past decade and a half eliminated the cost and technology barriers to Web publication, offering non-technical publication platforms that were available to anyone free of charge.
Suddenly everyone had a voice and those voices were, for a time, equally accessible to those of traditional elites.
Accustomed to quietly listening to others all their lives, the digital citizenry were in an instant all handed megaphones and told to scream out anything and everything that popped into their heads.
The extensive training, editorial oversight and experience with public engagement that defined traditional elites were thrown out the window. Without so much as a basic guidebook on how to behave online, the digital hordes were unleashed upon the world.
Absent even the most basic etiquette rules, the social Web grew up as a free-for-all largely without rules. Guidelines and policies were added in largely reactive fashion over time to address major incidents, rather than proactively at the beginning in a way that might have shaped online behavior from the beginning and avoided the toxic chaos that defines the modern digital sphere.
Much as a young child handed a tape recorder becomes enamored of the ability to record and share their own voice, so too did a public hungry for fame take to the idea of being able to share their uninhibited thoughts with the planet.
For their part, social platforms encouraged their users to share first and ask questions later in order to maximize the amount of monetizable and mineable content flowing through their servers. Once unthinkably mundane tasks like eating breakfast were presented and endlessly promoted as experiences shareable with the world.
The end result is that we became so focused on talking that we forgot how to listen.
Putting this all together, the Web has transformed over the past quarter century from a place we go to learn and listen into a place we go to taunt and talk. Social platforms have reprogrammed human society to convince them that they should live-stream their every thought and do so as loudly as possible in order to speak over everyone else.
We are taught to no longer take turns, research our answers or speak clinically and concisely. Rather we should grab the microphone and never let go, speak before thinking and couch our views in profanity-laden emotional diatribes and witty sarcasms designed to entertain rather than enlighten.
In the end, perhaps the most important question of our digital future is how we might learn to briefly stop talking and start listening once again.
