Social media’s great promise was that it would give everyone in the world a voice and bring us together in enlightened conversation about our shared future. The first half of that promise has come true for a quarter of the earth’s population, though most of the world remains absent from the digital revolution. It is the failure of the second half of that promise, to create shared conversation, that has so bedeviled the online world and led to the toxicity and hate, falsehoods and ignorance that threaten to drown out the kinds of enlightenment and community building that can only come from dialog rather than the monologues that rule supreme on social media today. In short, social media has taught us to talk rather than listen.
One of the most consequential aspects of Twitter’s evolution over the past seven years is the way in which it has devolved from a place for ordinary people to share their thoughts and experiences into a place the public comes to retweet celebrities. Twitter’s skyrocketing retweet rate and collapsing reply rate remind us that more and more, we talk but we don’t listen.
We no longer come to Twitter to gain insight from others and engage in thoughtful and knowledgeable dialog about mutual interests. We line up for a moment of Twitter’s megaphone to broadcast our own thoughts to the world but have little interest in thoughtfully considering the reaction from others. Those that agree with us we considerately retweet or thank, but those who disagree with us we either ignore or silence with vitriol.
On social media the one who screams loudest and most forcefully is the one who ultimately defines reality. Indeed, as the Librarian of Congress warned half a century ago, “it is the very simple technique of repeating and repeating and repeating falsehoods, with the idea that by constant repetition and reiteration, with no contradiction, the misstatements will finally come to believed.”
It seems some things never change.
In many ways social media, especially Twitter, have merely brought the longstanding practices of academia to the mainstream.
In the academic world, each new paper must demonstrate its worthiness of publication by drawing a distinction between itself and the literature that has gone before. This involves what amounts to critiquing past work and calling attention to what the author believes are their limitations.
Few scholars actually contact the authors of the papers they cite in their background sections, meaning their critiques of those works may not actually be correct and reviewers aren’t always in the best position to adjudicate such critiques. Scholars rarely respond when asked to correct errors in their citations, even factual errors that undermine the entire outcome of their paper, while journals are similarly rarely eager to retract or force revisions. Some journals go so far as to threaten legal action against authors who request that citations to their works be corrected, due to the embarrassment of a journal having to acknowledge a revision or retraction.
The end result is that the core of the academic enterprise involves criticizing others from afar without granting them the opportunity to respond or refute those criticisms.
Sound familiar?
Social media has brought this model to the general public, building platforms that encourage speaking without listening.
Imagine if Twitter required users to carefully read at least fifty tweets for each tweet they were permitted to post (checking to make sure the user actually paused the appropriate amount of time to adequately read each rather than merely fast scrolling through them). This would encourage users to spend more time listening than posting.
Alternatively, what if Twitter required users to reply to at least ten tweets for each original tweet they themselves posted? (With appropriate content analysis to ensure the replies were relevant to the tweets they were in response to.) This would force users to engage in mutual dialog rather than merely talking past one another.
Instead, our social platforms are built to encourage precisely the opposite behavior: singular contribution without the requirement of listening or engaging with others. Users can post almost limitless content without ever consuming or engaging with the posts of others. These superposters become the draw for lurkers who merely consume without posting themselves, but who are still monetizable.
Users come to social platforms to consume content and thus social media companies have built their interfaces to incentivize contribution in the most frictionless way possible.
An unfortunate consequence of this design is that users are encouraged to offer their perspectives on anything and everything, regardless of whether they have the slightest background knowledge or experience to actually understand what it is they are attempting to comment on.
Putting this all together, social media has created a world in which we as a society have been taught to speak rather than listen, with incentive structures designed to prioritize screaming monologues over thoughtful dialog, with the loudest one winning.
In the end, social media has failed to live up to the most important part of its promise: bringing us together. Instead of creating a place where we can all come together and engage in conversation in the global town square, we’ve ended up with a great gladiator match of megaphones in which the loudest and most toxic one prevails.
Perhaps someday we’ll finally learn to listen.
