A couple of weeks ago, I watched and then shared on social media a short (11 minute) TED talk by Elizabeth Lesser about ‘’taking the other side out to lunch’’. Basically she proposed that we all try to at least temporarily abandon our judgemental tendencies and really try to listen to and understand someone whose point of view, background, or political or religious leanings or beliefs were fundamentally different - if not diametrically opposite - of our own.

A large number of my friends on social media are Americans and Britons.  Both of these groups have faced and are facing some serious political and cultural upheaval at the moment. Most –but not all – of them, like me, lean toward the liberal end of the spectrum in their characters and choices. Over the course of the last couple of years, I have seen some nasty arguments play out between friends on social media. I’ve seen more than one friend unfriend another over political differences or moral disagreements. I’ve seen more friends than I’d care to imagine, on all parts of the belief spectrum, become ardent evangelists of their chosen point of view, and the consequential, exponential sharings of memes, articles and screeds that intend not only to reinforce said point of view but also refute and refuse all others. Trenches have been dug, and the battle is being waged not with traditional weapons, but with an endless slinging of recycled ‘’facts’’ and distilled ‘’justifications’’ of whatever it is one stands for. He who shouts the loudest (or who posts the best memes) wins.

I don’t like sharing things on social media unless I myself have authored them. This isn’t based in vanity or narcissism; quite the opposite in fact. If I share it, I want and need to take ownership of it. It has to come from me. I do not feel right participating in a recycling of information, and honestly I think sharing is a bit of a cop-out. You read something ready-made that aligns with your perspective, and you click ‘share’ and easy as that, you’ve expressed yourself, without the onerous task of actually having to think or to write.

This ease of sharing seems to go hand-in-hand with a perceived liberation from responsibility for the content of what one shares on social networks. Communication is happening so rapidly, so automatically and so nonchalantly that people seem to lose any sense of ownership for what they are saying. Filters come off, and things get really ugly. There’s a perceived anonymity when one throws things out into the digital communications cloud.

I used to post a daily journal on a small social network whose simple credo was ‘’Be excellent’’.  It truly was a lovely place, where photos were praised and favourited and starred and nothing mean or critical was ever said. A little uptopian haven on the interwebs. When the site fell into difficult financial straits, a facebook group was created where members could interact and share information. What was interesting was that as soon as anyone said anything remotely negative about the photo site, the cudgels and pitchforks came out and the negative poster was basically run out of town on a rail. So much for ‘be excellent’. Even more appalling and ironic, the group administrators would carefully expunge any such unseemly threads, because they weren’t in keeping with the group’s ethos. Yet it was the very members of said group who had participated in the pile-on. Welcome to the cutthroat world of social media.

I tried this week to follow Lesser’s advice, and read a couple of articles shared by friends whose beliefs and choices are different to my own. I tried, I really did, to read and listen objectively to these articles, and all I came away with was a sense of incredulity. Perhaps I need to follow Lesser’s instructions to the letter, and speak with someone face to face, rather than reading or listening to what they share. Have them tell me in their own words, not recycled or borrowed ones, what they think and why they think it. And perhaps that’s part of why we have arrived at such an apparent chasm of acrimony. We’re not really talking anymore, or at least not enough, not for ourselves, in our own words.  We’re hiding behind masks and keyboards and phones, lobbing borrowed words at one another, and turning deaf ears.

All that we're left with is cacophony.