A tower of babble

In this week’s podcast episode, I talk about the ways that recent killings of U.S. citizens have been galvanizing cities under attack (and the country as a whole) against ICE and Border Patrol—and argue that we should make sure that we don’t express fury only when those seen as angels are killed. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here.

News is constantly newsing and seems like it might never stop. But I’m trying to mostly keep Friday posts focused on ideas that step back from hour-to-hour or minute-to-minute events, and give readers a chance to breathe a little.

Today, I want to consider why and how social media has brought many of us to a point of frothing fury at one another, and what to do about it. This isn’t going to be a post on how to discipline social media’s corporate owners, although I think a lot could be done on that front. Instead, this will be a few thoughts about what’s happening online and how to get through your day-to-day digital existence without wanting to kill other random users who show up in your feed.

Forty years ago, I had just started college and was talking to one of my English professors. At some point, he mentioned that watching MTV was a surreal experience for him. Of course the channel was a corporate entity marketing current music, not one that somehow reflected grass-roots youth culture. But his point was that MTV had massively affected early 1980s teen culture, and he, an adult, could turn it on, and see what countless kids around the country were seeing at any given moment. Similar glimpses were available long before MTV, on shows like Soul Train and before that, American Bandstand. But MTV had made it a continuous phenomenon. It was its own whole world.

I’ve thought of his comment often in the age of social media, when anyone can get glimpses of so many cultures and subcultures that they might never have known about or encountered pre-Internet. When encounters happened in that prior era, as often as not, they would happen in the isolated setting of a magazine, movie, or book.

What MTV had in common with those traditional cultural productions was that it was a one-way transmission. But social media is most definitely a two-way phenomenon. You can experience a thing and comment on it, and people will reply in barely asynchronous formats.

In real life, however, we talk to our co-workers one way, our closest friends another, strangers on the street another way, and… you get the idea. Once in a while, culture or knowledge gaps between individuals could cause wild misunderstandings (see, for example, my account of a youthful small town upbringing leading me to mistaken conclusions about what “raw bar” meant). But on social media, all those categories of people are flattened into one.

We might still imagine we’re talking to one particular group. And with features on some platforms or a locked account, those distinctions become a little more possible. But more often than not, we’re putting out one complex message, aimed at the people we imagine will understand it. Yet that message is seen by many other people who in no way resemble those the original poster pictured as recipients.

On social media, we’re trying to formulate speech, but for it to make sense to everyone who might see it, we would also have to be able to do simultaneous translation for our various communities. And if a post breaks containment and goes viral, so that it’s seen by countless people who know nothing about you, the potential misunderstandings multiply exponentially. Chris Geidner, the journalist behind the excellent “Law Dork” newsletter, had the insight to put “Not every post is for every person” in his pinned post right at the top of his Bluesky feed.

Even with posted reminders, social media remains a minefield. I’ve mentally created a checklist for myself that might be helpful to some of you. Many of the items are blindingly obvious, but still worth pausing to recall from time to time. (Full disclosure: Though I try, I’m not claiming to have always followed my own advice.)

Try to remember that you don’t actually have to be on social media at any given point on any specific day. While a small percentage of people need to live-broadcast events in the Trump era, the overwhelming majority can be away from social media for hours, days or even weeks at a time. Even if you choose not to do that, it’s good to remember that it’s a choice.

Don’t suffer trolls. I don’t mean you should always come out swinging to counter their arguments. Most of the time, it means unfriend, unfollow, or block. If you feel compelled to try to reason with them, do it in private messaging where it won’t pollute your feed or anyone else’s. Most will refuse to engage in that setting. A troll will typically show up making an obviously bad-faith argument. But if you can’t tell right away, as is sometimes the case, a few seconds of looking at their feed will usually make it clear. Remember, you wouldn’t let people take a shit in your front yard (unless that’s your thing).

You aren’t obligated to converse with anyone. Many platforms have ways that you can limit replies to people you follow, or delete hostile responses. I encourage good-faith disagreement and discussion, but your social media feed is not a peer-reviewed journal or a Reddit AMA. Even when your replies are open, you don’t have to respond to everyone who posts.

Is this person actually agreeing with you? Here is probably the most useful thing I have to offer. As someone who’s had a moderate-sized following on Twitter in the past, and now on Bluesky, it’s my firm belief that people—often those with smaller followings—are using replies to try to connect with other like-minded people. Humans being humans, they will often try to add some kind of nuance to your post, or show that they know something you didn’t mention. However exhausting it can be to get a ton of responses like this in framed a tone that seems vaguely corrective, in my experience, they’re generally just wanting to show that they can add to the conversation.

Does this person probably agree with you on 95% of issues? Even when people are disagreeing with you, maybe even rudely, consider whether it’s worth arguing over. If you made a mistake, acknowledge it or clarify. But if they’re just unhappy because your post broke containment for the intended audience, and the issue at hand has become one of translation, you can just let it go. I try not to waste my time or others’. If they misunderstood something I wrote, and there’s no simple way to correct it that won’t become an argument or feel insulting to them, I often just assume they’re good-faith posters and move on.

If everyone is misunderstanding what you wrote, it might be you. And even if it’s not, you can always reply to your original post, adding information that will make it clear for all your friends and followers. You don’t have to answer each reply in order to respond to the group as a whole.

If in doubt, you can always wait to reply. This is self-explanatory advice with which you probably agree, though you will surely ignore it.

Lastly, if you find yourself feeling like you have a responsibility to engage with and respond to hostile people who have a very different value system or understanding of culture than you, I would say that is an excellent and honorable way of viewing the world, but that you should go out and do it in real life. I have never seen anyone’s perspective change radically through debates or arguments on social media.

Social media can be nimble and smart. At its best, it offers unbelievable educational moments, clever wordplay, and fun riffing on images. But its limitations mean our messages often get accidentally stripped of their subtlety. Meaning becomes a flat circle. Yet somehow our misunderstandings pile higher and higher into escalating confusion: a tower of babble. Sometimes I think there’s beauty and mercy in the fact that we can ever understand each other at all.

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