It doesn’t matter how well informed or well meaning or thoughtful the message, if you scroll down far enough you’ll find a whole bunch of ugliness. Most often you don’t even have to go that far. We have developed the ability to turn any and every good sentiment into a nasty negative one. I’m not sure if it’s just attention seeking or that there really are people out there who hate everything or if it’s just some bot programmed to post negative garbage everywhere it can, but it’s a big deterrent for me on social media.
The reason I joined Facebook in the first place was so that I could post things that made my mom laugh. And the reason I wrote (aside from clearing the insanity out of my own head) is to share some goodness with others. To create closeness and connection and love. And I’m fortunate to have a small enough readership that my blog isn’t yet exposed to the trolls who’ll want to read what I have to say and then try to twist it into something grotesque. At that point I’ll just disable commenting. But for now it’s a pleasure to have anyone read my posts and comment their thoughts in a positive and encouraging way.
Did the digital realm foster this kind of behavior and create a safe space where anyone can be a viscous ahole and hide behind the safety of the internet? Or is this a side of humanity that’s always there lingering at the outskirts looking for a way in and we just provided to venue? Probably. But we have the choice to be better than that.
I used to read pop magazines like US Weekly and People when I was younger. I found no intellectual benefit to reading it and really just pined away at the perfect looking people and felt sad that I didn’t live up to their perfect bodies and hair and good looks. When I stopped reading them for good I felt better. I purged my system of meaningless garbage like that. Yes I like movies but movie stars are not gods. No one is a god. We are just people trying to survive and maybe do something we love in a mad world.
I try not to scroll too far. It’s not that I want to ignore the underbelly of humanity or not consider an alternative opinion to my own. It’s that I don’t have the energy to listen to hatred and ignorance and cruelty when it serves no purpose whatsoever. You can believe something without having to lace it with demeaning, dehumanizing, damaging rhetoric. And what scares me the most about this kind of communication is the lack of listening. Things are said with no dialogue. We are ready for a fight. It’s about the fight and not the conversation.
And the other tragic side effect of trollers taking up space is that we miss out on the quiet, thoughtful voices that aren’t screaming to have themselves heard. We can’t scroll far enough to reach them because they’ve been buried by millions of loud, obnoxious, trigger happy rage-mongers.
Maybe we should turn all the comments off for good and start actually talking to each other again. Who knows what we might hear, or learn, of uncover.
Love this paragraph. “And the other tragic side effect of trollers taking up space is that we miss out on the quiet, thoughtful voices that aren’t screaming to have themselves heard. We can’t scroll far enough to reach them because they’ve been buried by millions of loud, obnoxious, trigger happy rage-mongers.”
Keep writing. I enjoy learning more about you than I knew when we were younger rowers.