There is a balance to public speaking that is often forgotten, and that is between the speaker and the listener. You may have a speaker, but if they are shouting into a void or in terms their audience doesn’t understand, then their message and their efforts are pointless. Unfortunately, in today’s society we are not taught how to listen nearly as effectively as we are taught how to speak. We are put out in this world and told that our opinions matter and they are important and people are going to care about what we say, and we ultimately find out that no one does. So we turn to social media, and we scream and we shout into this endless void of friends that we don’t really know and followers who don’t care, begging for someone, anyone to listen.
We are forced to recognize that in our efforts of reaching the largest crowd possible, we are often left alone.
This loneliness prompts us to engage anyone on any platform in a desperate attempt to be heard. This is why social media has become the place for political debates. It is accessible, it is protected, and unfortunately there is often an anonymity that is both liberating and dangerous. Anyone can go online and state an opinion, and once it is out there it is there for the world to see and debate freely. Once it is on the web, you no longer control it. We were ultimately forced to turn to social media because the art of the face to face debate has been destroyed. Often we get caught up in the necessity to spare a person’s feelings, or protect our own, that we hide our political or social opinions in an effort to maintain relationships. And if we cannot fathom living with someone with different views then ours, we ostracize them.
We are taught not to build bridges, but to burn them.
Worse than isolating people, we target them. We let our public debates become crowded instead with personal attacks, and libel. We attack the person not the opinion, because we are taught that our opinions are polarizing and there is no way have a relationship with someone so contradictory to one’s own beliefs. Our political debates have transformed into grotesque forums of shame and blasphemy. Instead of debating an issue openly and honestly, we often attack the other person. We actively shame them to not only belittle them, but to belittle their opinion. We make them seem lesser, so that we can appear to be more. Our rhetors of today are not speakers, they are glorified bullies. This is seen especially on social media as we can hide behind computer screens and throw ad hominem attacks into a debate as if we were fighting trench warfare launching bombs haphazardly into no man’s land. We have made a monster out of social media.
We have taken away the art of expression and replaced it with the art of shaming.
There is only one solution to this type of madness, this lack of communication, and that is to teach people how to listen. We need to not disagree so immediately, but to understand exactly what is being said, how it is being said and who it is being said by. We are not our opinions, we are people with opinions, and they should not be the deciding factor in who we associate with. Now, obviously everyone is not going to get along. (For instance, people who prefer waffles to pancakes are dead to me.) But, I can still respect them as a people, regardless of what they believe in, because if you don’t take anything else away from this piece remember this one line:
Acknowledging the validity of someone else’s opinion does not mean that you’re conceding your own.
What it means is that we are showing people that we respect them, and we hold their opinion to some value. This can be done in any social setting, both in person or online, and we should work to encourage this type of communication. We learn to empathize with people and their stories, and learn that maybe their opinion for their situation makes more sense. If we discuss openly and honestly our grievances, maybe nothing will change. Maybe no one will budge on their stance and neither party will be persuaded.
Maybe we will have to simply agree to disagree, and that’s kind of a wonderful thing.
