Discussions Build Humanity
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the last few rounds at the Catherine Project.The gist of the project involves slowly reading literature classics with weekly small online group discussions about them. For instance, this spring, after spending over 50 years on this planet, I finally managed to read and deeply discuss Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey over the sixteen week session. Reading at that pace gives you a chance to chew on the text, to give it a chance to speak to you. And the weekly two-hour discussions with a handful of curious strangers was something I eagerly looked forward to every week.
This summer, though, with all of this, I just needed a break. I longed for a bit of the mindless. And for a few weeks, I blissfully was. But I still missed that slow, close reading and, most especially, the discussions. So, I convinced the family to do a miniature version of that project. Not only do we get to read a few (hopefully) good books over the summer, but it also forces a house full of decided introverts to sit down and have some deeper conversations. A book-and-a-half in, I’m going to call it a resounding success, and I have a new thing to look forward to every week (and I don’t think I’m even the only one!).
The one thing that this activity has made particularly apparent to me is how almost entirely pointless social media is. Let me ramble my way to my point…
The book we’re reading right now is Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and one of the points that my son brought up during our first discussion on it was how the book’s community’s rules ended up ensuring every conversation never went deeper than the surface level. The citizens are subtly and not-so-subtly trained from birth to avoid any uncomfortable/interesting/novel discourse. Those ideas may arise, but only in a confessional sort of way, and then the conversation is redirected back to the mundane. And without those discussions occurring, the community is stripped of much of what makes them human.
Social media isn’t quite that direct. No one is actively policing the redirection away from uncomfortable. From the interesting. From the novel. But the corporations hosting our posts just want us to keep watching those ads, and a lot of time spent in a single discussion isn’t going to get our eyeballs in front of enough of them. So they incentivize scrolling more, seemingly hiding posts we swear we just saw, even advocating the posting of the same content repeatedly from some of the niche news sources in order to get more interaction from their followers. However, in doing so, the conversations around that content never have the chance to go deeper than the surface. Sure, I’ve had a few decent back-and-forths in my day. But far more often, the thread just withers and dies before it even has a chance because it’s impossible for anyone to discover in the fire hose that is all of them.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (lest I haven’t said it today, fuck you Elon!), Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit. All the same, never any depth. And just like the community in The Giver, without those discussions occurring we’re equally stripped of much of what makes us human. And we need so much more of that today.