First, my fellow Pagans, my people...I love you. I just want to say that. It has been a rough few days and first and foremost I want to say clearly that I love you and I love our community.
So, I am watching debates raging about how Pagans should or should not react to Notre Dame and accusations that some people are telling other people how to feel about it. I, actually, want to pull back a bit and have a different conversations because what I am witnessing is worth considering from a different angle. In fact, it is related to some topics of study that the faculty learning community at American University that I founded to investigate the pedagogical implications of our contemporary information ecosystem is pursuing.
One of the most dangerous aspects of our contemporary information ecosystem is that we have these platforms that give an illusion of being private (my wall, my feed, etc.) but that are actually part of the public square. In giving people the message while they are in the public square that it is a private space, we are telling people that they don't need to think about the impact of their communication on others. It gives us the illusion of intimacy in which we are with people who know us so deeply that they know what we do and don't really mean beneath the surface. Social media is portrayed as being a private expressive affair...except that it isn't. It really, really, really isn't. Social media is the primary Public Square of our time. There are three things that are going on here that are especially dangerous.
1. People are not understanding that they have no real privacy rights in this sphere. What they say is not private. It also doesn't ever really go away, even if they delete it. What they say and do isn't really just shared with their friends. Everything they do, in some way or another, is out in the open in the public square.
2. You are being monetized. Your conflict and drama is being monetized and machines are learning from it. The drama that you feed into it isn't just going to become business intelligence...it will become political intelligence. It isn't private and the way it is used is opaque and doesn't require your consent.
3. Most importantly to me, in pretending like we are in a private space but not realizing that we are in a public square what we have really done is to collectively lose cultural competency about how to have public conversation. I'm not saying that we need to be inauthentic...I LOVE Amanda Palmer, for example. She is incredibly authentic in the public square. I am saying that when you are in the public square, you need to know you are performing in public and that your words have impact on other people. If you value compassion, you need to pay attention to that performative impact because it can cause harm. That also means that you can use that public square to create change for good purposes...but only if you realize that you are in the public square and not in private.
I'm going to give a real life example from a comment thread I got embroiled in the day Notre Dame burned. There was a post grieving about the fire. Someone commented, "We don't care when the sacred sites of indigenous people burn."
All right...why would this person write this? I don't actually know their inner life. I don't know their motivation. I don't know what they feel. What I do know is that they are out in the public square and that this comment and its ilk could be read by any number of people who are actively grieving, including possible Parisians for whom Notre Dame means something that I can't fully fathom. In circumstances like this, I try to hold back myself, ask myself what I know and what assumptions I am making, and how I can be most compassionate in my assumptions. I decided to give the most charitable read that I could and determine that the person was genuinely wanting to try to protect indigenous sacred lands and that they have an actual activist/reform motivation rather than a troll motivation.
So, I wrote a critique, because I think that if that really is their motivation, then there are ways to respond to this that would be helpful in protecting indigenous sacred lands while also acknowledging the pain people were feeling about Notre Dame.
Basically, the first part is not to make assumptions about the audience, like when the author said "we" don't care about indigenous sacred lands. Given whose wall he was commenting on, I doubt that was true. I know some of the people there. I have higher expectations of them than that.
Secondly, standing up and saying to those who are grieving..."I see your pain. I care about the fact you are in pain. I understand the suffering that comes from the loss of sacred places and I mourn with any people who lose that which is sacred to them. I grieve with you." For me, this is authentic. Maybe it isn't for you. Maybe you are much more internally conflicted. Maybe you have a deep reaction of "FUCK YOU" to the Catholic Church. But if you are writing on social media, you aren't in private. You are in the public square. The people who are hurting are not the church nor are they the history...they are people who are watching something that is important to them be destroyed. What you say is performative and has power. Probably not power to hurt the church...certainly not power to change the past, but power to leave the people who are hurting feeling seen and valued or feeling alienated and with the sensation of being kicked while down. So sure, feel whatever you authentically feel. But you may want to think about what you say in public. Maybe it wouldn't change anything you want to convey...but please, pause and think.
My final point is that, given that we are in the public square, you are wise to think about tactics. If the person's point was really to help address indigenous sacred land rights, then, after showing empathy, at a later time you call back and make a link between the experience of spiritual devastation and grief that people were having about Notre Dame and the next indigenous sacred land that is threatened. You tell them it is the same. You plead with them to help stop the tragedy since they know how it feels. This isn't a competition. It is an opportunity to expand understanding.
However, my point in writing this is NOT really about Notre Dame and this particular incident. It is to put out a call for us to pause and think about the true nature of social media and ask ourselves what we want our public discourse to be. These issues are complicated. If there is a really "right" answer, I don't know it. But one thing that I am pretty clear about is that we need to stop the rapidly moving reaction train that is part of social media, remember we are in public, and then act from that understanding.
Thank you for listening.
This is perfect- thanks for the insight!!
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