Offline Is Where The Real Progress Is Happening

The sad but true statement about the state of social media.

I think it’s nearly impossible to have any consistently meaningful dialogue on social media between two people who hold opposing viewpoints. By consistent, I mean at a fraction of the rate that we currently have pointless, hate filled online dialogue where too many people simply attack other’s opinions or state their own without any effort to understand what someone else is trying to say. By meaningful, I mean dialogue that actually leads to some kind of coming together to take action.

Right now, there’s plenty of people who share the same opinion teaming up to spread that opinion to others who share a similar mindset. There are plenty of groups binding together to continue spreading whatever they believe to be true, and that’s great. Unity is a good thing, but I’d argue that conformity isn’t.

When you conform, you’re not allowing any room for individual thought. You’re going along with the wave of whatever popular opinion that group shares without making room for any opposing criticisms. And in an instance where there is criticism against the group thought, well, you get Twitter.

What I mean is that you get a bunch of people posting incendiary comments to back up their own beliefs. The back and forth begins and before you know it there’s a trending topic filled with angry, pointless, commentary that serves absolutely no purpose.

Offline Is Where it’s At

On my most recent trip to New York, I was fortunate enough to meet Writer and Author Mary HK Choi. She was holding what I guess you could call a book launch in Williamsburg, but her book was the last thing I remembered about that evening.

Instead of a typical book launch where I expected Choi to read passages from her book, we were all seated in rows of chairs with Choi and two other writers sitting up front. For the next three hours, Choi lead conversations about some of the most controversial topics in culture today, and did it in raw fashion.

Cultural appropriation was, “Why are people so comfortable stealing Asian culture.” Interracial dating was, “I didn’t realize I was a thing till I started f*cking white men.” Yeah, I’m talking raw.

But it was beautiful. No one pulled out their phones to record. No one gasped and stormed out of the room ready to post how offended they were that anyone could speak like that. Everyone felt safe to speak their mind, everyone was engaged, and nearly everyone stayed for the entire three hours. How’s that for attention span.

That’s just one small example. Very small. But I believe it’s a good one. It was public, meaning not everyone there knew each other. It was informative, people had different viewpoints, no one crucified someone for their beliefs, and the defamation that occurs on social media wasn’t even an issue.

That sounds like everything the internet promised to be, right? Just on a much more connective scale with endless boundaries. But that’s not what’s happening online. People aren’t having the open discussions they’re supposed to be having and we aren’t growing any closer together. In fact, I’d say we’ve become more divided if you base it on comments alone.

Offline offers an opportunity for much more progressive discourse. And to achieve the same level of honesty online, people are turning to closed groups. I get why that makes sense, but it’s sad that it takes shutting off the very thing that the internet was meant to be to achieve what we thought was meant to happen.

So now here we are with the most powerful communication tool ever invented and we’ve limited our communication. And in what has to be the most cosmic mix of karma and irony, more and more people are turning offline to exercise that power.

C.R.Y.

Offline Is Where The Real Progress Is Happening was originally published in C.R.Y on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.