The Conversations We're Not Having

What are we shouting about online & shutting up about IRL?

portion of The Scream, Edvard Munch, 1893

HI

A few days ago, I was on the phone with a friend, talking about Israel-Palestine. “Did you ever hear from…” I trailed off, tired of imagining, in the absence of real conversational data, how a mutual friend of ours might be thinking about the subject, how they might be seeing me through its lens. “Nope,” she said, before I could get their name out. “From _____?” I clarified. “Nope,” she affirmed.

And back to imagining it was.

These days I have many Big Conversations alone, internal debates that begin with a seemingly benign scroll on Instagram or a news app, and end up as a raging discourse in the confines of my mind. Almost instantaneous to the moment I log on, my mind is flooded with hot takes, opinions, headlines, and the fury of thousands of other people having Big Conversations—mostly with themselves.

I scroll past posts on a thorny subject, usually political in nature, and soon begin to battle it out in my brain, point-counterpoint, hurling caveats and devil’s advocates until I exhaust myself, or think I’ve come to the right conclusion, or decide I want a banana. That is, of course, until I find myself back on Instagram, or opening up The New York Times.

Identifying these internal debates got me thinking: In our current political moment—less than two weeks out from one of the United States’ most historic presidential elections—what conversations are we having online that we’re not having in person, with the closest people in our lives?

And more specifically: How many of us are having fewer face-to-face conversations as our time online, on social media, increases?

Turns out, there’s a name for this: the social displacement theory.

As we spend more time than ever on social media, the idea is that we’re eating up minutes that would otherwise be spent with people. Though this seems logical, current research shows that if we weren’t using that time on social media, we’d likely be spending it watching tv (or another form of media), as opposed to hanging out with friends.

That said, I think the research is missing something more complex. Back to the conversation with my friend.

“I’ve been thinking,” she began. The phone went silent, a lag full of shared grief. “In the same way that Big Conversations often get lost in the minutiae of daily life in a marriage, some of those conversations are muted, or taken for granted, in our closest friendships, too. We stop talking about some of what’s occupying the most space in our brains.”

She was right, of course.

Beyond the glut of minutiae taking up space in our daily conversations, there’s also a stark difference between how we write to each other online and how we talk to each other in-person. Most of the time, we don’t bring the focused intensity and self-righteousness of a ranting Facebook post, Tweet, or (ahem) Substack to our in-person conversations.

In real life, we warm up to each other, sniff each other out, compliment each other’s outfits, sometimes even engage in small talk as a form of intimacy-building. We don’t climb right up on our soap box and commence shouting at our friends the way we’re wont to do in the virtual town square.

Which means that sometimes, the heavier subjects—the ones we’re debating about with ourselves and each other online—don’t make the cut in person, with the people closest to us. Which begs the question: As it becomes easier and easier to mouth off online, is it becoming more and more difficult to have a real discussion IRL?

Today, Big Conversations about politics and identity are happening everywhere from Instagram to public restrooms to phone-banking Zoom sessions. But are they happening in real-time conversation with the people most important to us? Or is it just too uncomfortable, too vulnerable, to communicate in this way, without the protection of a screen?

The discomfort is one part my own, and one part an amalgam of the information I osmose during my time scrolling. As we spend more of our social time online, we absorb an increasing amount of information about other people from their self-curated online spaces. Living rent-free—and quite noisily—in my mind is a massive cache of ideas about my friends: which of them believes X, Y, or Z about a wide array of sociopolitical issues, based largely on their social media posts.

At any given time, I can flip through this Rolodex of humans + their assigned beliefs, and draw from that some sense of whether or not I think a conversation with them about a certain topic is worth having.

By worth having, I mean: Will it advance and complicate my own understanding of the issue? Will it expand my worldview? Will it be free from undue animosity and violent rhetoric? And fundamentally: Do I feel safe to have this conversation with that person?

The question of safety on social media platforms has been hotly (and rightly) assessed on personal and governmental fronts since their inception. But shortly after October 7th, 2023, I noticed a flavor of online discomfort I wasn’t familiar with: I think the best way to describe it is actually suspicion.

Witnessing friends I regularly spoke or texted with share volumes about Israel-Palestine on social media, yet never bring the topic up in phone or face-to-face conversation with me, I began to feel a kind of suspicion. The conversation couldn’t help but be about American Jews. I am an American Jew. Why did these friends—with whom I talked about everything else—spend so much time posting passionately about this issue online, and so little time talking about it with me?

Nastya Ptichek

Did they simply presume I agreed or disagreed with them? Did they think I didn’t care (despite my own writing on the subject)? Did they not respect my opinion enough to be interested in my experience, or what I thought? Did they think a live conversation would be too difficult to have, too fraught, too scary? Or maybe they were just waiting for me to initiate—which I often did, or tried to.

Yet I soon began to feel suspicion projected towards me, from friends who occupied both ends of the sociopolitical spectrum. Early on, this looked like people unfollowing me (in reaction to something I posted) without ever asking about my beliefs. Subsequently, one lifelong friend seemed to decide to end our friendship after what I thought was a benign exchange over Instagram direct message. In the months that followed, they rebuffed every one of my requests to talk, let alone see each other in person.

This has been, perhaps obviously, heartbreaking.

At the same time, there were many friends who defaulted to live conversation the moment they felt some suspicion, some question about my beliefs, or their own. They texted me, or picked up the phone, or looked me in the eye and said, “Hey, can we talk? I’m hurting / confused / angry / feeling alone.”

Those conversations were rich, offering space to listen, stumble, say the wrong thing, be real together, connect, grieve. To know that neither of us had the answers, but that coming from a space of presumed shared humanity instead of suspicion meant finding something closer to truth.

The only thing I can imagine more painful and infuriating than a friendship ending because of an ideological difference is a friendship ending because of a presumed ideological difference based on social media suspicion. This makes me feel violent urges towards inanimate objects, like my phone.

Of course, it’s not just in-person conversations about Israel-Palestine getting sidelined, corrupted by the suspicions and abstractions of social media. Monologues about democracy, abortion, religion, education, equity, housing, healthcare, race, climate change, authoritarianism, U.S. imperialism, and so much more are proliferating in these impersonal, digital spaces. We might be more comfortable than ever sharing our opinions with hundreds or thousands of strangers online.

But can we actually talk to each other? Can we be real? Can we be more human, less app? Can we share our thoughts, fears, feelings about the issues that matter to us? And can we find a way to make our default setting be to do all that in person or by voice, rather than online?

I know that sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes it’s not safe, or worth my time, to enter into a Big Conversation with someone IRL. And that’s ok. That’s wisdom to be heeded. That’s knowing boundaries and practicing self-care.

I also know that in many ways, the damage social media has done is irreparable. Millions of us are hooked on the rush of expressing ourselves from behind a screen, without a human in front of us to respond, to act as an immediate touch-point, to reflect the fleshy, messy impact of our words.

But I refuse to let social media permanently corrode the basic connective tissue that makes us relational animals: our ability to communicate, to be responsive, to talk, to listen, to argue, to understand where someone else is coming from even if we disagree, to empathize.

I believe we still know how to do this. I believe it’s something we can practice, get better at, day by day.

Will you join me in strengthening this connective tissue—in reaching out from behind the screen?

I believe it matters.

SOME HOT LINKS

To watch.

This clip of actor Andrew Garfield talking to Elmo (yes, Elmo) about grief and the power of loving people is exactly what we all need. I promise. Just watch.

To listen.

“Complicating the Narratives,” published in 2018, is a supremely helpful exploration of how people communicate when they’re polarized and suspicious—and the role media and journalism plays in mediating this communication.

For a palate cleanser, this episode of the podcast “Change Agent,” about an 80 year-old woman falling in (and out of) love and finding herself was pure delight.

To read.

Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, a dive into the psyche of a writer-archivist unearthing her own sexuality while discovering the iconic Southern novelist’s secret lesbianism, was brilliant. Joining the

Memoiring

book club Zoom for a talk with Shapland herself? Even more so.

I’m about to start poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is A Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, and promise to report back.

STAY SANE

Keep having those Big Conversations with the ones you love IRL, ok?

Oh yah, and make sure you VOTE VOTE VOTE!

Love,

Lily