The Difficulties of Listening Online
“Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening.” — Gertrude Stein, “Ada,” 1922
Today we are being called to listen. To listen to the stories of those whose voices have not been heard, to listen to each other as we determine what future to build. In this sense, listening isn’t only about hearing; it’s just as much about seeing and feeling. It’s about being open to what the world is trying to show you.
Listening is difficult, and we are not very good at it. Perception seems to be rooted in prediction; we tend to see and hear what we expect to see and hear rather than what is actually there. We’re much better at talking: When we ought to be listening, we are often just thinking about what we want to say next.
What does it mean to be good at listening? At heart, there are three standards for good listening, as proposed by philosopher Hanna Kiri Gunn:
- listening to trustworthy speakers
- listening to a range of speakers
- listening to sincerely understand what others have to say
You can find any number of listicles online with tips for how to become better a listener. I won’t recapitulate those here. Instead, I want to highlight some of the unique difficulties that the structure of our online communication platforms poses for listening.
The first and perhaps most important thing to know is that our online worlds are, more and more, tuned to us, like an old pair of shoes that have conformed exactly to our feet. When you do a Google search, for example, Google’s primary aim is not to present the results that best answer your question, but to present the results that generate the most ad revenue. Just like your own perception, Google will show you what it thinks you want to see. The same logic underpins our social media platforms. What results is what has been called the “filter bubble”; each of us lives in an informational bubble that protects us from dissenting opinions, uncomfortable news, the other side of the story, and so on. When most people get their news from social media—i.e., from within a filter bubble—we might worry about our prospects for achieving the second standard for good listening: exposing oneself to a range of speakers.
So we are in a seemingly paradoxical situation: Online, we have the world at our fingertips. We have the impression that we have instant access to everything anyone has said about anything. But that potential is simply not borne out in our online experiences. Oftentimes we are simply fooling ourselves into thinking that we are being good listeners. “Thus,” writes Gunn, “while googling has the potential to make us better listeners than we were previously able to be, the actual result is that we fail to meet our obligations to be good listeners more than ever.”
Gunn suggests that we have a duty to become better listeners, which today means building better online search practices. The first step, she says, is understanding how search results are generated.
Then the hard work begins. Supposing we can manage to break out of our bespoke Google shoes and run barefoot across the web, we face the challenge of the first standard for good listening: determining who to listen to.
A feature of the online world is that everyone is subtly encouraged to sound off on every issue, whether they are informed about that issue or not, a phenomenon Harry Frankfurt first pointed out in the 1980s in his famous essay “On Bullshit.” Writes Frankfurt: “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.”
Unfortunately, the design of our internet infrastructure does not help us determine who is bullshitting. The institution of the blue checkmark on platforms such as Twitter was, I think, meant for this purpose, but in practice it only shows who is famous (however tenuously), not who is trustworthy.
Discerning the trustworthy from the untrustworthy is difficult, and so we tend to deem trustworthy whatever and whoever our friends deem trustworthy. This may serve us well enough in terms of social capital, but it may not be the best route to the truth. We needn’t look further than Charles Mackay’s 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds for many examples of where social capital and truth were at odds.
And we haven’t yet addressed the third standard for good listening, which is perhaps the most difficult of all: listening to sincerely understand.
To this end, Gunn counsels that we see the vast information on the internet as a “deep resource of the worldviews of others” and not just a “testimonial-credit-account.” That is, we shouldn’t just treat a particular blog post or article as straightforward evidence of such and such fact. Rather, we must work to understand who wrote it and why, what their worldview is, and so on.
Understanding is about grasping a network of interrelations among a body of information. It’s about the whys and hows and interconnections of things, not just cherry-picking facts. It’s about explaining and describing, not just pasting a URL and saying, “Here’s the proof.”
To really listen, I think, we must ask questions. That doesn’t just mean stringing words together with a question mark at the end. (After all, “How are you?” is rarely really a question.) Questioning is, rather, an orientation to the world, a form of openness and wondering. Building a questioning practice is the centerpiece of information literacy—and even human relationships more broadly.
I’ll leave you with a few questions to start with. Consider these as you listen, whether you find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with what’s being said.
- How might I be wrong?
- What proof do I have that this is true?
- What would it mean if the opposite were true?
- What evidence would I need to believe that?
- How does this fit into the bigger picture?
