Consuming conversation

Photo by Onur Binay on Unsplash

I write for a whole bunch of reasons, one of which is hopefully the furthering of my own thinking. Writing lets you chew on your thoughts, spit them out, examine them and start over if you need to. It allows you to bounce ideas off a wall, and turn them over on the page before playing with them again. Writing helps us think, and thinking helps us write, ideally. Likewise, talking through ideas with a friend, a partner, a co-learner lets us draw out and examine and develop our thinking. Our ability to build one another up, to become more than the sum of our parts, is maybe the most important factor in furthering human flourishing.

But that is not, of course, how we spend all of our time. Whether it’s work or distraction our attention is often forced, or led, elsewhere. And there might be nothing inherently wrong with that. One of the many things I have to do for work, a part of the job I sometimes embrace and sometimes weakly attempt to resist, is scroll the almighty TikTok. And my section of the app, the sort of videos fed to me by the algorithm, are largely political, to no one’s surprise. So I’m being sent video after video about the election right now, from Kamala dancing to rants about voting vs. not voting to the occasional strange and unpleasant MAGA video that seems bound to drive people away from the Trump campaign. Very few convince me of much, except one thing – our capacity to speak to one another and think through ideas together in ways that further our common cause is under threat.