Wormald: Fighting Over Cucumbers On Twitter

By Dana Wormald

Anybody who spends even a little bit of time on social media, which as far as I can tell is just about all of us, knows how toxic it can be. The question is: Why?

Consider, for a moment, Market Basket. It’s often crowded with a lot of people you don’t know, a handful you recognize from town, and a few who are friends or acquaintances. Sort of like Twitter. Now imagine that as people are gathering food they’re also loudly stating what they believe and why other shoppers are idiots for believing what they believe. Not a great situation for someone who just wanted to pick up cumin.

Of course, people go to the market so they can feed themselves and their families, not to grapple with ideological opponents. So instead of dishing out snark and insults to everybody they pass, people of all different backgrounds and beliefs go about their business while, for the most part, quietly respecting the space and time of others. After all, at the market we’re all just trying to get what we need so we can move on with our lives. That is the rhythm of an ordered society, where all (OK, most) willingly follow well-established rules of behavior so the community as a whole feels relatively safe and relatively free. That’s the norm – so much so that when it falls apart it’s news.

The structure of society is partly reliant on intent and expectation. We shop with the intention of buying supplies and expect that we will accomplish the task without being harassed or worse. We may log on to social media with the intention of seeing what’s happening in the world or our areas of interest, and to engage with friends and strangers alike, but some of us also expect that we’ll encounter people with whom we disagree and who need to be reminded that they are morons.

Just as a person who declares they are having a bad day is sure to elevate cumulative everyday frustrations to near-tragedy, anyone who goes online certain they’ll be offended or angered is sure to be proven right.

Social media isn’t toxic, people are.

I try to be outwardly polite and kind, and I’m usually successful. Inwardly can be a different story. Every time I go to the market, somebody does something that I find absolutely maddening. Last weekend it was a woman who camped out in front of the cucumber bin for an absurd amount of time, investigating each one like it was a previously unidentified species. Then she filled bag after bag after bag, leading me to wonder whether she ran a cucumber-themed camp or catastrophically misread a recipe. She could see I was waiting. Her husband could see I was waiting. Neither seemed to care.

In my frustration I began assigning character traits that may or may not have been accurate. Rude. Selfish. Thoughtless. Do they think they’re better than me? That they deserve cucumbers more than the rest of us? I need two – two! – cucumbers. Is that too much to ask?

But I waited, silently, without so much as an eye-roll because it is ridiculous to think you know anything about anyone based on how they shop for vegetables – and we’re also just talking about a couple of 69-cent cucumbers here. That arc from frustration to regained sensibility doesn’t make me unique; it makes me part of a society where everyone gets angry from time to time but has a good idea of how they are expected to conduct themselves. Any verbal expression of frustration would have been an act of pure self-indulgence and a quick and lasting source of embarrassment.

Lots of times, social media feels like a bunch of people fighting over cucumbers. Only physical separation, acceptance of conflict as a social-media norm, and relative anonymity make it feel different than a real skirmish.

We’ve evolved enough, for the most part, to be decent to each other in public spaces most of the time, but there’s much work to be done online.

Maybe that starts with the internal acknowledgement that our own world view is certainly incomplete and therefore absolutely flawed. From there, who knows? Conversation and illumination rather than aggression and negation? If that’s too much to hope for, maybe we just dial it down a bit and tweet a little less. And if you find yourself engaging with people online not to understand them but to tell them they are wrong, maybe take a second to ask why that is.

I recently read a conversation in the Atlantic between Erin McLaughlin, an educator in Pennsylvania, and staff writer Connor Friedersdorf. Something McLaughlin said stuck with me: “If you can get people to be open to new ideas, having conversations with other people and being able to disagree in a way that is constructive rather than just being judgmental, that’s your best chance to change minds – and regardless, you understand more and coexist better. Right now, we’re in this self-indulgent and self-righteous culture of just ripping other people down. But to what end?”

I don’t have an answer to that question.