Stories & Reels vs. Lives & Real

I’m not sure who is responsible for the saying, “Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are.” In the digital age, it may force the subtle change to, “Show me your friend list and I’d walk away with nothing.” The internet and social medias have impacted the world for an overall good, but with good things, other things can be lost. Our attention spans are much like the “shorts” or “stories” we watch for one. We need the summary of the story, not the stories in between. Those seem to take too long. Speed up to the clinking glasses, the walk on the beach, the shot of someone jumping into water, and an airplane taking off. Then repeat over and over as someone on the opposite end scrolls past and rewards the video with a heart, or at the very least, a view. The interaction becomes a boring transaction. In fact, the in-betweens of that vacation shown could be two people staring at their screens either editing their experiences or watching sliced up versions of someone else’s. More than the shrinking of attention spans has been the brutal inability to carry conversations with weight and substance. Like the disappearing digital stories that are live for only 24 hours, we simply forget in order to make way for the constant drip of information flowing day by day. Conversations used to be built over time, like one brick laid over the other; information on top of information, often carried by the other party’s curiosity to gain access to that knowledge. Then in turn, either in polite gesture or genuine interest, the two swap stories to create a sort of book between themselves. I have not had the privilege of such an interaction for a long time, and if I have, something important is missing.

I now enjoy writing over any other source of communication because I obviously get to think before I say. I assemble my ideas as I type while the jumble of thoughts floating around my head make physical contact with paper. I get to untangle the lines of imagination to anyone listening. And that’s the main ingredient- to anyone listening. I don’t have to watch someone scroll their phone in front of me, or watch their eyes dart to the 100 things preoccupying their mind, or see very clearly that they merely want me to hurry up so they can return to what interests them. Perhaps the curse of growing up back and forth between two very different nations is that my first language has become body language and emotional intelligence. What’s the use of talking when the other party is clearly not interested? So then we pivot back to what interests them the most, and that of course, is the topic of themselves. The other curse is that I tend to remember what they say because I can’t help but listen. In the end, I have some semblance of a house built, brick by brick, of who this person is, what interests them, what fears they have, and their future goals. On their end, they did not lay any bricks. Why muck up the view with someone else’s home?

Somewhere down the line, we have adopted this global communication format to our day to day lives. “I will post a thought and I won’t read the comments. Besides, no one can have a conversation with the world. Who are these people? They are probably bots anyways, or maybe just lonely trolls, and so I will not seriously post with the intention of winning hearts and minds over.” This line of thinking can be more associated with a platform like X, but then we can also adopt other platforms. “I had a wonderful night at the show,” and to great relief, a few hearts flow in acknowledgement. We may flip through stories, shorts, reels, and whatever other titles we have accumulated into daily lingo. We have gotten better as a society of updating the general world, (people we may have met somewhere along the road of life) of our lives but we have lost the art of conversation. We have lost subtle etiquettes. We have lost eye contact and posture. In our hunger to consume more content by a wide net of people, we have lost the ability to hold onto the details of a few good people; people who are right in front of us in the here and now; people who may be wildly more interesting than any semi anonymous person’s highlight show.

Walking around as a listener in the modern world is quite the task. You may walk away with understanding and they will walk away with a post. They will have the remarkable feeling as well that community just happened. Perhaps they think that some sort of transaction occurred and it was pleasant, but only because they were allowed the opportunity to update their status on your timeline. You may ask the reasonable question- do I get anything in turn? A platform isn’t afforded the opportunity to talk back. It is the database of information that receives. We put a face to their book. We are the audience to their story. If we had a story, then we’d find a way to trick the algorithm that we’re interesting. The rules of engagement have changed and we merely compete for proper attention. Is there a conclusion to this entry? Not really. There’s more good than bad. We also have the adoption of podcasts- to watch a proper back and forth between interesting people from far away places via podcast. I wonder what the world would look like where we don’t have to watch podcasts for interesting conversation but that we’d be just as engaged to the people who surround us daily. What interesting stories are in their hearts and minds? What is the content too long to post in a 20 second clip? Perhaps we’ll never know but I hope we will. I hope we will show interest and that can start today if we stop and listen.