Listen up

Facebook and I have a complicated relationship. I once wrote a Dear John letter to the service, which anyone with a vague understanding of Google could conjure.

Then I created a new account as a self-marketing campaign, believing the hype that people in my business can’t survive these days without a comprehensive social media portfolio. I use Facebook the same way, I expect many people do these days. To see what my friends are up to, and for passing amusement. I also post things—I’m not a lurker—that can vary from trivial observations and links to articles I find interesting and attempts to kick-start discussions with strangers and semi-strangers about things I think need discussing.

In posting, and also in skimming through the bits and pieces others in my small social network circle, I’ve noticed something obvious, but perturbing. Trite is most definitely more popular than important.

It’s a trend the internet, and media in general, caught onto long ago. We don’t want to think about serious things. We want to escape.

Who wants to know that their spending habits have a direct effect on wars in the Congo and the deaths of children in sub-par factories in the Philippines? It’s much more comforting to learn cost-saving tips and tricks for your household.

Who wants to remember that in our own country, women are being trafficked, going missing and getting murdered, and that we’re doing nothing because of their ethnicity? There are celebrities and cute kittens to soothe you instead.

The troubling thing is not that we prefer comfort. That is human nature, and probably healthier for us. The problem is that the decisions we make about what to read and see and listen to are being ever more closely tracked by the companies that create them.

Why would a company spend the money and human resources to report stories seemingly no one is listening to? We jump on the acute, the obvious: ISIS in Iraq; earthquakes in Nepal. But those hidden stories—the insidious ones that speak volumes about the violence we implicitly permit by doing nothing—stay hidden.

And when they do come out, in the form of a 5,000 word exposé by a journalist who has spent months or years working on it, how many of us have been guilty of scrolling to the bottom or glancing at the sidebar and clicking on the link that offers to tell us one weird tip about this or the top 15 of that?

Living in the information age does not make this an information rich world. It makes it easier to see how little people want to know. Clicking those links is the technological equivalent of sticking our fingers in our ears.

And while it’s the responsibility of journalists to let everyone know what is happening in our world—the things we can affect and the things that affect us—it’s hard to keep talking when you know no one is listening.

mihal@mihalzada.com