The Internet was once a place where people with similar interests, across geographic divides, could connect. The promise of instantaneous, more reliable communication around the world was exciting and full of promise.
Only a couple of decades later, the “innovation” offered by the Internet begs for a new orientation. Anonymity, isolation, manipulation, division, constant marketing, constant reactiveness, and shouting into the ether now color our online experiences. Stories have become disposable, soon forgotten in the cacophony of ever-”new” content. In a world filled with more information than ever before, we are increasingly missing the one thing the Internet was designed to deliver: connection with each other.
Yet we know it is the intimacy and trust within community that is the antidote to our world’s ills:
Promotion.
Individualism.
Transaction.
Sensationalism.
Selling. Selling. Selling.
When our communications take queues from institutions and corporations that perpetuate these ills, we do a disservice to our collective vision. We proclaim our values and our views, along with everyone else – disconnected and focused only on ourselves and “our” message.
We are not selling transformation. In fact, we know the lasting, equity-bringing changes for which people around the world work is born of something much more vital and much more enduring. To bring and be the balance in our society, nonprofits – without the aim of political/financial gain – are entrusted in our communications to reflect what is most important to our humanity:
Pause.
Growing.
Belonging.
Giving.
Reciprocity.
When our communications take queues from institutions and corporations that perpetuate these ills, we also do a disservice to our depth, to the actual mess that is created by unfettered capitalism, patriarchy, militarism, racism…and directed by linear thinking and linear communications.
What do we need to ensure we are not communicating only in a one-way manner? How can we reclaim communications tools that have been co-opted and/or created for financial gain and accumulation? Can we make a circle of (or at least bend) what has become a set of linear, individualized tools and platforms?
Can nonprofit communications not just serve the collective, but help restore and rebuild it?
How can we model magnanimity?
It is through our collective, shared insights that the world can be changed today. Not through grandiose “silver bullet” solutions, but in the small, still solutions – that, when combined – create a rising tide of change. We must re-learn how to care for each other, and count on one another. We must invite each other to liberation. We must learn to begin again, and again, and again, reimagining all the while.
What if these tools are combined with relationship, deliberation, reflection, fragility, acceptance, self-determination, openness, collaboration, courage, joy, and revolutionary love? What if we completely let go of “convincing” and using enthusiasm to attract people? What if we only share information within context and within a conversation? We aim always to align our grantmaking and fundraising with our values. What happens when we push communications to do so too, in even deeper ways? This requires a more profound conversation or dialogue than what can be shared in 280 characters, with market-driven tools. While it is not possible to become anti-technology nor anti-social media, we can attempt to discover how to use these tools in ways that has yet to be seen.
Let’s ask “what if?” together.
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Related Links
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