In her piece, Following You, author Kate Crawford discusses different types of listening on social media. The three types are “reciprocal listening, background listening, and delegated listening.” The originally positive “background listening” that Crawford uses to describe the behavior of users on social media in 2009 has become a major negative in 2018—both for the individual and for the community at large. Crawford describes background listening as conversations that “continue as a backdrop throughout the day, with only a few moments requiring concentrated attention.” As social media has become a bigger and bigger milieu for online discussion, background listening has become a dangerous concept for two reasons.
First, as more and more information becomes only available on the internet, people come to rely on the internet as a major source of information. Thus, if people are not giving full attention to the information they are constantly processing, they can transmit the wrong information, sort of like an Arabic telephone. This misunderstanding is one of the major factors that led to the Fake News epidemic which began in 2015. It is much easier to slip in falsities and spread them around if people are only half listening.
Second, something that is a major problem for me, is that, because of social media running in the background, it is difficult to dedicate full attention to other things. Even as I write this blog post, I have flitted back in forth between Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. If I didn’t have these distractions it would be much easier to create a logical, coherent, argumentative post because I would be giving it my full attention 100% of the time.
