Harmonization is the art of adjustment — of fitting in — according to the sound of another. It requires listening: A person who produces too much sound too often or too soon is unlikely to harmonize because he fails to listen to others. On the other hand, it’s nearly impossible for a person surrounded by too much sound from a variety of sources to harmonize with any one thing. So harmonization depends on both limiting external sources of sound and being willing to hear others and adjust accordingly.
Our modern media environment makes harmonizing with other people — especially people who are different from us — incredibly difficult. And the more news and posts we are exposed to, the worse things seem to get.
False news spreads
In his recent book “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart,” Nicholas Carr brings forward the surprising results of modern media research. While no one prefers being lied to over being told the truth, according to a study of 125,000 stories and 4.5 million retweets on Twitter over an 11-year period, “false or otherwise misleading stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than factual ones,” Carr writes.
False news spreads more easily, more regularly and more quickly than factually accurate accounts. Certainly, this has something to do with the often shocking or tantalizing nature of false stories, many of which have been fabricated or embellished in order to garner maximal attention. This means, however, that the more a person is engaged in the stream of media, especially as shared through social means, the more regularly they encounter false and misleading stories.
More frequent media immersion builds up a distorted reality around the user’s field of vision. The reactions elicited from a person who abides in this atmosphere are not keyed to true renderings of reality or of other people. Interpersonal harmony is impossible if what a person encounters are distortions of real events and people.
Condemnatory posts attract
We all like what we like, except that we like what we don’t like even more. When it comes to politics, for example, we rightly assume that everyone likes his or her own political views and preferences. As a whole, though, we really like to see and share political views that oppose our own or are radically different from our own — not to learn from them or stretch our perspective, but far more often to ridicule and demean those views and the people we associate with them.
As Carr shares in his book, “when a team of … cognitive psychologists examined the spread on Twitter and Facebook of nearly 3 million posts originating from a variety of left-wing and right-wing sources, they found that people on one side of the political spectrum loved to share posts denigrating the beliefs of those on the other side.” The posts about the “out-group” were shared or retweeted twice as often as other posts. In fact, the researchers reported that “each word or term in a post referring to an out-group ‘increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%.'”
Encountering posts from perceived adversaries tends to arouse feelings of rage or anger, emotions far more likely to focus our attention and elicit our own sharing than other, more moderate emotions. And as these posts are shared and reshared, they continue to attract mockery and sarcasm the way that dark fabrics attract lint.
This kind of discord is the opposite of harmony.
Group identification hardens
The net effect of the seemingly irresistible attraction of condemnatory posts can be seen in the way that people who consume and reshare those posts change. While you might think that increased exposure to differing viewpoints would tend to lead a person to modify or adapt his own views, the opposite usually occurs. The more that political partisans share and reshare stories about or posts by “opponents,” the more certain they become that they themselves are right. A 2018 study from Duke University’s Polarization Lab showed that “the more attention that people paid to tweets offering opposing views … the stronger was their ideological shift in the direction of their existing bias.”
It turns out that what we are looking for is often more influential than what we see. When we are locked into seeing the “other” as the enemy, we become more and more convinced of our own correctness the more we look at what comes from the other side. Exposure does not necessarily lead to understanding, let alone empathy; in this case, it almost never does. It is as if a single note gets louder and louder, never deviating or changing.
Creating the space for harmony
Harmony is about combining disparate notes to produce a pleasing effect. The research on modern media practices shows that their effects are not all that pleasing. Rather than harmony, there is discord, and the din is amplifying all the time.
As we all know too well by now, what happens online forms us for the rest of life. A steady diet of false news fuels our hunger for gossip. Regularly feasting on evidence of our perceived adversaries’ failures creates a hankering for vilifying others in all arenas. Imbibing viewpoints we are already sure are wrong bloats us on our own presumed superiority. In an environment like this, harmonization becomes less and less likely all the time.
This is why I have started to take very seriously our right to not be informed. That sounds strange, as if it is a plea for willed ignorance or blindness. But I have found that, paradoxically, the more I am constantly exposed to, the less I actually know. Likewise, the more I see and hear and monitor, the less I tend to recognize and consider and understand. I have become a strong advocate of moderate or even minimal media consumption.
I have found, for example, that if you do not check the news during the week and read only, say, the Sunday newspaper (or check the headlines then), you will find that you have not actually missed much. If anything truly earth-shattering happened in the interim, you would hear about it from others anyway. Moreover, removing myself more and more from social media spaces has, unsurprisingly, cleared up my mind and steadied my affections.
A healthy response to our increasingly saturated and frenetic media environment is to limit the amount we pay attention to while also making a habit of doing something with those things we do pay attention to. I think, for example, about something the neuroscientist Sofia Carozza shared in a recent lecture about the effects of media consumption on our neural networks. When someone asked her how she engages with the news, she said that she has made it a practice to offer a prayer of some kind over every headline or news story she reads. (She also shared that she is not on social media at all.) The effect of this practice is twofold: First, it hinders the reflex for scrolling because you are perpetually impeded by the time and attention required to pray for what you have encountered. Second, it forms you to actually respond to what and who you encounter in a positive, creative and sympathetic, if not empathetic way. These are preludes to harmonization.
Prayer is the true pathway to harmonization. By prayer, we attune our affections and desires to God’s will, and by praying for other people, we both take them seriously and make their good our own. Harmonization is not homogeneity. Instead, it is the possibility of real communion: the union between things or people who are distinct or even very different. We need time and space to practice that art of harmonization.
