You have permission to close the door because of the noise.

Pembina State Museum. Image © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved.

While at the Pembina State Museum last year, I stopped at their tiny library near the door and found an old book about the history of the Red River Rendezvous Region. It was interesting, but mostly because of the comments a previous owner had left in the margins. The person disagreed with the historical data presented in the book and penciled in their thoughts unabashedly. With fervor. And exclamation marks. Some swears.

The reader’s response to a print author is generally limited to margins, letters to the author, or letters to the editor.

Or at least that was the case pre-social media.

I love to write and share thoughts, but I’m in the wrong era because I don’t care too much to hear back from a broad swath of people. I know that statement is upsetting and even offensive to many people these days. Perhaps it’s the difference between sending a radio wave out into space or bouncing it off a tower: do you want it to come back, or is sending it out to whomever might find it enough?

Social media is about responding: here’s the media, and here’s where we socially respond. Everyone has a voice, and the noise is deafening. Curation is the new must-have art form.

Pro: We rid ourselves of the gatekeepers.

Con: We rid ourselves of the gatekeepers.

This struggle to figure out what kind of interaction was necessary, good, allowable, or required has been an ongoing conundrum since I started blogging in late 1999. At some point, I created ever-growing comment rules for my blog to attempt to tamp down some questionable behavior, but eventually gave up.

The explosion of social media rendered the issue moot; the behavior that developed on those networks favored the most poisonous and worst human beings had to offer, and it inevitably flowed back to blog comments. Nasty behavior was cemented as normal, attempting to control it seemed futile, and this is about the time I began turning comments off, or heavily moderating what I allowed.

I’ve pared the struggle down into a few categories of questions:

1. Intellectual purity. If I don’t allow all kinds of people and opinions, am I not just living in an echo chamber? Is the proof of standing on intellectual feet being willing to open the door to everyone’s opinions?

2. The purpose of creating. How do I know if what I create matters if I don’t get any indication that it does? Must opinions and ideas necessarily contain hooks to allow for others to add their own to it, all in a complete package, as if everything is performance art that includes audience participation?

3. Creator and consumer exchange. If I create something and put it out for the world to see, should I not accept the return response as part of the equilibrium to be fair? Should ideas always be socialized directly to the source of the idea, or instead, should they be sent out and let actual social circles discuss amongst themselves?

We’ll get back to this list in a bit, because by now I’ve begun leaning towards one, simpler question to use as a rubric to wade through the noise. But before we get there, I want to take you on a wee meander so our arrival makes sense, a little journey that questions our fixation on how something lands, the lack of unique ideas and creations, and a misplaced understanding of access.

First, we must look at the question of how something lands, and what matters more, the courage to be sending, or the landing.

I think often of the book, the printed page, or even a painting.

It goes out across time and geography, and people respond, but the creator generally doesn’t know all of their responses, save for financial indicators (i.e. people buy what they like). But now we’re concerned with how it lands in every way, not just financial sales. This creates an internal struggle that a writer or artist cannot avoid, as they cannot send out their work without hearing how it's received the moment it’s launched. Is how it landed the main point, or is the created item the main point? How something lands is up to an individual exposed to it, is it not?

Next, it’s about the lack of original ideas and our mistaken understanding that mashups and including our opinions make us equal participants in original creative thought.

I have considerable frustration when a person has a unique idea, but everything following it becomes the world trying to do a remake and mashup instead of finding their own unique idea. It seems that our insistence on attaching opinionated voices to every piece of content has made original ideas murky, and the mashup pile-on has become a substitute.

We see ideas as the wellspring, which we can either build on or plug up with concrete, rather than something to admire enough to try and build our own well where we live. We spend our creativity responding to others—which has a place at times—but that cannot be our whole creative existence. At some point, we need to create an original work, or we only exist as feeders and consumers trying to lay claim to property that we didn’t build.

Lastly, we are confused about what it means to be a patron of the arts, an obvious conclusion of the previous two points.

The process I’ve described has led not only to the difficulty of creating in a world that has now been permanently changed to consumers assuming that content should be free, but if they give a creator money, it’s not about the ability to access or consume the content but having access to that creator’s life through online social interaction (of which cancel culture is a threatening form) to get a piece of them or at least control what they are allowed to create. The money isn’t to access what was created, but to access and control the creator.

So what does this mean?

It means I’m constantly at war internally, trying to find a way to make a living creatively before AI chokes the last of us out, while also trying to maintain sanity and keep my life my own, free of the obligation of being controlled by others outside of my realm of real existence. I want the created output to have enough value without having to also hand over my personal existence with it as some kind of value add-on.

There are real reasons to do this.

I’m wary of online stalkers and doxing, things that have happened to me on varying levels of concern and confusion, and treading a thin line between being polite and friendly without encouraging improper obsession or fearing that if I don’t respond regularly, the money goes away. It also means constantly refining how I behave on social media myself, having tripped up quite a bit.

So now we’ve arrived at what I’m using now to work with going forward for interaction on social media.

It’s not a question about the content of the interaction, but the person behind it. Not the what, but the who.

On a social media platform, on the recent ridiculous and murderous June 14 “No Kings” protest day, I posted that Jesus was my king, and that Donald Trump was our president. These are simple statements of fact. A woman I don’t really know left a rude comment, though I am unclear which offended her more, Jesus or President Trump. She is no longer on my “friends” list because:

1. Actual friends don’t behave like that. (We need to grasp that!)

2. She only responds to content in anger over American politics.

The first point concerns reclaiming the concept of friendship and its true meaning, and the second is about drive-by input.

Why do we allow people who aren’t legitimately in our lives to speak into our lives?

People wholly removed from our lives should not get to put their mouth in the door and holler at us,” I wrote after removing the woman from commenting capability. “They have no context and concern. They only show up on your door to speak out of a place of anger, and their words are necessarily poisonous. The opinions that matter in life, whether in agreement or not, are from people who have a real footprint in our lives. They have some skin in the game. They care what happens to us.”

Some people want to argue and vent their rage and get a little rage-release dopamine hit, others wish to correct and encourage because they actually care. The latter is rare.

This concern about who or what we allow to speak into our lives extends to the books we read, the things we watch, and the friends we associate with online or in person. Why do we allow people to do a verbal drive-by shooting? We basically let them wander in whenever they want and scream angry, cruel, foul, and vulgar things in our front door as we’re baking cookies or enjoying our home.

“Here is my social media stream, a place I share the things of interest!” we say.

“Don’t mind me, but I’m going to treat it like a toilet,” these online friends respond, hopping over just long enough to pee into the water and then wander off until next time.

Of course they should be asked to leave. Their opinions aren’t iron sharpening iron. They aren’t enabling creativity. They aren’t even providing decent feedback because it’s all context-free. They have no vested interest in your life. They just like the fact that the internet is one giant open mic.

It’s not always easy to figure out who these drive-by screamers are, but pattern recognition helps.

Pattern recognition is an integral part of thinking to the extent that I included it in my first book for children, because it’s how we train our brain to recognize danger and deception before our logic processes kick in. It can almost be instinctual. We get used to certain patterns leading to certain outcomes, and if we make the effort to notice patterns of behavior around us, we can train our brains as such. It’s ideal for helping with discernment in a time when we have too much information and endless deception.

Inputs are a big part of training yourself for pattern recognition.

Through inputs, we can train our brain to crave what is good and recognize patterns for our safety, or we can train it to crave evil and mindless garbage, leading us further down the path of personal degradation and rage. The repetition of what we see, hear, and read trains our brain to normalize those patterns and react when patterns outside of it are present.

In May, I left a comment on a YouTube video about anti-MLM content:

I work from home and do work that allows for background videos to run without distracting from my work. While I may not necessarily learn something new every time, I also know that what we allow to come into our ears and eyes changes us because it becomes our normal state. So I'm cautious about my choice of inputs. I have a mix of videos talking about being cautious and wise with finances, social media trends, scams, etc.

I then noted that it’s not necessary for me to always learn something new, but that the repetition of what I’ve heard before helps to re-groove the pattern so it takes that much more root. It’s the reason you keep going to church and keep reading your Bible even if you’ve heard it a million times. You’re building pattern recognition.

For this reason, I’m trying to constantly fine-tune my inputs, keeping Philippians 4:8 in mind. So when someone wants to strike up an online connection or be added to a friends list so they can see and comment, I ask myself:

1. Would I enjoy having a conversation with this person in real life?

2. Do they converse online the same way they do in real life?

3. Are they someone I know in real life, and if so, are they a positive influence based on what the Bible tells me is good and right?

4. What kinds of things are they sharing?

Figuring out a healthy way to create without being distracted or reliant on constant feedback, and learning to recognize wise patterns, is where I want to be. What this looks like at the conclusion of the journey is not clear. It may be no social media at all. It may be dumping the blog and writing in static, comment-free places only. Or it may simply be cautiously reviewing interactions and making tweaks along the way to keep the ship on course, being courageous enough to act when I realize there’s a negative pattern ahead.

But I want to tell others out there who aren’t sure, who feel like they have to give everyone access to them and allow every opinion to land, that it is okay to close the door to all the noise, choosing instead to create and send it out into the ether with no regard for how it lands.

You might not be able to pay your bills off of that work, sure.

But you can still go ahead and do it.