I’m thinking it over
“React now!", social media seems to tell us. But do we have to react to everything right away? Can everything be sorted out by speaking what is elicited from the top of our minds or should it be cooked and shaped by a pause and some consideration?
Here is something that I read from thinker and philosopher Alan Jacobs. It's from one of his posts called "I'm thinking it Over". We could perhaps mull upon them before we jump the gun and make a "statement" (or even reply to controversial allegations).
[Excerpt begins]
I don’t have to say something just because everyone around me is.
I don’t have to speak about things I know little or nothing about.
I don’t have to speak about issues that will be totally forgotten in a few weeks or months by the people who at this moment are most strenuously demanding a response.
I don’t have to spend my time in environments that press me to speak without knowledge.
If I can bring to an issue heat, but no light, it is probably best that I remain silent.
Private communication can be more valuable than public.
Delayed communication, made when people have had time to think and to calm their emotions, is almost always more valuable than immediate reaction.
Some conversations are be more meaningful and effective in living rooms, or at dinner tables, than in the middle of Main Street.
In short, peer pressure is always terrible, and social media are a megaphone for peer pressure. And when you use that megaphone all the time you tend to forget that it’s possible to speak at a normal volume: thus my first protestor’s apparently genuinely-held view that if you’re not talking to peers on Twitter you can’t possibly be talking to peers at all. (We must all have been trapped in our silos of silence before 2006.) But the more general view of both of those who wrote to me — that rapidity of response is a virtue, and therefore that technologies that enable rapid response are superior to ones that enforce slowness — is the really pernicious one, I’ve come to believe.
[ Excerpt ends]
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