The Quaker community where I was raised spent a lot of time thinking about words. I remember sitting through business meetings as a child when the language of a single-sentence minute could be deliberated, revised, read back, and deliberated again more than a half dozen times before unity was reached. I learned that words matter. But I also noticed when words weren’t enough, when the perfectly crafted minute, approved by all, didn’t resolve the tension in the room. I started to wonder whether communication – an act of with-oneness – had anything to do with words at all.
In the many years since, I’ve learned a lot about the many ways Quakers communicate. I’ve also noticed that, because I manage a collection of Quaker publications (under the umbrella of Barclay Press), when I talk about the ways Quakers communicate, people listen, but what I’m trying to say doesn’t always seem to get through. So today, instead of writing about Quakers, I’m writing about social media and about what I have learned from social media about communication.
First, a caveat: communication isn’t really about what you say or to whom. Communication is not about the direction, the quality, or the flow of a message. Nor is it about what other people hear or think or feel. At least, not really. Communication is about community, and communication is a creative act.
Second, a story: In February 2013, I joined the leadership team of an Instagram community called @ig_artistry. Abbey, the administrator, sent me instructions and introduced me to another person who had come onto the team at the same time I did, and over the next few weeks, another three members were added.
Then Abbey disappeared. Our little team – all recruited by Abbey – was left to figure out how best to keep the account alive. None of us had ever met in person. While I live in Oregon, other members of the team lived in Philadelphia, London, Indiana, Uruguay, Bali, and Puerto Rico. Initially, we shared optimism, lots and lots of communication, and a plan. But as some team members stepped away and others were brought on board, we experienced more and more conflict: secret meetings, backchannel communications, open disagreement about what should and shouldn’t be posted to the account, lots and lots of conversations about how we would operate. In one case, a richly-layered light painting posted to our account, which featured partial nudity, was reported in a complaint to Instagram, and one of our administrators was briefly locked out of our account. Her fear rippled back through the entire system with a wild chaos of efforts to: 1) identify the user who placed the initial complaint to Instagram, 2) work on the wording of our policy for curators about limits on content, and 3) set up a secondary feedback system that would require an additional layer of communication between curator and moderator before an image was forwarded for posting.
I am struck that our primary responses to such incidents were pretty much always protective responses that moved us toward increased control. We took measures to separate different conversations into multiple, discrete channels. We charted our leadership functions hierarchically – curators reporting to moderators reporting to administrators. But these efforts to control communications and decision-making processes did not eliminate old patterns. Those patterns continued as legacy channels in the community despite our every effort to reorganize. The end result was a clean, new communications layer on top of an increasingly thick and complex layering of “ghost” channels.
One of our administrators left the team, saying he was feeling overwhelmed in life and that Instagram wasn’t as fun as it used to be. He shut down all his other Instagram accounts, too, and simply disappeared from the platform. This pattern of stress, fatigue, and burnout repeated itself again and again. My official role on the team was content administrator. Unofficially, I tried to comfort others and help build and sustain work-arounds that kept people working together when they were no longer talking to each other. It was stressful.
The leaders of this community wanted to get the messaging just right. What I was learning through experience in this community was that the messages didn’t matter nearly as much as the interpersonal networks that supported, shaped, and gave purpose to our messaging efforts. It was around this time that I began entertaining the idea of starting my own Instagram community.
I sensed that a different kind of community might be possible. So I wrote a vision statement, and on January 4, 2014, I started a new community on Instagram. Although I initially worked alone, I sometimes had other team members who worked with me. Over the years, more than 700,000 different people have been part of this community.
Here are the basic understandings about building community that I developed and relied on:
Container: This is where you put the content. A container can be an hour on Sunday morning. A container can be a hiking trail, an open plaza, or a collection of campsites next to a river. A container can be a Facebook page or a website or an Instagram feed. The container needs a name. The name doesn’t matter that much because the community, over time, will make meaning in the container, and the name will take on that meaning.
Content: This is what goes in the container. The container is a void. The content fills the void. People don’t come for the content. But it is very difficult to get people to come if there is no content. A void is a scary place. It is no place. People don’t need to drink beer at a party. But people are more comfortable holding a beer. Content can inform or entertain or challenge or shape. But content’s purpose is to give people a reason to be together. Content calms.
Consistency: The container must be filled with content on a schedule. The particular schedule doesn’t matter. But in order for people to be together, their fears must be disarmed. Content calms. Predictability calms even more. Because the container is a void, consistency helps us to enter and exit the void – enter and exit each other’s presence – without too much thought. Content cushions our entrance and prolongs our stay. Consistency brings us back again and again and again.
Density: Our human emotions are contagious. We trigger one another, and when an individual cycles up emotionally, other individuals in close proximity will also begin to cycle. The closer we are to one another, the faster we go. Density, or critical mass, can be energizing. It can also be destructive. Consistency brings us in and out of the void. Content cushions our entrance, allows us to stay closer together for longer than we would otherwise be capable of enduring. These two structures can help us to achieve density or critical mass. In unstable communities, critical mass increases stress, tension, heat, friction. In stable communities, critical mass can take longer to achieve. There is creative possibility in those communities that are neither excessively unstable nor excessively stable.
Solidarity: When critical mass is focused, the various individuals in a community experience communion. They move in harmony. They are of one mind. In some cases, we call this a mob. In others, we recognize a movement.
Reciprocity: If I say your name, you turn your head. If I tap you on the shoulder or bump your elbow, you notice. People don’t always reciprocate, but it is natural for them to want to do so. The easiest way to trigger reciprocity is to extend an invitation. Reciprocity works most powerfully when it is asynchronous and asymmetrical. If I smile at you and you, remembering that exchange, smile at someone else in another place and time, then the loop is left open, and we have potentially started a pattern that will replicate itself throughout the entire system.
I’m now in my second year as the executive director of Hillsboro Friends Church, the meeting where I grew up. I preach one Sunday a month at Silverton Friends Church, a group I’ve been part of since 2017. And I serve as the publisher at Barclay Press. Each of these bodies has been around far longer than anything I’ve ever done on Instagram, and I’ve witnessed in each the marvels that can happen when a community practices communication as a set of intentionally communal and creative acts.
In these three communities of Friends, we still think very carefully about our words. We still take time to deliberate the language of each minute we approve. And we’re learning, more and more, to practice creative with-oneness – to embody community.
Eric Muhr is a member of Silverton Friends. His favorite rainy-day meal is a bowl of Bún bò Hué, and you can find him on Instagram at @ericmuhr. Eric and his partner live in Portland, Oregon.