Fear of Speaking Online

Today I stepped out in LinkedIn and Facebook: I posted about my Digital Mirror self-assessment and webinar for the first time.

I’ve been on LinkedIn for years, have about 1000 connections and a few articles, so stepping out maybe shouldn’t really be a big thing. But as it turns out, it is.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about why speaking out online is so uncomfortable. I have no problem speaking out in person, but online makes me anxious. I know I am not alone.

One reason is because when I speak in-person I know how many people I’m speaking to, one, three, three hundred. Online I have no idea, I have this paradoxical experience of thinking no one is listening (or reading, or watching) while at the same time worried that I will look silly to thousands. No wonder that is scary, I feel both irrelevant and exposed at exactly the same moment.

Another reason is that the online world radically changes how human communication works. In-person – traditionally if you will - communication goes like this: sender sends message, receiver receives message, receiver confirms receipt of message. Even in-person this can go awry, but in the online world the confirmation part often gets missed. As senders, we don’t know whether any (or which) messages have been received. (An aside: this is not a function of technology. Digital communication very much relies on send message, receive message, confirm receipt of message. This is a human thing.) No wonder I feel anxious, I’m out in the wild sending messages having no clue whether - and perhaps more importantly, how - they are received.

Yet another reason is lack of practice. Because of the other two reasons, I hesitate, I read rather than write, I listen rather than speak and so my voice dims.

But this is a digital world, it demands I overcome my very human fear of speaking out online. It’s tricky, because the digital world is a hybrid one when it comes to human connection. This morning I had coffee with a friend, we sat outside, shared stories about our pandemic experiences, laughed about how we’ve changed. It was an entirely comfortable, human, in-person connection. Just now I came back to my computer to discover an old friend, living more than 4000 km away, responded to my LinkedIn post: “LOVE IT! So useful. DM me ... I’d like to arrange something for my community :)” Less comfortable maybe, but it was a thrilling experience of human connection. I feel her, supporting me, saying “I see you, I hear you. Message received.”