Listening Is Also Participation: A Response to "When Everyone Is Posting, Who's Listening?

 

Listening Is Also Participation: A Response to "When Everyone Is Posting, Who's Listening?"

Vanessa's blog post stopped me mid-scroll, which felt appropriate given what she was writing about. Her central question, when everyone is posting, who is actually listening, is one I have been sitting with all week. Not because I do not have an answer, but because my answer is more complicated than I expected it to be when I first read it.

The honest truth is that I am often the person who is not posting. And I am perfectly okay with that.

The Value of Quiet Presence

There are weeks when I do not post on Instagram at all. I might open the app every day, watch how people create and share content, notice what resonates and what falls flat, observe the rhythms of a community I belong to without announcing my presence in it. That is not disengagement. That is a different kind of engagement, one that is harder to measure but no less real.

What I take from those weeks of quiet observation almost always shapes what I eventually create. A caption style I noticed. A format that seemed to generate genuine conversation rather than performative likes. A topic that a community was circling around without anyone addressing directly. Lurking, in that sense, is not passive. It is research. It is listening in the most literal way the medium allows. The listening has to come first, and what follows is almost always better for it.

LinkedIn Is Not Different

The same dynamic plays out on LinkedIn, though the stakes feel higher because the audience is professional and the pressure to perform visibility is more explicit. I go on LinkedIn to stay updated, to see what researchers in my field are publishing, what practitioners are building, and what conversations are worth entering. I comment when something genuinely moves me to respond, not to demonstrate presence but because I actually have something to add.

Vanessa's observation about the class where students are required to post regularly on LinkedIn stayed with me. I understand the rationale. Visibility matters in professional networks. But there is a risk when posting becomes obligatory rather than intentional. Content produced under pressure to be seen often reads that way. It fulfills the requirement without contributing anything to the conversation. And a feed full of that kind of content is exactly the room Vanessa describes, where everyone is talking at once and no one can hear anything.

The Gap Between the Post and the Person

This brings me to something Vanessa's post gestures toward but does not fully unpack, and it is the thing that troubles me most about networked knowledge environments. What people post is not always what they actually think, feel, or know.

I have watched people share confident takes on topics they clearly have not thought through, not because they are dishonest, but because the platform rewards certainty and punishes nuance. I have seen posts that perform vulnerability while carefully controlling every detail of the narrative. I have seen misinformation travel faster than the correction that followed it, simply because the false version was more emotionally satisfying to share. The network amplifies what performs well, not necessarily what is true or what represents how someone actually experiences their life.

Meaningful Participation Includes Skepticism

What I take from Vanessa's reflection is that meaningful participation in networked environments requires more than posting and more than listening. It requires a kind of critical attentiveness, a willingness to ask not just what someone is saying but why they are saying it here, in this form, on this platform, at this moment.

If you are posting to be seen, you will produce content designed to be seen. If you are posting to think in public, to invite genuine response, to contribute something to a community that would be diminished without it, you will produce something entirely different. The rationale behind your participation shapes everything that follows.

Vanessa ends her post by asking whether you are listening. My answer is yes, often more than I am posting. And I have come to believe that the listening is not the lesser half of participation. It is where most of the actual learning happens.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How a Cold LinkedIn DM Found Me a Community Across the Atlantic

Think back to the moment you received a major life-changing update. For me, it was getting my PhD admission letter to the Instructional Systems and Learning Technologies (ISLT) program at Florida State University. Once the initial rush of excitement and celebration settled, a heavy, practical thought immediately took over: “How am I going to find my people?” Moving across the world to a new city, a new university, and a completely new culture is exhilarating, but it can also be profoundly isolating. We live in an era dominated by recommendation algorithms, but when you are looking for a genuine human community, waiting for an algorithm to serve it to you on a silver platter rarely works. So, I decided to bypass the algorithm entirely. Treating LinkedIn Like a Targeted Search Engine Instead of passively scrolling through my feed hoping to stumble across a connection, I treated LinkedIn like a highly specific, targeted search engine. I knew that names alone weren't enough to narrow d...
Read more

Social Media Told Me It Was About Learning. The Readings Proved It.

  I have held the same assumption about social media for years. It is a tool. Use it well and it serves you. Use it poorly and it wastes your time. Simple enough. Then I sat down with this week's readings, and that assumption started to crack around the edges. The Boundary Nobody Can Find Anymore Greenhow and Lewin open with a provocation that I keep returning to: social media is not just changing how we learn, it is changing what we even mean by learning. The line between formal and informal has always been a little fuzzy, but social media has made it almost impossible to draw. When a doctoral student builds a critical part of their theoretical framework from a thread they stumbled across online at midnight, is that formal learning? Informal? Does the distinction even matter? I think it still matters, but not in the way institutions want it to. The categories exist to protect systems, not learners. And increasingly, learners are operating outside both. A Conversation That ...
Read more

What I Actually Think About Professional Learning Environments

I have been in education long enough to know that the most valuable learning I have done rarely happened inside a classroom. It happened in conversations, in late-night rabbit holes that started with one question and ended somewhere entirely unexpected, and in feedback from people who had nothing to gain from being generous with their time. That is what a professional learning environment actually is, at its best. Not a platform. Not a structured program. Not a badge. A network of people and resources that pushes your thinking forward when no one is requiring you to grow. Coming into this PhD journey, I already had a version of that network. Years of working in K-12 education across Africa, building curriculum, leading production teams, and eventually founding a nonprofit taught me early that learning does not wait for institutional permission. You find the people doing interesting work, you pay close attention to how they think, and you contribute something back whenever you can. Tha...
Read more