One of the most common things that I see and hear from my neighbours is that they never know what’s going on, that we need to get better at communication, and that they never see us. I heard this a lot four years ago, and I tried to work on it all term (not least through the 120+ posts I have written on this blog!), but this theme has only gotten stronger. So what gives?
Communication
Four years ago I was arguing that we should have a Community Liaison Officer on staff to help connect people to the municipal corporation and make sure the community knows what we’re up to with regard to questions like “when is the construction going to end” or “what events are coming up” or “can I come to a council meeting? When are they?” I was coming from a place where, having spent years answering such questions on Facebook, I saw a need for a more official channel of communications and recognized that we didn’t have any dedicated comms staff at the municipality. With the loss of our local paper, there was no central line of communication in our community.
The municipality was thinking along similar lines, and hired Morgan Scott as our Community Engagement Officer. She’s doing a fantastic job. She has created new lines of communication, such as our Community Newsletter, which is available digitally as well as at various locations around town in print format. She keeps our social media channels up to date, and posts news notices to our website. There’s a wealth of information at the link above, and even though I’m pretty well-connected with current events in our little town, I still learn something new every time I pick up a newsletter.
And still, our staff report that they most frequently hear the same complaint that I do: “we never know what’s going on,” or “why wasn’t that promoted?” when the thing in question was most definitely promoted through every municipal channel, and often even on local radio. I see two challenges here that might help explain the situation.
First, Facebook continues to dominate local engagement. The place we most often hear the “why didn’t the town promote ____” complaints is on Facebook itself, and I often hear the same complaints secondhand from Facebook users. I know that a lot of people love Facebook, and at one point it really was a great way to reach a lot of local people to organize and promote events. But those days are long past.
Facebook has a constantly changing algorithm that determines what shows up in your feed. There was a time when it only showed you your friends’ posts, in the order in which your friends posted them; back then you could remember “oh yeah, Steve posted something about that yesterday” and then scroll back in your feed to find the post in question. You could interact with people who weren’t your friends in groups, but those groups also had a chronological feed, so information was easy to reference. Then we could create an “Event” page that people could join in order to see info specifically about that event, and people could share the Event around. Those shares would appear in a person’s feed, in the chronological order in which they posted it.
The algorithm has changed a lot since then. Most of what you see in your feed is no longer from your friends. Much of it is paid advertising, or “boosted” posts. The pages you clicked “Follow” on to ensure that you didn’t miss any of their posts…they might not appear at all. Same for the groups you’ve joined. You’re more likely to see content from complete strangers, based on the algorithm’s prediction of what content you’ll engage the most with, than you are the things you’ve already Followed. The things you like are crowded out by the things they think you’ll like…and the posts that are bought and paid for.
On the flipside of that, Facebook’s algorithms actively suppress some content. Many people forget that, since 2023, Facebook and Instagram have blocked all Canadian news sites. They simply won’t show Canadian news. That means that if you see a “news” story in Facebook it either isn’t Canadian, or it doesn’t meet the definition of “news” — so the bloggers and commentators that don’t meet the quality or content threshold for real news have the run of the place, while quality journalism is banned.
But Facebook actively suppresses any and all links that lead off the platform. Facebook used to try to be “the gateway to the internet”, with people starting a web surfing experience on Facebook and following shares and links to other sites. But for the past several years they’ve been focused on trying to ensure that you never leave Facebook, so that we see Facebook as the entirety of the internet…or in some cases, Facebook users don’t even realize that they’re using the internet.
What this means if you’re trying to use Facebook to organize a local event or share local news is that, unless you’re paying for posts, it’s quite likely that nobody is seeing your content. Sharing a cat video will get instant exposure, because the algorithm knows that those perform well (i.e., they get a lot of engagement); but sharing a local news story that links to a municipal site will get buried by the algorithm. Even creating an Event on Facebook is likely to get no engagement at all unless a lot of people are actively sharing it in groups, etc., or…if you pay for it. Facebook is now optimized for paid advertising, not local organizing and information sharing.
All of this is part of a business model called “Enshittification”, a term coined by Canadian polymath Cory Doctorow. You can pick up his excellent book on the subject at the shop. The short of it is that Facebook used to have a pretty good user experience, so much so that most of us were captured: it became a major part of our lives, and our main connection to a lot of people, and so we will continue to use it even if our experience of using it gets, well, shitty. Then they make the platform work better for their bottom line, and every time there’s a conflict between a great user experience and a great profit margin, they can pick the profits knowing that we’re likely to stick around anyway.
All of this to say that Facebook is sticky: other types of communication can’t compete with it, and organizations that want to communicate through it increasingly need to pay them for the privilege. So long as folks are looking primarily at Facebook for local news, they’re going to continue to miss out on what’s going on. So please, please subscribe to our Community Newsletter!
Community
So that’s the communications side: we ARE communicating, but social media platforms often undermine our ability to do so. But I think there’s a deeper problem, and I feel that problem every time I hear someone say “we never see you.”
I mostly hear this phrase in our rural area, particularly in Codrington, the area farthest from downtown (at least by distance; by drive time, Presqu’ile Point is actually further away!). Some Codrington residents recently hosted an all-candidates event at the Codrington Community Centre (thank you, Kathy and George!), and I heard this sentiment several times. Some were even saying “nobody up here is even going to vote, because we just never see you up here.”
Well that sure breaks my heart, but I’ve also had to spend a lot of time thinking about it to understand it. For one thing, I don’t think it’s true: people don’t come to an all-candidates event if they don’t plan to vote. So what are they really saying? I think they’re saying that they’re discouraged, because they feel disconnected.
It may well be that a rural Brightonian only comes to town once every week or two for groceries, and otherwise feels little connection to the urban area. Some have told me that they like it that way. But for some, the community connections that they keep strong through things like community meals and Euchre nights provide a sense of neighbourliness that they might otherwise miss out on entirely purely because of distance between neighbours in the rural area. (As a decidedly indoorsy introvert I have to stretch myself to understand that sentiment, but I get it!) So if members of council aren’t at those events in the rural area, those members of the community don’t feel like we are their neighbours in the way that someone who bumps into me at the grocery store or sees me walking around town are likely to.
I’m always tempted, when I hear this concern, to say all of the ways that I’m available to people: my phone number and email address are publicly posted; I blog regularly about what’s going on in the community and what I think about things; I come to market regularly, and once or twice a year I make it out to a community breakfast or other event. It sometimes feels like people are asking me for the impossible: I need to be everywhere at once, all the time, forgetting the fact that I have a family and two other jobs. I’m also tempted to tell people that if I’m not at their event it’s likely because I’m at a meeting somewhere working to represent and advance their interests; would they rather see me washing dishes at the community centre, or should I be doing the work I was elected to do? But then I get over myself and try to listen to the real concern. This isn’t about me, and I don’t need to be defensive.
We know that there’s an epidemic of loneliness. A full third of seniors in Canada have what are described as “weak social networks”. For someone in that boat, a community meal or Euchre night might be the only social connection they have. And every single resident of Brighton deserves to feel connected to their community, and to their municipality. Without that sense of connection, no matter how good our communications are, people are still likely to feel out of the loop.
In this term of council, we received a request from the Rural Advisory Committee to hold regular Town Hall meetings. Given that there are three opportunities to speak to council at every regular council meeting, we were confused: if nobody comes to council meetings to speak to us and hear from us, who will be coming to these town halls? But the request showed the same sense of disconnect that I was otherwise hearing from rural residents, and the less formal format of a town hall might be more successful. At least this way we might get through social barriers. I am open and optimistic!
Conclusion
So in 2022 I campaigned on the issue of communications, and we made great strides but still didn’t manage to gain ground on the feeling of disconnection that many residents have. This coming term I hope to spend more time, energy, and reflection on the other side of it: how can we build real community, real connection, in an era marked by rising loneliness? How can we ensure that everyone feels like they belong in our community? Knowing what’s going on is only half the battle; feeling welcomed and connected is even more essential, but perhaps harder to define or address.
What about you? Do you feel welcome and connected in Brighton? Do you have any ideas for how we can build stronger relationships and social networks? Let me know in the comments!