Two Important Differences between Online and Face-to-face Communication

1) In online communication, you can be as nasty as you wanna be. You’re too far away to hit, and in many cases you will never see the person you are communicating with. This nourishes the kind of armored hostility that creates road rage. We say things to the car that cut us off in traffic that we would never say to the driver if we saw her face-to-face. On the internet, this attitude is reinforced by the fact that we can communicate our rage to the person that triggered it, which triggers rage in them, which triggers rage in us and so on, creating “flame wars”. Like the exploding flames in video games, these online flames don’t physically hurt anyone, but they do create an emotional mood that is more effective for killing an enemy than communicating with a friend.

2) In online communication, you never have to communicate without proofreading. You can go back, think carefully about what you said, and ask yourself “Is this really what I want to say? Do I want to be the sort of person who says things like that?”. No matter how angry you are, you have the opportunity to cut the snarky and abusive language that first popped into your head, and replace it with a paraphrase that is calm and reasonable. You can replace phrases that make the other person feel so strongly they cannot think, with phrases that help them think by taking their views into consideration.

You can, in other words, choose to use the internet to present your very worst self or your very best self. Which do you usually choose?