The safety of talking online

Nah, I’m not referring to chatrooms or anything like that. I’m talking about person to person. People feeling braver because they’re hidden behind a computer. “Nice” people showing their “true colours”. It’s an odd situation when people aren’t able to transfer their personality between life at their computer and life away from it. Messages suddenly become littered with digs and little attacks. When they see that they can get away with it, these attacks can become bigger and more and more personal.
I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for a while now. I had a run in with someone on twitter a while back that’s still in my head. I’d made a comment to no-one in particular which they took as a dig at them personally. It was weird. But I suppose a sign of how used we’ve gotten to the way that people feel they can behave online and it’s what got me onto this thought process.

So here it is. Please just try to remember that you’re still talking to a person. Your words aren’t going out into the abyss and not affecting anyone because I can assure you that they will always have the potential to. Would you say these things to them face to face? Would you want people to think that that was how you behaved and how you thought it was okay to behave? If you were out and a friend started shouting at people the same words that you’ve typed out to someone on a laptop, would you not be ashamed to be in their company?

Something for a fair few people to think about.

Just be nice. People will be nice back. Respect your friends and their lives. You’ll always be rewarded.

July 13, 2011. Uncategorized.