The dangers of Blogging

The internet is always a dangerous place to debate or even to express yourself. You are instantly open to any tom DICK or harry who comes along (pun intended, accusations at anyone not) who happened to stumble across you and decided that you are worthy of being targeted. There have been occasions when I have been the victim to this sort of person [who usually has a small following of people who think their "witty comments" [that usually involve and argument swiftly followed by swear words] are cleaver. Some of these people are actually very clever and make some very good points and yet still want to actually offend the reader of their comments.
Quite frankly if this is how they get their kicks, I really don't care. If they so wished to populate my blog with mindless comments then it may provide me with some great bed time sleeping and entertainment. If they wish to attack my character then really I don't care, they have never met me and don't know me at all.

However something else tends to occur on line, miss communication.

The old saying that we convey so much via our body language and tone has a lot of truth in it and on line we of course don't get this. However there are ways that we convey this via text. quotation marks, commas and other methods can help show whether we are trying to make a serious point, being sarcastic or reflecting someone's point back at them.

Of course what can also happen is that we write something in haste or without thinking how it might be read [which also happens when we speak] and then the other person reads something into it more than we intend. Why? because words and sentences mean very different things to different people. If someone says I think your view is wrong it can be taken as "I think you are wrong". How do I know this? Well I've reacted in that way. I saw a response to something I wrote and took it as a personal insult when it wasn't.
I assumed they were saying I was naive and silly for not researching enough and then complained they weren't listening to me. In fact they were, they knew my arguments already and had researched more than I had. When I calmed down I realised I was wrong, they were my friends [in real life not just online contact] and they loved me and they wanted the best for me.

I learn a big lesson about miss reading people and the need to be careful with what you say.

Sadly sometimes this doesn't happen, maybe the pain of past experience has tainted our perspective too much, maybe the other person over reacts back as well or maybe you never knew them in the first place. In any case sometimes people on the internet insult and belittle other people and sometimes we perceive it as them belittling others.

The obvious response is to be careful with what we write, read what other people write carefully, attack the ideas and not the person and to sometimes step away from everything. Sometimes it will mean we don't get the last word, but that's often better.