10:17 a.m. - 2023-06-05
Crossed Wires

I've enjoyed the weekend very much. Good company, good food and plenty of entertainment. I also managed to get a couple of business deals under my belt. One deal is concluded and the other should be sealed tomorrow when I have to travel out of town to an old countryside haunt that I haven't visited for several years.

Something that's been on my mind of late is how easily wires can get crossed in the online world. I was reading a thread yesterday on an online forum I follow and watched it spiral out of control after one person, seemingly heaping praise on the op had a post taken the wrong way as what the op believed to be sarcasm. Some people it seems find it difficult to accept well intentioned praise and that is something that happens all too often in the internet world.

I recall my older sister tell me of her first ever venture onto social media when she signed up for her twitter account in 2007 at the dawn of twitter. She posted an honest reaction praising a tweeter she was following and within minutes was inundated with not only messages of support but downright nasty horrible and derogatory responses. She was shocked when the hate extended to her twitter account and became quite personal. Twitter did nothing when she reported the harassment and she was effectively cancelled when the only course of action to halt the attacks was to close her twitter account.

It changed her perception of social media permanently and she told me later that since that time, she always fears something being taken out of context or misunderstood and never makes person to person comments or uses a quote in a response. People in general mostly always take this as being a personal attack of some sort.

After almost two decades of mainstream social media, its increasingly difficult in the online world for most people to accept anyone is being genuine and open with the words and thoughts typed in little online boxes. That's online life these days and if you dabble in any sort of social media, you will almost certainly come across things which may not always appear to be as you initially believed them to be.