This is part of the problem. Between how sue happy people are these days and the fact that you can hide behind your internet identity, nobody takes responsibility for the things they say. There is no real negative repercussion. You can be mean or rude and not have to deal with the actual damage/implication caused by what you said, so who cares... right?The difference between typing "go fuck yourself" onto a screen and saying "go fuck yourself" to someone's face is monumental. You don't have to watch the anger in their expression or show them any form of hesitation or discomfort in your own if you're on the internet.
Even beyond that, the normal social pressures we feel that we often don't even recognize fail to come into play. It's harder to defy social norms when people are looking at us and we have to watch their reactions. I have a strong suspicion that this is also why people are so terrible at communicating and prone to anger in regard to driving, and why small things like hand signals and nods can go such an incredibly long way toward making the difference.
I guess in weird I'm the sense that I feel the same pressures attacking someone physically as digitally. I recognize that the things I say are the same and will have the same impact/worse impact/or just wrong impact on the same situation. I wish there was a way to add stress to the submit buttons on heavy comments.
Well sure, it's still some form of communication so you're going to feel some degree of social pressure, but it's not the same. You don't see their face redden or their eyebrows furrow. You don't hear their voice become louder or start to waver or see them start to gesticulate. Even simple little things in tone of voice that make the meaning of a sentence clear are lacking. We still get some of our whole communication social pressure setup, but it's way dressed down. The really troublesome thing is, we don't even think about it. We just carry on as normal because that's how we're trained socially.
Lol. What I was saying was that I, personally, am affected/invested/care the same about both situations. As in, I probably react less about physical interaction than I should, and care more about the digital effect than is standard.
That's definitely true, but having less information doesn't change my tact, it doesn't make me feel better or worse about the way I treat people/situations. Like, I don't disassociate real people from their online counterparts.