Handling your aggro: how to get over yourself online

As a student, you may already be thinking about sharing your research and developing an online presence to help build your career.  Social media can be a great way to both do and share research, but there are also challenges in handling yourself online.

Have you ever found yourself getting hot under the collar after reading a tweet or blog post you disagreed with?  How did you react?  SAGE Study Skills author Megan Poore shares her thoughts on handling your aggro online in a guest post for the SAGE Connection blog, which is posted in full below. 

How to get over yourself online

How often have you forgotten that there are real people behind the online world we so frequently communicate through and inhabit?  Does the screen make you feel protected and elicit certain behavioural reactions that you wouldn’t necessarily adopt in a face-to-face situation?

The challenges of ‘learning to behave’ online are becoming very paramount in our modern day society.  SAGE author, Megan Poore, explores these very issues in her text, Studying and Researching with Social Media.  So what philosophy should we be taking around developing a communication framework for our interactions with people online?  Can we actually be honest with ourselves when we have overstepped the line online?  

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How many of us, I wonder, will admit to our own bad online behaviour?  You know, that time when you fired off an angry email that was completely out of all proportion – only to find out you were wrong, anyway…  Or when you ridiculed someone’s genuine creative effort by leaving a sarcastic or disparaging comment on their YouTube video, thinking you were being funny or clever (or something)…  Or when you got all uptight on a discussion forum and cast personal aspersions about a contributor’s mental capacity to write proper English, or their ability to do their job properly.

OK, so maybe most of us can control ourselves most of the time, but who of us, when we’re being honest with ourselves, can say we’ve never sent off that aggro email? ;)

We seem to know intellectually that one of the big ‘traps’ of online communication is the difficult mix of immediacy coupled with its distancing effects: it’s too easy to hit ‘send’ on that email, and because we aren’t sitting in the same room as the recipient, it’s also too easy to forget that we’ve got a real, live human being on the other end of our hostility.  But when it comes to our emotional reactions to what we read and write online, well, what can I say other than that the lizard brain takes over; we react based on what we feel, not on what we reason, and when that happens, we can act very poorly – very poorly indeed.  Disappointment all round.

So, what gets in the way of effective communication online?  Hopefully, you won’t be surprised to learn that it’s the exact same stuff that gets in the way of effective communication in face-to-face situations, namely,

·         Ego

·         Feeling that you are always right

·         Feeling aggrieved

·         Believing that your (poor) behaviour is justified

·         Being too willing or too quick to take offence

·         Having a sense that you must never be wrong

·         Believing that you should not be ‘called’ on your bad behaviour

·         Shifting blame to someone or something else

·         Thinking that your position should not be questioned

·         Being over-sensitive to criticism.

Not an edifying list of temperaments and attitudes, I’ll admit.  But that’s just it: we must admit to our own bad behaviour if we are to change it.  It takes skill to recognise what is happening to our higher brain functions when we are having an emotional reaction to something someone else says or does – especially in the immediate and distancing online environment – and it takes maturity to overcome that emotional reaction and to replace it with a reasoned one.

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This post originally appeared on the SAGE Connection blog.