One of my parents has always been someone to stand their ground when it came to their opinion. A family friend of ours decided to share about their personal life on the internet and issues they were having with their child, and of course, my parent decided to give their opinion. For some reason, them providing input on the situation started an online feud between the two over a Facebook comment section for the whole world to see (which has since been deleted), which then transitioned to personal text. They were being called nasty names by someone who we have always been a friend of ours, and they did not understand how quickly someone’s emotions could change for the worst. The comments were getting to the point of others having to comment for them to calm down, because it was just a back and forth. It took them a while to finally finish this behavior towards one another.
Eventually with space and forgiveness, the two were able to make up for the choices they made towards one another. If this would have turned to an in-person battle, the outcome would have been horrendous. One way this could have gone very differently was if they talked about the child a different way. It’s highly unlikely that they would have said things like “you raised your child wrong” to their face, or “your child is the problem”. The two of them are very kindhearted people, but when you ignite the fire in both, all hell breaks loose. The conversation (I feel) would have had a longer lasting impact if it were to have been in person in the sense that what was said would have made it a lot harder to be able to forgive one another if it was a face-to-face conversation seeing each other’s genuine reaction.
The two biggest factors I feel fall into this not seeing the visual cues of others as well as not responding in time to the conversation. When they were communicating, there was no visuals to see how the other may have responded. My parent who made the first comment wrote it as a suggestion, trying to be friendly. Their only intent was to share their opinion from personal experience like “maybe try such and such a thing and see how that works”. Although, there was no visual cues to the other person to show that this was a genuine piece of advice and not a jab at them, but that is how they took it. The other person could not see this and took it completely out of context because their visual cues were not seen. Additionally, the asynchronicity of the conversation had more time to dwell on what they said and think way too far into it. If this was a normal conversation, they would not have had the time to think far into the nature of what they said, but rather respond quickly to what they said. By not seeing the other person and not responding immediately, this creates a sense of wonder, which can turn, like this conversation did, very bad very quick. A minor part of this conversation that could have made it worse was listening to what others were commenting. If someone is telling you to stop typing in the comments or to listen to each other before responding, this has been known to make people want to do the opposite of what people are saying. Therefore, the input from other people could have been making them want to keep going.
Why do people feel the need to try and break down one another? What motives come from within someone to keep fueling the fire? If this was taken too far, could Facebook have taken over and pulled it down from their site? In what ways can we make communicating online more versatile without confusion? Why do people insist on having a conversation publicly in a comment section rather than taking it to a private conversation sooner?
