A Gentleman Online

[ysabetwordsmith]

Etiquette guides fascinate me, although I pick and choose manners in a way that few cultures ever approve of. Or use them as boxes of spare parts to build interesting new cultures. In general, I find that guides for gentlemen are far more useful than guides for ladies. So here's one for how to be a gentleman online. Most of the advice is quite good.

Certainly the loss of empathy from interacting as anonymous, disembodied selves is a major factor. But the real root of the problem is how we view our time online; many see it as a break from their “real lives”—a place where they can let it all hang out. In their off-line lives they must be civil and refrain from telling their boss how they really feel about him, yelling at the customer service rep who’s giving them the runaround, and getting out of the car and punching the rude and reckless driver in front of them.

Interestingly, I find it far easier to be polite online than in person, because I don't have people right in my face, and I can just ignore them I feel like they're wasting my time. I can be myself online, in ways that are sometimes feasible in person and sometimes not.

As for being rude -- well, sometimes the most honorable thing to do is call a man a coward to his face when that's how he's acting. Be polite, but don't impersonate a doormat. If your honest opinion is rude, lying about it is hardly any nicer than voicing it.

This is simple: if you’re not proud enough of something to have it associated with your real name, then why are you writing it?

Because there are a great many things that need to be said and done, that could get someone fired for saying even outside their job, which is legal but not acceptable.  Online anonymity is a necessary precaution for many people and topics, so ignore this rule.  Just don't use anonymity as an excuse for acting like a jerk.  You are still responsible to yourself even if nobody else knows who you are.

The thing about being a gentleman is this: It doesn't matter what other people think of you.  It matters whether you live up to your own expectations of being a decent, responsible human being.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>It bothers me that he claims to define empathy "as the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes, to understand their feelings and feel them yourself", but equates that with the ability to read body language and nonverbal signals and seems to think that the lump of flesh typing on a keyboard is somehow more real than the self that's reflected in the words that it types.<<

Most humans seem to detect others' emotional state through body language and voice tone. But there are other ways to do it, equally valid.

As for the other? Most people make the mistake of thinking that they are their bodies. I think it comes of not remembering anything else, and putting a whole lot of emphasis on physical appearance and performance. Being meta and focused more on soul than body is going to make you stick out in all kinds of ways.

>>It's hard to be empathetic when I'm being bombarded by sensory input, but I have no problem empathizing with people (even fictional ones!) when I read about their experiences. I also think that reading what other people have to say makes it more likely that you will understand their feelings rather than guessing from the outside and projecting your own.<<

Yes. Input can get overwhelming. It's hard to spare the energy to be polite or work on problem-solving when someone's raining all over you, and not everybody can shield it out. Or worse, they're lying about how they feel and then get upset when you take their words at face value, which falls into the category of shit up with which I will not put. Having a statement of emotional condition is very convenient.

>>Like you, I find it much easier to be myself online. My personality comes across far more clearly in text (and pictures!) than in person — to the point that I'm not sure my real self even exists in physical space.<<

Well ... maybe the important parts of you just don't fit into the dimension that contains meat. A lot of mine don't, and I know other folks for whom that's true. You still know what you are, so you can describe it easily enough; but someone looking for it won't see it because that isn't where it's at.

>>I also disagree with the implication that real (by which I assume he means legal) names are necessarily more valid than the names we choose for ourselves.<<

Yeah, this culture has weird ideas about names. At least now people have widespread social options for choosing their own use-names. That's not even two decades old yet.