In Space No One Can Hear You Screen
When social skills work differently in online and offline social situations
Those of us who've been conversing online since the last millennium have often learned some important differences between how social situations work in person, and how they work in virtual spaces created by digital networks. Often, we don't realise this. We learned these things by trial and error, modifying our behaviour to do more of what seemed to work better in each environment, without necessarily thinking about why1.
It might be very helpful for some of us to become conscious of how we behave differently in online and offline social situations, and talk about them. This might help some people stop importing behaviours that work in one domain into the other, where they don't work. Leaving them wondering why they keep ending up in bitter disputes, or ostracised, seemingly without cause.
For example, in an offline situation it's very unwise to respond to escalating aggression by continuing to remain calm, crack jokes, or explain clearly to the aggressors what they’re misunderstanding. In my experience, effective de-escalation starts to work almost straight away. If it isn't working at all after the first 2-3 tries, it's not going to. The best way to avoid getting the snot kicked out of you is to either beat a hasty retreat, or treat the aggressors like barking dogs; puff yourself up, and bark back louder.
Talking to strangers online couldn't differ more. In most cases the aggression can't escalate to a physical attack, certainly not quickly. Counter-aggression can be used as an excuse to stop listening to arguments they're finding disturbingly convincing (cognitive dissonance is a common cause of online aggression), or archived as a post-facto rationalisation for their own aggression. The option to disengage (or mute/block) is always there, and sometimes that’s the right move. But people who are able to remain calm in online discussions no matter what, cracking jokes, or carefully arguing the point, tend to earn a grudging respect.
People often miss out on real opportunities to persuade people of important things online (and less important ones), because they interpret impulsive outbursts in replies as calculated threats. Rather than understanding that they're more likely to be the result of cognitive dissonance. Or factors totally unrelated to the conversation, like bleed-through from other online conversations that aren't going well, or offline experiences they've been upset by, or triggered trauma from prior bad experiences, whether online or offline. Even just hunger or sleep deprivation creating grumpiness.
I learned this one early, because most of the heated exchanges in my early days online were with people I already knew offline. Because they happened within the context of ongoing personal or political relationships, I had the opportunity to see them eventually accept my argument, or to be persuaded of theirs, or to work with them to find a consensus that addressed both our arguments and concerns.
But there's another difference, relating to how in-groups and out-groups work, online and off, that took me much longer to see. Perhaps because of my formative social experiences.
Like a lot of people who were attracted to the net early on, I grew up a nerd. I remember a cartoon from the late 1990s about "anti-globalisation"2 protests, with a caption along the lines of "I think they organise them on the internet". The picture was a huge mob of stereotypical nerds; buck-toothed men wearing glasses, standing around in anoraks.
I never needed glasses and by that point I'd long since traded in my anorak, for the closest thing to a trenchcoat I could find in the local charity shops (the truth is out there, follow the white rabbit…). But otherwise, that was me. I loved that cartoon so much I printed out copies and stuck them above my computer in activist media centres I worked out of. Sadly I can't find a copy right now, but I’m guessing this is the sort of thing the cartoonist had in mind…
Scrolling back a few years, my life as a nerd was made tolerable by a large and surprisingly diverse 'freaks and geeks' social group that formed at my high school. Like the US high school experience described by Paul Graham in a 2003 blog piece, school cultures in Aotearoa descend from the same origins as Lord of the Flies; the micro-tyrannies of life at British boarding schools.
Being identified as "different", for any reason, meant living in constant fear of bullying. Whether it came in the form of physical attacks by angry, frustrated working class kids for whom school was a part-time prison. Or group humiliation from snobby middle class kids, for whom it was prep school for boardroom mind games. Or power trips by conservative staff with a chip on their shoulder, for whom it was a chance to rule their own private dictatorship.
As with all bullying, loners were vulnerable targets. So misfits like me inevitably drifted into social clusters that formed around the library, the tech crew, the Theatresports club, the Te Reo Māori classroom, a computer room available to students, a radio club that made a regular program for the local access radio station, and so on. Some of which then pulled in other misfits with related interests, who we'd met in class, or already knew before we ended up at the same high school. Looking back now, most of the kids this brought together were probably, like me, neurodiverent in some way.
As Paul Graham says, "in a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together", and our high school was one of the bigger ones in the country. A few of us overlapped more then one of these interest-based social clusters, so inevitably we drifted into a meta-cluster who often hung out together, at school and outside it. Kind of like a real life version of the alliance between the Lambda fraternity and the Mu sorority in Revenge of the Nerds.
This happened, among other reasons, because we all had some awareness that there was safety in numbers. The more of us there were, the safer we were. Because of that, and because we'd come together to avoid the consequences of being ostracised, we were very hesitant to exclude people. Even if their behaviour sometimes crossed a line. Because that seemed very likely to put them in danger - even physical danger - from bullies we had no ability to influence or restrain.
Because I’d spent a lot of time talking to my Dad, who was active in trade unions3, I had an understanding that there was also power in numbers. As the meta-cluster grew, I quickly realised that the more social clusters we could ally with in the school, the more spaces and activities became safe for members of our meta-cluster to move through or participate in. Later that extended beyond our school, but that’s another story.
I also understood that no one could be excluded without the risk of alienating whole clusters they were part of. Weakening the larger group, and putting everyone at greater risk of bullying. Especially since the people most likely to cross lines were also tight with the clusters most likely to be able to defend themselves in a fight, and who could potentially flip from allies to bullies if their fragile egos were bruised. So I did everything I could to keep them onside.
That was an in-person situation, and I stand by the way I played it, even decades later. When I left school and started to get involved in subcultures and activist groups, I followed pretty much the same playbook. Making alliances with as many social clusters as possible and introducing people across them to create informal federations. For the most part this worked pretty well, even as people from these groups started getting online, and using the net to form links across the country and the world. Again, I stand by it.
But this is not a playbook that works the same way in online-first social situations. Like I said, it took me a while to realise this and to understand why.
When people have no offline relationships with each other, we exist to each other only as handles; labels that spout words. If someone is excluded from the tiny part of the net I hang out in, there's a million other places they can try again. Plus, anyone we encounter in online spaces - especially those with large populations - is just as likely to be part of the world of bullies we're trying to defend against, as to be one of us. The freaks and geeks who now, as then, just want to live in peace and geek out about our special interests together.
More profoundly, unlike the physical world with its fences and walls, the only boundaries that exist online are the ones we create in the ways we interact. The mutual interest social clusters that I value, can't form online without a semi-permeable barrier around them. Which excludes people who don't share that interest, or haven’t yet learned how to play nicely with others.
Federations of those clusters can only work if they can exclude (or at least mute) whole clusters of people whose participation is motivated by making trouble, not working together to prevent it. It's not at all the same situation I faced at high school, nor as an adult organising around cultural or political interests.
I suspect this dynamic I’ve noticed in myself may be common among Gen X and perhaps some of the very oldest Millenials; people who discovered the net after leaving high school. I'd love to hear from others this age (and older) about whether they've noticed themselves misapplying offline social guidelines to online-first situations.
I also suspect that younger Millenials and Zoomers, for whom the net was an indistinguishable part of their high school experience, tend to do the opposite. Misapplying what works in online-first environments to in-person social situations. Again, I'm curious to know if this matches the experiences of people this age.
In any case, I'm not that exceptional, and I doubt that I'm the only person who's made this category error in one direction or the other. The more we talk about it, and write about it, the more understanding we can create of what works socially and what doesn't, online and off, and why.
Images:
"Protest Sign in NYC" by topgold, licensed CC BY 2.0.
"'Not The Moo's' Booger 'Revenge of the Nerds'" by anarchosyn, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.
One reason I do think about this might that I’m autistic and I have ADHD, so social graces never came naturally to me, and I’ve had to put a lot of work into “fitting in”, in different social situations.
I put scare quotes around “anti-globalisation” because it’s a misleading description of the "movement of movements" behind these protests. So what was it against, and what it was for as an alternative? These are reasonable questions, but they're very hard to answer, simply because there's no one answer. Every political group that contributed - and perhaps every person involved - will have their own answers, and they'll all be different. For me it was a movement against the massive social and environmental harms caused by neoliberals, as they took over the state in many countries - both rich and poor - and used it to shift control of resources and regulatory powers from the public to corporations; deregulation, corporatisation, privatisation, etc.
Given what was going on politically in Aotearoa from the mid-1980s on, and especially after 1991, this may have been another reason the snobby middle class kids and conservative staff seemed to resent me in particular.