Recently I posted a movie trailer video to a favorite Facebook group page and, after several weeks, was delighted to see other fans had “liked” the posting. I posted a comment expressing delight that they did. Therefore I was startled to receive a bristling response from the page administrators who had mistaken my meaning for sarcasm.
false pretenses? Are we sensing you're annoyed with the lack of response to your post? If thats the reason being five percent of fans reguarly respond to posts to begin with and secondly we doubt it's due to them being more interested his other attributes and forgetting his acting abilities..If it's something they have seen or heard about before there is lest interest compared to new things popping up about [him]. Kind regards, [page] administrators.
Aside from the confusing syntax, what struck me was how much they had misunderstood my comment. Also stunning was
• How quickly the worst was assumed of my meaning, and their assumptions of my motives applied instead;
• How bristling their response was—to a “constituent”; and
• How much exhausting drama came with this (this is, after all, a Facebook page about a movie actor, not a debate about cancer research funding).
But I think this is how people do communicate these days, especially on social media—quick to anger, quick to call names, quick to misunderstand and kick down the wrong impression versus verifying for the correct one.
I can only reiterate what Linda Bishop and I discussed in our webinar last year:
• If you’re unsure about someone’s intent, give the benefit of the doubt until you can verify it;
• “Flaming” responses ultimately reflect more damagingly on you. Your remarks cannot be retracted although they can be used out of context; and
• Remember that human communications is a flawed process, so going ballistic over imagined insults is the human equivalent of shouting down someone an office meeting—without having taken the time to hear them out.
Finally: people always remember how they were treated. Adding stuff like “kind regards” when you’ve basically acted like a mindless bully does not change that. If your role is to administer, your job is to keep constituents engaged, and practicing civility is a stepping-stone to ensuring that.
This is something that we discussed FOREVER with our kids when they first started using the computer when they were in middle school. So many of their friends were pretty quick to write whatever came into their minds without thinking of how the person receiving the email would take it. Maybe the writer was writing something tongue-in-cheek but would the reader know this??? Maybe the writer was extremely emotional and writing from their heart rather than their head but would the reader know this.
ReplyDeleteIt's so easy to say something in writing that you would never say to somebody standing right in front of you. The kids had to realize that once the wrote something, even in private to a person, that correspondence could be forwarded, printed out and passed around and would remain 'out there' forever. A hard lesson to learn. Some people have yet to learn it.