One of the biggest revolutions in my lifetime has been social media, though oddly it seems the most unsocial place to hang out.
For so many people, it appears to be an opportunity to just be unpleasant and attack other people. Maybe I’m overplaying that aspect of it, but it does seem to affect many people in a similar way to road rage.
As road rage may make people behave in ways they wouldn’t directly to someone’s face, because they’re separated and sat in their own private space, so it seems the separation online makes people behave in ways they wouldn’t in person. So they’re hyper-aggressive online, but would never fight a man with a perm1 in real life.
It’s another thing driving division between people who should be working together.
Maybe we just like being angry and hating on people. Or maybe we just don’t realise how difficult communication is and so jump to the wrong conclusions when reading or listening to what someone else is saying online.
Mrs H Forclift is a wise person and many years ago she taught me that if someone doesn’t understand what you’re saying you’re saying it wrong.
Unless it’s me not understanding what she’s saying, in which case it’s because I’m stupid.
My stupidity aside, her statement’s not too far removed from something Dale Carnegie2 said, that it’s “easier to make a million dollars than to put a phrase into the English language.”
Communicating online is difficult and we need to learn to slow down and give others the benefit of the doubt.
To try and illustrate the difficulty of communicating online, let me share an example of how difficult it is to communicate in the real world. Face to face with all the non-verbal cues that should make communication so much easier.
Trust me, when you finish the story I’m about to share, I guarantee you’re going to think “no way”.
Billy, Get Your Gun
For a couple of years at the start of my 20s I worked jobs with shifts that meant I often had time off during weekdays. As a result, I spent a lot of time in the local pub on my afternoons.
You meet an interesting mix of people when you go boozing during the day.
For instance, Billy was an amateur boxer, some 10 or 12 years older than me, who had also been described to me as a gangster with some dodgy, and possibly violent, sidelines.
Coming from a different part of Bristol, I’d only met him a few times with mutual friends before the afternoon he called into the pub. I was sat at the bar chatting to Jenny, the barmaid.
It was either that or chat to Pat who’d just come in straight from work, but he was having quite the heated conversation with himself in one of the booths by the windows. I didn’t like to interrupt.
Having bought a beer, Billy asked me to join him as there was something he needed to talk about. I’d found him good company before and was happy to join him.
Once sat at a table, he says “you know I’m seeing Jenny, don’t you?”
Well, truth be told, I didn’t and if I’d just said as much, things would have played out so very differently. However, I didn’t like to look like I didn’t have my finger on the pulse of current events, so I responded with “yeah, of course.”
This leads to Billy sharing his concern that one of the locals in the pub has been chatting her up while he’s not around.
I feel quite sorry to see how upset about this Billy is and decide I should do all that I can to reassure him and put his mind at rest.
So I point out to Billy that I’m in the pub most afternoons and I haven’t seen anyone trying to chat up Jenny.
Oddly, Billy wasn’t reassured and reiterated that he knew that someone had been chatting her up and he wasn’t at all happy about this turn of events.
Now, I like Billy and I really want to help him get this weight off his mind, so I repeat that I’m in the pub all the time when Jenny’s working and I’ve not seen anyone chatting her up. I’d know, because I’m always sat at the bar chatting to her.
Oddly, this still doesn’t reassure Billy.
Right, I can see you’ve worked it out, haven’t you? Yep, Billy had heard I’d been chatting up his girlfriend.
He was clearly convinced this was true and so it never occurred to him that I might not understand what he was really saying. He must have thought I was taking the mickey out of him rather than genuinely trying to reassure him.
At the same time, because I was just passing the time of day with Jenny, it never occurred to me that he could possibly think I was trying to make a move on his girlfriend.
So we play this verbal tennis for a few minutes more until he suddenly gets up and says “follow me.” I do and we walk past the pool tables to the back of the pub and he passes through the first door to the men’s toilets.
He then holds the second door for me and I enter into the grubbily tiled, windowless room. When I turn to face him, he’s pointing a semi-automatic handgun square to my chest.
With firearms being all but illegal in the UK, this is the first time I’ve seen a weapon that wasn’t a shotgun. It looks surprisingly big.
And cold. What an odd thought.
My eyes slowly arc upwards and then lock with his.
I see steel there I don’t recognise.
My left knee starts to tremble ever so gently.
Almost imperceptibly and I don’t want him to see it.
I don’t want him to see just how very, veRY, VERY EXCITED I AM RIGHT NOW!!
Beavers rice, I am hanging out with a real-life, bona fide gangster.
COOLIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
Keep spendin’ most our lives
Livin’ in a gangsta’s paradise3
And to show me how much he appreciates me trying to reassure him, he’s giving me a gun.
Okay, he’s probably not giving me a gun, but still.
I. AM. LIVING. MI-AM-I. VICE.
Hardcore, you know the score!
In my head, I’m squatting slightly with my straight arms crossed in front of me as I do finger pistols.
At least I think it’s in my head.
Will he let me shoot it? I bet the acoustics in here will make our ears ring.
And then I nail my line. Okay, the delivery’s lacking, but the line is pure gold.
I blurt out “Blimey Billy, you’ve got a big’un there.”
Bad-dum, cymbal crash!
How about that, eh? We’re two fellas in a public toilets and I come out with that little gem. That’s gotta crack a laugh.
The reaction is unexpected though.
Have you ever seen someone’s eyes roll back into their head so fast and so hard, they literally revolve around in the sockets a full three or four times? Like you’re playing a slot machine in a Vegas casino?
Take it from me, it’s the most uncanny sight. I know it’s not the same, but I couldn’t get Linda Blair in The Exorcist4 out of my head.
With the benefit of hindsight, as I write this, I do feel absolutely dreadful about the situation.
Poor Billy. Barely 10 minutes earlier, this must have seemed like the simplest exercise he could imagine.
Walk in the pub. Let the young lad know he’s to stop chatting up Jenny. Young lad folds and begs forgiveness. Don Corleone style “it’s fine if it never happens again…yadder, yadder…it’s all about respect…yadder, yadder.” Another beer and ‘nuff said.
Instead, it turns out the kid has balls of brass and is intent on taking the pigs.
I’ve no idea how close Billy got to using the gun, but fortunately he tried a slightly different approach first.
“I know that someone in this pub has been chatting up Jenny. If it carries on, I’m going to have to shoot him. Understand?”
?
Understand?
Surely he meant “capiche”?
Still, I let that ride because I could see an opportunity to give him the peace of mind he was seeking.
“Don’t worry Billy, no-one’s going to try chatting up Jenny.”
It’s basically what I’ve been telling him for the last few minutes, though switched to the future tense and it finally seems to have the effect I’d been hoping my previous reassurances would have.
“Let’s hope so, eh? Now, how about some pool?”
We play a few games, Jenny’s shift ends and they leave just as another afternoon regular comes in.
“You’re still alive then?” they say to me.
“I believe so,” is my sparkling reply.
“It’s just Billy was in last night and said he might have to shoot you for trying to make a move on Jenny………have you farted?”
“Kind of.”
Billy was a really crap gangster. From the moment he walked into the pub, he thought he was threatening me. Yet the whole time I thought I was helping to give him some peace of mind, even with him waving a gun around.
And our communication was so messed up, in the end, he thought he’d made me agree to back off his girlfriend, while I believed I’d been a friend indeed helping a friend in need.
And bear in mind, that happened in person, without the additional problems that can come from trying to communicate online. Oh, and did I mention he was waving a gun around? You’d think that would be a pretty clear real-life emoji, wouldn’t you?
Beavers rice!
Funnily enough, an off-duty police officer once threatened me in the same pub. It was just one of life’s silly little misunderstandings, he misunderstood his ability to prove something that he couldn’t. Anyway, he was a lot more intimidating, simply because he was crystal clear in his language, even down to the finer details of body cavity searches.
Now how many conversations do you think you could have had in the last week where you and someone else weren’t singing from the same hymnsheet? Not necessarily as skewed as my chat with Billy, but where your understanding may not have been quite as aligned as you may have believed.
It happens all the time, but we make very little effort to ensure that we really understand what others are saying or if they understand us. We just react the first moment we think we understand what someone is saying, even if they haven’t finished saying what they’re trying to say.
Those at the top of society want us at the bottom to be divided as that’s what gives them their strength.
The stupid thing is that we’re doing exactly what they want, weakening our position while strengthening theirs.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l116zoMBl1Y ↩︎
- Dale Carnegie wrote How To Win Friends and Influence People in 1936, but there’s still shedloads of good advice in there (and some good old-fashioned sexism too) https://ia601004.us.archive.org/1/items/HowToWinFriendsAndInfluencePeopleBy/How%20to%20Win%20Friends%20and%20Influence%20People%20by.pdf ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQCSxqScSVQ ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSxuXQCEC7M ↩︎