The internet is weird, and I don't understand people. Part n in a series.

Apparently there is some kerfuffle going on over at the Yarn Harlot's - I wasn't aware of it, as I haven't been reading that many blogs lately (and even then mainly stick to the ones in my own personal sidebar). But apparently the author of the blog said something that someone interpreted as insulting (and again, I'm not trolling the archives of the blog for the supposedly-inflammatory comment, and it will become clear why in a moment). Anyway, some anonymous commenter basically called her an America-hating witch-with-a-b (The Yarn Harlot is Canadian) and continued to escalate.

You know what? Blogs are OPINION. Blogs by and large belong to the person who writes them. It's like inviting someone into your living room. So I don't really care what she said that set the commenter off, and I don't really care what the commenter said specifically. (To quote my mom: "I don't care who started it. I want to see it end now." And yeah, yeah, you don't give in to bullies, but still.)

Oh, bloggers say stuff I disagree with. Some of them say it all the time. If a blogger consistently rubs me the wrong way, I'm going to stop reading them, unless they are like the Best Writah Evah! (and even then, I might stop reading).

But...and this may be just me, I don't know - I'd never leave a nasty abrasive comment on someone else's blog.

Because so much of what's on blogs is opinion. And, to clean up slightly a phrase my dad has been known to use: Opinions are like armpits. Everyone's got 'em, but you don't necessarily want to know all about them. (And some of them stink).

So, someone says something I disagree with, my major inclination is to shrug and go, "their experience is not my experience." Or, if I really feel the need to post a comment, I'll say something like, "I see it differently because I experienced XYZ..."

Or if it's a matter of a fact, something that can be checked and verified, and I really think a correction is important, I may gently say something along the lines of, "Do you really mean..." or "But Noted Authority says..." But in a lot of cases, meh, I let it go. It looks pedantic to correct someone who's wrong, or at least it does a lot of the time to me.

I guess my attitude in the face of what I view as wrong-ness or an ill-formed opinion is more one of "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means" instead of coming out, brandishing a broadsword, and declaiming, "My name is Iniga* Montoya. You insulted my father! Prepare to die!"

(*Attempt to make the feminine form of Inigo)

I don't know. I tend to be more retiring - to sit back and try to listen to all sides. Oh, I know, I jump to conclusions on stuff and probably my opinions are oft' as ill-formed as others'.

(And another issue: without facial expression and tone of voice, it's sometimes hard to divine what someone's attitude is. Even for people like me who are a bit more Rain-Man-y and don't always interpret facial expressions or tone of voice RIGHT, it still helps to have some kind of a guidepost. As much as emoticons are despised, they do sometimes help with that, someone saying something that could be seen as abrasive, SOMETIMES if they finish it off with a winky ;) face, then it changes the interpretation enough. Not always; a clever emoticon is not license to say passive-aggressive things and then go "BUT I WAS JUST JOKING!!!" when someone calls you on it. And sadly, I know a person or two who will say borderline-mean things and then call Pax by claiming they were 'just joking.')

But somehow, coming onto someone's blog and going into a little Tasmanian Devil flurry of anger and wrongedness because of something the blogger said - which was almost certainly not directed at you - seems kind of, well, unseemly. (And of course we don't know the commenter's backstory, but I find myself less likely to do the old "they may be worried about a relative in hospital" routine, which I sometimes use when someone cuts me off on the highway or something, as a way of preventing myself from getting angry. Because if you're preoccupied by stuff, are you going to be dreaming up nasty comments to leave on websites. I don't know. Maybe I'm falling into the trap of dehumanizing the rude commenter)

(And I realize how much this attitude of mine - of trying to avoid conflict and not be too inflexible to hear what others are saying - sometimes makes me ill-suited to be on a college campus, because there are times you do need to speak up for stuff and just grit your teeth and know that people are going to get angry - and in a lot of cases, extra angry because the stakes are so small. I was chair of a committee on campus for a couple years and had to give it up because the conflict was literally making me ill.)

But you know? As much as I bemoan having few commenters (and apparently, few readers these days), that's probably actually preferable to having some Anonymous waltz in and insult me.

Because it's funny: as much as I've said "I'm not thin-skinned," that really only applies with friends and family. If I know someone pretty well, I'm able to forgive and forget easily: "Oh, that's just Ronnie being Ronnie." or "I know she was having a bad day that day." Or "She's really worried about what's happening with her daughter, that's why she lashed out." But with the semi-anonymous world of the Internet, we don't always have that backstory (which would make it harder for me to forgive - and easier to be hurt by - what seem like random snarky comments). And also with the semi-anonymous world of the Internet, a person can hide their identity a lot.

And the simple fact is that some people do seem to enjoy being rude. Stirring the pot (to clean up yet another phrase a little bit). But because that's a bit out of my ken, I tend to not realize immediately, "Oh, it's a pot-stirrer" and instead obsess over the random comments or the things that may have been said for the sake of sowing discord (And how you do anything is how you do everything: the crux of my discomfort with student comments). I tend to take the stuff people say at face value; I am not always good at discounting someone else's opinion even if folks more objective than I look at it and go, "What he's saying about you, it's crap."

And I do get hurt if someone that doesn't know me well says something unkind. (There could be a whole new version of You Don't Know Me - which incidentally, I think is one of the saddest pop songs I know - written about someone who's been anonymously insulted). Because there's no recourse! If it's someone you know, you can take them aside, and say, "Hey, did I say something that upset you?" or "When you said that thing to me, did you really mean it in that way?" or, if you're braver than I: "Why did you say that to me?!?" With anonymous drive-by commenters, you're left saying to the screen, "But I'm a REALLY GOOD PERSON. Really. YOU DON'T KNOW ME." And it's frustrating and I admit it's the random anonymous rudenesses of life that get me down a lot more than the people I know saying stuff to me - because the people I know, like I said, there's backstory, or the chance to kind of go quietly to them and ask for a better explanation, or you can maybe kind of sort of take it as "constructive criticism" (though so often what people CALL "constructive criticism" seems to be mainly aimed at making them feel good and you feel bad).

(And then there's the whole issue of people teasing you and riding you hard BECAUSE they like you. That's another thing kind of out of my experience - I come from a family of extreme introverts, and that kind of teasing - which still feels borderline mean to me and I never know how to react to it - is something out of my experience. I've been told it's a "Southern Thing," but I really don't think it exclusively is. I think it's just something I didn't experience growing up so I'm not used to responding to it in kind)

I don't really know where I'm going with this, other than that I look around and feel like the human race is becoming more fractured and fragmented and it seems to be increasingly easy to see another person as an obstacle or a "thing" rather than another human being. And that makes me sad and also a bit worried for the future of civil society.