cannot tell if my brain has just been abnormally bad today, making me oversensitive to regular levels of ambient salt, or if I've been encountering a higher-and-more-distressing volume of anger/bitterness in spaces where I normally relax, about things which usually bring me joy
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I'm as guilty as anyone of riding the Dread Disc Horse until it coughs blood, but I'm starting to feel like legitimate anger at bigoted tone policing unfolded in a way that accidentally cut a very necessary conversation about conversational atmosphere online off at the pass
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I'm probably not going to articulate this very well because it's late, but "tone" means something - or can mean something - very different in written vs spoken contexts. written tone is important because, unlike spoken words, *you have literally no other cues to interpret mood*
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what this also means is that, once a written conversational tone is established, it is *much harder* to collectively shift that tone, or the perception of that tone, compared to what can happen in a physical setting
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example: you're at a party having a group conversation. as can happen, a casual topic leads into something heavier. the heavy topic is explored, there's a pause when it reaches its natural end, and then someone shifts gear with a light joke, which breaks the tension for all
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online, however, this tension-breaking shift is much harder to achieve, particularly in a context where the people talking don't know each other well, or IRL, or at all, because there's few or no shared tonal cues or in-jokes that can be unambiguously recognised as such in text
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in a spoken heavy conversation, it's generally clear by mutual pause if/when all parties are done, and so when it's appropriate to change things up. but online, without that clarity, people read the room wrong ALL THE TIME, which invariably leads to more anger
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I've said before and will say again, because it matters, that written communication is a skill distinct from spoken conversation, and that many people aren't all that good at it. the fact that we live in a digital age means we get a lot more practice, but that's not a panacea
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it also matters that, at present, different generations - both agewise and in terms of when/how they first entered The Interwebs plus their trajectory on it since - use different typographical tricks to try and signal tone. these rules are many, often unconsciously used & learned
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example: for some people, ending any casual text/chat message/DM with a full stop means the speaker is somewhere on a scale from ambivalent to PISSED at their interlocutor - the diff between saying "really" and "Really." can be MASSIVE. BUT IT'S NOT A UNIVERSAL SYSTEM!!
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and BY THE SAME TOKEN - and this is a real honest Difficulty - *asking clearly for clarification is often viewed as hostile or sarcastic in and of itself*. why? because something something Internet Conventions something, a flat question devoid of obvious tone FEELS rude
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I'm straying away from my original topic here, but the POINT is that tone actually matters hugely to written conversation - can be the difference between a forum/platform feeling hostile or welcoming to newcomers - but tonal shifts are hard to make & interpret
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and thus today's conundrum, where I'm looking at my corners of the internet and honestly cannot tell if I'm having a bad mental health day independently or if everyone is just unusually angry in a way that's upsetting to me or of it's both, because internet
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and seeing as how mental health is kind of important to the general population, I wish we could have a productive conversation about tone/mood in the conversational internet and how it impacts us, without that conversation being hijacked by dudes who tell women to smile more
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ANYWAY. that was a rant of some kind and now I'm gonna go curl up and sleep
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End of conversation
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