Hello Celeste
by Maggie (no login)You can have nice people who just have misunderstandings and miscommunications. I learned in T that the bare words you say are only about 8% of the message you send - body language and tone of voice are crucial and they are completely missing online. Also in a normal conversation you have immediate feedback. If someone misunderstands you, you can see it in her face and immediately clarify what you meant. But if you post something, "Person A" can read something into it out of her own woundedness and then she tells "Person B" that what you REALLy meant was "xyz" and there is no real communication.
On the other hand, I have seen evil people use the internet to study people and figure out the best way to hurt them and then use what they have revealed against them. I have seen that in 3D too, in fact I have been married to a master at it. So that makes it hard online - do you open up and reveal yourself so that the good people can truly know you or do you protect yourself because of the evil people who are looking for a way to hurt you?
And there ARE people out there looking for a way to hurt others. In addition to the reasons you mentioned why people do that, I think another one is feelings of guilt. If someone hurts other people, and their conscience bothers them, they have to dehumanize those people - and anybody else that reminds them of the ones they hurt. If they can dehumanize the victims and make them into somebody who "deserved it," that soothes the guilty conscience.
And some people are just pure spite and malice, dripping with venom, hiding it just long enough to get close enough to hurt. It stands to reason some of those people - who are the sociopaths and psychopaths that keep the cops so busy - are going to be online too. We have locks on our doors but we let anybody into our lives online....
I think we also have to watch out for people who are manipulative, who tell you what you ought to think and feel. But I have made some valuable friends online too, so I am not going to stop being "real." I will be a little less open, though, with personal information, and I won't ever again post my home telephone number on a public forum, although the one time I did that it worked out fine
from IP address 63.204.113.187
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