Social media – the importance of patience and positiveness -2 January 4, 2010
Posted by Karen in life, simple philosophy on life.Tags: patience, postiveness, social media
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Just as I was going to start my day, I received a reply from this person who seem to be bending the facts. How could a student know about the conversation details if the person had kept quiet? It makes no logical sense but nonetheless I just move on but I made a simple reply on 2 main pointers:
Namely (i) positiveness (ii) attitude towards online communication to people whom we may not know.
I think these 2 important pointers are worth mentioning here for productive social media interaction.
To me being positive is to accept both the so-called negatives and the positive. I think this is the way of understanding what happiness is. One can’t be doing good without seeing the reality of life.
In the real world, to be able to empathise & genuinely radiate positively to help, one must accept both positive & non-positive areas. To me, avoidance from the so-called ‘negative’ is itself a negative action; as you fail to read what sadness and disadvantaged is. This is inherently a negative personal trait that has other implied values of the person. If you fail this, how can you understand what is needed to make a service or product useful and thus bring happiness to the people ?
Even if I do not like a person, I wouldn’t go to the extent of blocking him/her unless if it were the case of spamming/verbal abuse/online harassment/negative attacks. In a liberal society practicing democracy, one has to be entirely receptive to different kinds of thoughts and perspectives. I may dislike a certain person/ view, and will unfollow the person. But blocking is really a hostile act.
In the case of online communications, I think words are seen seriously in light of personal respect based on cultures. If we do not treat one another properly, we are not doing social media a good deal. While online media is a casual form of communication, it does involve respect. Relationship rifts are a result of this kind of disrespect. Its actually the same for offline communications too. Actually I should have added on these chunks in my reply. But since it was supposed to be the last and I made an addtional reply to this person’s email, I didn’t.
If respect for cultures were present, those words shouldn’t have used online in the first place. And if this person had genuinely see online communications as causal, this person shouldn’t have acted against what this person had written. It just doesn’t make sense. What seems to be even clearer now is that words are bent. If I had not been positive, there wouldn’t be a lot done. The energy wouldn’t have radiated in other areas. Being silently positive is a different form of positive energy from this person’s preference of loud positiveness that shows immediate visible actions. Clearly this person is actually unreceptive and impulsive to take on anything that is ‘different.’
What I did also mention in my reply to this person is that at times this person’s perceptions online of others may be wrong and what I’ve assessed may also be wrong too. Until you meet the real person in reality, no one is 100% sure that their judgements are right. Based on this assumption alone, this person is inherently a negative person.
Assuming quiet people do not do big things is another bias. People who are quiet sometimes do far more and achieve more. They may not be gaining reputation loud on TV shows, advertisements like this person wants to do; they are a source of positive energy that a good person will normally acknowledge and accept without bias.
Going about it loud is a style but please do not disregard silent styles. The contributions are usually far more powerful and long lasting.
Social media – the importance of patience and positiveness January 4, 2010
Posted by Karen in life, simple philosophy on life.Tags: patience, positiveness, social media
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Its a black comedy; almost a white tragedy. Maybe it isn’t and the whole social media communication could just be that : intended meaness. But I was thinking about this particular person on this particular social media platform, who started off linking up with me in a positive tone, reaffirming all the positiveness that my clarifications were well regarded; only to end up with me receiving a good numner of sacarctic communications. That is exactly how a fight would start: oversensitivity and a lack of tolerance. On the flipside, perhaps its just that the person had suffered from a very bad experience before. I had always suspected this person to have some kind of problems. I earnestly think so from the start. But I had not bothered about it because we went on very well and it seemed that a great long distance friendship had blossomed. So I took the initial bad impression off. On a few occassions I had felt I had offended this person and out of worry, emailed/Direct Message off clarifications. Once I was asked when my birthday was and I accidentally hit the wrong key. I quickly corrected it and did a resend. I sensed the person didn’t like it and passed some remarks off to me that I was ‘an old pig’ and ‘an old sister’ in mandarin pinyin. I was offended. Then again, the person said the wrong keys were hit too. I accepted the reasoning considering the fact the person wasn’t a native speaker and a foreigner to the language. Soon I found that this person appeared to do a positive action before making a negative one. One example was this person said it was fine to clarify, then blocked me off from one of the social media I was on. Immediately I took offence as I was invited by this person in the first place and that I did make it sincerely clear that I did made a typo.
I had made clarifications before to a lot of people before due to typos/terse lines due to the fact I was hurrying my emails. Most of them took it positively except for 1 whom didn’t even reply me. This person is my 2nd ‘offended one’ and the reaction has been really very poor. The latest negative communication was done by the person’s student, who seemed to have been told of the whole online communication process by this person. It made me think and reassess this person again. It does reaffirm me of the bad impression of this person. I had thought about it carefully and emailed this person one last email as I just felt that all this is such a shame.
Internet communications should be positive and when you say so you should mean so too. Whatever role one plays online or offline shows explicitly clear the kind of person you are. I usually am not bothered about criticisms and debates. But I do mind attacking ones that are destructive. Any remarks should be done with consideration because you want to improve relationships with people. Only via this way, we can foster a positive participation globally.
Just thought I should write this in. Its sombre post on an elfin’s site, but once in a while; there should be some serious tone posts here on issues that are actually important. And that reference is ‘patience + positiveness’
PS: this person’s negative rejection genuinely left me no choice. But I hope such events will never happend again!
PPS: maybe I should not even done the last email to this person !!
Karen
