Social media – the importance of patience and positiveness

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 !!