How to Combat Unkindness in Cyberspace

If your childhood was anything like mine, you may have heard adults say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”  As children, we intuitively knew that there was something false about this bromide, but we repeated it anyway. I can easily recall children taunting others on the playground and seeing those youngsters who were targeted with the cruel remarks often crying or running away feeling ashamed that they had demonstrated their vulnerability.

All too often in today’s world, we are reminded of the inherent falseness of the above clichè when we read of children and adults being subjected to heinous and abusive speech in cyberspace.  Many years ago, I made the mistake of very innocently correcting someone’s post on a YouTube comment stream which had attributed a song’s lyrics to the wrong songwriter; the string of venom directed at my innocuous remark convinced me to never post a comment again.

While we have little to no power over someone’s words and actions on the Internet, we can control how we respond.  A recent essay in The New York Times by travel writer Stephanie Rosenbloom, “Dealing With Digital Cruelty,” makes this argument strongly by looking at the ways we can avoid being hurt when people post insults.  She says that we can even possibly learn something from the things that are said.  As Rosenbloom points out, “In the virtual world, anonymity and invisibility help us feel uninhibited. Some people are inspired to behave with greater kindness; others unleash their dark side. Trolls, who some researchers think could be mentally unbalanced, say the kinds of things that do not warrant deep introspection; their singular goal is to elicit pain. But then there are those people whose comments, while nasty, present an opportunity to learn something about ourselves.”

In order to maintain healthy relationships with others and retain our own self-confidence, we should resist the urge to give more credence to the negative things that are said about us than to the positive comments people may be making on our behalf.  Similarly, if we can be reflective and self-analytical, we may be able to acknowledge that there may be some truth in what was posted, even if the way in which it was said was repugnant.  We should also be aware of the time of day or kind of mood we’re in when we look at feedback about us online; reading posts on Facebook or Twitter before one goes to sleep may not be the best way to have a good night’s rest.  Perhaps the best way to avoid becoming depressed about things that people are saying is to disconnect and leave cyberspace for a while to regain a sense of balance and perspective.

While we will probably never be able to stem the vituperative speech that exists in cyberspace, we can learn to prevent it from affecting our lives. We can also help our children develop coping mechanisms for dealing with it, so they can be confident, secure, and resilient people in the near future and long term.