Given the current threads on Disputable Matters and the many pitfalls of communications, I thought some may find this article interesting.

In the Digital Age, rudeness is just another virus

Leah McLaren, Globe and Mail,

(note this article may end up being locked out, hence my lengthy quoting)

[...] 

Given my considerable experience in blocking out Internet crackpots, I was fascinated to read about a new study out of the University of Southern California, which found that increased digital rudeness is decreasing our ability to perform at work. A group of management scientists found that impoliteness in the form of abusive Twittering, nasty e-mails or angry blog posts significantly diminished a person's creativity and problem-solving capabilities in a work environment.

For anyone who has wasted an afternoon fuming over a nasty blog post or found themselves on the wrong end of a text message breakup, this will come as no surprise.

It's no secret, after all, that technology is turning us into a culture of social boors. As you are reading this, countless semi-literate cranks are busy slapping up inflammatory posts that will be instantly slagged off by anonymous posters in return. Ashton Kutcher is busy tweeting another photo of his wife's ass, while several U.S. politicians are cheerfully twittering about basketball during Barack Obama's latest address to Congress.

Don't get me wrong here. There is a difference between healthy critical debate online and the kind of cancerous mudslinging so many people engage in. (For a fascinating example of the former, check out Dan Baum's recent tell-all Twitter blog about being canned as a staff writer at The New Yorker at www.danbaum.com.)

In debate, you communicate in order to learn and teach; in rudeness, you trade insults in order to hurt and be hurt.

It's a distinction I've explained to a talented writer friend who occasionally calls me up to vent about the things he finds posted about himself online. Unlike me, he will courageously charge into battle, defending himself to the anonymous cyber-bullies and countering their venal bitchery with polite, even-handed responses of his own. His aim, I think, is to teach these people how to engage in decent public debate. Unfortunately, he is one man and the rudies are faceless and exponential in their numbers. Arguing with them is a hopeless, Sisyphean task that can only end – like Evelyn Waugh's chain of never-ending thank-you notes – in bitterness and death.

Depending how you look at it, the study suggests that a long-held pet theory of mine might be right: Social networking is a vicious circle. Frittering away one's life online increases our chances of experiencing or perpetuating rudeness, which in turn makes us less productive at work. And how do most of us waste time at the office? We Facebook, e-mail and Twitter with friends. Ergo, social networking leads to more social networking.

But what is it about digital culture that brings out the social cretin in what are presumably (and I'm being generous) otherwise normal people? Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future , believes people say things on e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. that they would never say in person because they don't actually understand the Internet as a public space in which social behaviour has consequences. “I'm sure we all occasionally think rude and nasty thoughts, but there's a reason why we wouldn't say them out loud. Face-to-face interaction is a check on our worst impulses.”

And here's another pet theory: If rudeness online depletes creativity, perhaps politeness will encourage it?

In an effort to test this idea, I would like to launch a campaign to inject some common courtesy into digital communication. We could start the way we all did as children – by learning to say “please” and “thank you” in our tweets, posts and e-mails. These two little words, which are increasingly scarce on the ground in all aspects of life, have been virtually abolished in the accelerated/abbreviated realm of digital culture. Make no mistake, though: They are powerful. In the words of British etiquette writer Lynne Truss, niceties are “a ritual necessary to life's transactions, and also magic passwords guaranteed to earn us other people's good opinion and smooth the path to our own desires.”
 

Thank you for taking the time to read it....