Don't Leave Your Manners at the Door!

May I share a gripe with you? Has anyone ever been on an internet chatroom? I have. In fact, I'm quite keen on the things. I generally surf about the Yahoo chatrooms, here and there. What I like about them is that you can discuss any subject under the sun with a mixture of knowledgeable people and not-so knowledgeable people. You can have a raging argument about nothing at all, discuss everything from religion to sport. Often in the same chatroom, too. In fact, I have a few friends online, people who I hang about with and usually talk about music with. They're nice folk.

But some people are not so nice. In fact, chatrooms seem to attract brain-dead morons with an attitude problem quite a lot of the time. You'll be peacefully having a conversation and, wham! someone comes in with "ur all idiots, i want to kill you all". Or something similar - often more obscene. Now, what sort of perverted pleasure anyone can get out of entering rooms and just shouting insults, is quite beyond me. Especially as they must know that people iggy them immediately. But even these irritating adolescents do not irritate me half as much as the debaters-with-no-manners do.

You know the type, you settle yourself in for an interesting debate. Then you realise your partner is an idiot. Then before you know it, your simple little debate has degenenerated into flying insults here, there and everywhere. You can get called worse than filth in chatrooms, and no one thinks much of it.

But I ask myself - would I really behave like that to someone in the real world? I, too, have been guilty of the most appalling bad manners online. How often would I call an older person a moron? or how often would I insult someone's class or nation? Never, is the answer. I would never be so rude - and in a normal conversation I would know better than to insult someone's nationality in any case, and I certainly would not call someone a moron - even if they were. So why do we do it in chat?

Perhaps it is because we cannot see others' faces. We don't have to see what our words do to them. We obsess about whether someone talks in txt or in ALLCAPS, but that is our only standard of etiquette in cyberspace. We don't see the people we are talking to - which in one sense is handy as it makes it harder for folk to be racist or whatever - but on the other hand it helps people be quite astoundingly rude to each other. We forget that what we do in chatrooms does have real consequences - I know I have been upset by what happens online before now, because it is real.

So that is my gripe with chatrooms, and chatters - we forget our manners. And yes, we all do it. We cannot blame it on the fast pace of an internet conversation - because it is at least as fast if we talk to someone in real life, and we do not behave with such abandon there. So we ought to pay more attention to the way we treat people online, too. Because online does not mean imaginary!

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