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Recently it's felt like I've totally lost the ability to express disagreement with people I like without utterly ruining that relationship. Part of that is to do with various things going on with my personal life/brain chemistry but I'm wondering how much of it is that a lot of these conversations have moved to tumblr.
Like...in my experience the best arguments happen when you can be open and understanding and try and see the other person's pov, engage with what they're actually saying instead of what you THINK they're saying, and not get all defensive and antagonistic.
But I'm too wordy for asks or replies (and those often get replied to publically anyway) and when I post a reblog I feel very aware that I am engaging not just with that person but with everyone who reads me, everyone following the post, and all of their followers (if they reblog my reply). And that awareness makes it SUPER HARD to be all the things I said in the paragraph above. Even if I trust that person to engage with me in an open and productive way, I don't trust all those other people, and so I put my guard up.
Does anyone else have this problem? And if so how do you deal with it?
Emailing them privately is an option when I have their email address, but it makes everything seem SUPER SERIOUS which puts me off. There's also writing out my argument in a text editor and dividing it up into as many asks as neccesary, I again feel weird about it but maybe it's a better approach. I like that reblogs can feel more like a casual discussion instead of a super serious "taking aside to express private disagreement" but it so easily goes from casual discussion to huge visible argument it seems not to be worth the risk for fraught topics.
"Don't argue with people on tumblr" is not a helpful aproach for me, I have recently tried arguing less but there are some opinions I find too upsetting to let slide and in my experience these unspoken arguments have a tendency to bubble up and explode if you ignore them. "Don't follow people with opinions you want to argue with" would mean cutting out a lot of people I mostly really like. And an echo chamber of people who all entirely agree with me is not entirely appealing. I really like being able to have productive discussions with people with different povs, and I know I used to be better at it.
Thinking about, I have taken the "just don't argue with people and unfollow anyone who makes that unbearable" approach to twitter, because expressing myself in 140 characters is just impossible. But I follow a very different group of people there, and barely post at all.
EDIT: Some interesting responses on tumblr...which of course I can't easily link to because tumblr but at worst you'll have to scroll down a little through that tag.
(going to post this on tumblr too, god help me, but point out that this post exists as a space for conversation for those who prefer it)
Like...in my experience the best arguments happen when you can be open and understanding and try and see the other person's pov, engage with what they're actually saying instead of what you THINK they're saying, and not get all defensive and antagonistic.
But I'm too wordy for asks or replies (and those often get replied to publically anyway) and when I post a reblog I feel very aware that I am engaging not just with that person but with everyone who reads me, everyone following the post, and all of their followers (if they reblog my reply). And that awareness makes it SUPER HARD to be all the things I said in the paragraph above. Even if I trust that person to engage with me in an open and productive way, I don't trust all those other people, and so I put my guard up.
Does anyone else have this problem? And if so how do you deal with it?
Emailing them privately is an option when I have their email address, but it makes everything seem SUPER SERIOUS which puts me off. There's also writing out my argument in a text editor and dividing it up into as many asks as neccesary, I again feel weird about it but maybe it's a better approach. I like that reblogs can feel more like a casual discussion instead of a super serious "taking aside to express private disagreement" but it so easily goes from casual discussion to huge visible argument it seems not to be worth the risk for fraught topics.
"Don't argue with people on tumblr" is not a helpful aproach for me, I have recently tried arguing less but there are some opinions I find too upsetting to let slide and in my experience these unspoken arguments have a tendency to bubble up and explode if you ignore them. "Don't follow people with opinions you want to argue with" would mean cutting out a lot of people I mostly really like. And an echo chamber of people who all entirely agree with me is not entirely appealing. I really like being able to have productive discussions with people with different povs, and I know I used to be better at it.
Thinking about, I have taken the "just don't argue with people and unfollow anyone who makes that unbearable" approach to twitter, because expressing myself in 140 characters is just impossible. But I follow a very different group of people there, and barely post at all.
EDIT: Some interesting responses on tumblr...which of course I can't easily link to because tumblr but at worst you'll have to scroll down a little through that tag.
(going to post this on tumblr too, god help me, but point out that this post exists as a space for conversation for those who prefer it)
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I've been pretty lucky for the most part, but it can definitely be quite intensely awful.