Angry Emojis? Message Flood? Did Your Post Blow Up? - Ixy’s Guide to Taking a Debate Offline
Here at Ixy we strongly believe that it’s best to talk through disagreements. And we believe that important topics can be productively debated online with the right tools, support, and mindset.
Nevertheless, there are some instances where it’s best to take a debate offline — both for the sake of the debate itself (making sure that both parties have understood each other and reach a more intelligent conclusion) and for the sake of the relationship.
Here are a few situations where it may be best to take your debate offline and continue it via a phone call, a video chat or (radical!) an in-person meeting:
1. When the debate relates to someone’s highly personal experience
Sometimes another person has experienced something so personal that — even if they are “wrong” and you are “right”— it may be too difficult to address the topic with sufficient care online. High levels of emotion simply prevent us from dealing well with debates; studies suggest that when our heart rate rises above 100 beats a minute or so, we can no longer think well enough to respond to other people or to change our minds. All of us have experienced a related phenomenon where we are too angry, upset, or panicked to think of a solution or see another person’s point, but can later understand or reason better, once we’ve calmed down.
When the person we are debating has a very personal stake in the topic at hand, it’s often best to take the debate offline. Better to discuss in person, where you can generally show a wider range of emotion through body language and tone of voice, and where you can show you cared enough to find them and even console them in person. This helps everyone keep calm and be sensitive to the emotions of the other person.
2. When you’ve caught someone (or been caught) at the wrong moment
One of the problems with online conversations is how easily they infiltrate other parts of our personal lives. Someone can begin to tell us why all of our values are wrong or why we’re entirely mistaken about basic facts while we’re lying in bed on a Sunday morning, taking our kids for a walk through the park, or getting out of a shower. It feels so much more personal because — in terms of where it happened in our personal time and space— it is.
Something we might have been happy to debate at the right moment in a pub or at the end of a dinner party interferes with our leisure time or our time with those we love, and so we’re far more prone to resent it and the person who disagrees with us.
If a disagreement with someone you care about heats up online, especially if you have reason to believe it’s a bad moment for them, it’s often worthwhile suggesting that you meet in person at a more convenient time to discuss it. This allows the debate to happen in a way that is less invasive and less frustrating than an online conversation might be.
3. When privacy is needed
Sometimes people are sensitive about a debate being recorded in writing. They may worry about it being leaked or somehow seen by other people.
This is particularly true when there are other “observers” who can see the debate (if the debate occurs on Twitter or in a Facebook status, for example). You might find that your left-leaning friend can’t do anything other than defend unions when commenting on your Facebook status, but is far more nuanced and ambivalent in a private direct message conversation. That’s often because, like a politician, they need to tow the party line in any remotely public forum. They can’t be caught off-message by other people they know.
The same phenomena means that some conversations are unlikely to go well when they are written down at all, even in a private message. Many of us will feel a lot more comfortable admitting that we think our spouse is wrong, our boss is terrible, or that we might have been wrong in our political judgments if it’s not written down anywhere it could come back and haunt us later. Perhaps this sounds a bit paranoid, but as social media becomes increasingly prevalent, more and more of us have become self-conscious and cautious in this way — we know people can share what we write, and that some of what we say may later come to light through hacking, someone looking through our phone, or other unexpected mechanisms.
If you find someone you are debating with seems very cautious about what they put in writing, you may find the debate more interesting and rewarding if you take it to the pub or coffeeshop. You can reassure them it’s off the record.
4. When one party starts to assume the worst about another
Recent research suggests that when we hear people speak their opinions (rather than reading them as text), we disagree with them just as much but we are far more generous in the way we disagree. We are less likely to assume they are heartless or ignorant. Perhaps this is because hearing another person’s voice or seeing their face reminds us that they are a “real” person, with more to them than the particular opinion we disagree with.
Unfortunately, in online conversations we can’t generally hear the other person’s voice or even really see their face. We’re very likely to be more dismissive and feel contempt towards the other person — which is an especially destructive emotion in interpersonal conflicts.
If you find that a debate quickly turns to attacking a person as stupid, foolish, or cruel, it may be best to meet in person or discuss on the phone. It helps both parties to remember that the other person is complex and varied, that they “contain multitudes”, as the poet Walt Whitman would say — and that they therefore are worthy of respect, even when they are entirely wrong.
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