Manners lost in cyber translation: calling out online trolls

We are more connected to each other than we ever have been before, it is easier to keep in touch with loved ones from across the globe, and who can honestly resist smiling at those hilarious cat videos?

But it seems to me, that along with the age of social media, we have ushered in a new age of respect-less conversation acceptance.

I know that I am now showing every single one of my newly acquired 40 years, and you can imagine this article being read in my "mum voice" if you like, but is it honestly so hard to just not try to make others feel terrible about themselves?

Bullying has always been a thing. Pretty much since the dawn of time, I'd imagine.

However, with the advent of social media, cyber bullying has entrenched itself into our every day lives and we can't "go home" from that - it invades every space we hold from our bedrooms to our lounge rooms to our school rooms and work places.

We call them trolls. But this gives them a persona, an image in our mind of what they look like, which is just a mask they can hide behind.

Anyone can be a troll and we might not recognise them in either the real world or the cyber world because they wear their masks so well and we can't always tell when they switch between them.

At least when I was at school, we knew who the bullies were.

We could recognise them.

We could avoid them (when possible).

Or at the very least, we could see them coming.

But now? Things feel less certain.

With this lack of certainty, we tend to come to online conversations in the social space with our defences at least partially raised, which can be enough to precipitate a negative experience.

The more negative experiences we have, the more we come to expect them.

This will always pervade our lives beyond the computer screen, flowing over into how we interact with people in general.

This doesn't seem to be a generational thing either: it's not a case of "kids today".

Memes like "Karen" demonstrate just how frequently these people are not confined to high school.

Our sense of social entitlement is staggering - that we expect others to deal with our temper tantrums in the public forum without repercussion is something that still catches me by surprise.

Perhaps we feel protected by our computer screens and thus more able to "let rip" on the unsuspecting residents of the internet, because there's no threat of physical confrontation if we say the wrong thing to the wrong person.

Maybe this means we care less whom we are "trolling" and this has made it into some sort of sport.

For those of us interacting on socials on behalf of a business, we can find ourselves subject to more than the usual amount of trolling behaviour.

It seems that people forget that when they send nasty and threatening messages to a "business", they are still interacting with a person and that person has to take that home and deal with it.

It's hard to fathom that in this day and age, "being bullied" could be part of a position description, and yet I haven't met a social media manager who has not had to deal with this.

Defensive social media training is a part of many organisations' approaches to combatting troll de-escalation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation being just one such organisation.

It saddens me that organisations have to train their staff how to deal with abuse and threats just for turning up to work.

Respectful conversation is something most people grow up learning how to conduct.

Manners, address, not speaking over the top of others; these are the basics of conversational skills.

And yet once we go online, we seem to so often lose these concepts in cyber translation.

Maya Angelou famously said "people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

It's time we all learned to take responsibility for that.

Zoë Wundenberg is a careers consultant and un/employment advocate at impressability.com.au.

Twitter: @ZoeWundenberg