E-Arguing: A New Concept in Conflict
Author: Helen Seymour

Email, oh joy! It is fabulously fantastic! Countless office hours have been lost to lovers sharing secrets and saucy suggestions on the electronic highway. This terrific tool facilitates global communication. We are able to contact people regardless of where they are in the world. We can pedantically ponder linguistics when propositioning a potential suitor. We can even befriend train spotters in Tennessee, should we have the inclination! Yet the cyber scribe can also be a weapon of verbal warfare.

The Internet provides a ‘safe space?free from the fear of immediate retribution. This can entice us into disclosing spiteful sentiments that are restricted to the crevices of our mind in face-to-face encounters. Consequently we type the words we wouldn’t dream of saying and triumphantly click ‘send? Whilst we may be infinitely wittier than our partners, we should resist the temptation to demonstrate this in an e-argument. They won’t congratulate us for it.

Even at the best of times the world of e-communication is fraught with problems. One may fail to detect irony or rhetoric. An innocuous joke can easily be interpreted as a sadistic slur. Conflict escalates and the monitor and modem suddenly become the means of conversation. Now is the time for us to stop! To remove ourselves from this technological terrain and get on the blower in a bid for reconciliation. I do not mean to condone callous comments or monstrous behaviour, but most e-arguments are merely sweating the small stuff, they are founded on semantics, not sadism.

As a veteran e-arguer I propose we keep the memos fun and frivolous, thereby sparing ourselves hours of upset and antagonism.








--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am a Msc Sociology student at Bristol University.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------