Civility
I'm a big fan of civility.
I like it when people are nice to each other, and I get stressed when they're not. And especially when they're not nice to me.
At the same time, I'm not always as nice as I could be, though some of my friends don't believe that. Like that Christine Lavin line:
You thought I didn't have a temper; ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, surprise!
But when I do lose my temper, I almost always regret it later. I don't like conflict, I don't like hurting people, I don't like being hurt.
In my public and professional capacity, I try to take Ellen Datlow as a role model in this regard. People post comments and questions to the discussion forums at Sci Fiction, sometimes (to be blunt) kind of clueless ones, and Ellen responds graciously to them. She's never snippy with them, she never puts them down, she never indicates that something isn't a good question. I admire that approach a great deal, and I try (generally with a fair degree of success, I think) to emulate it. There's just no benefit in making people feel bad, especially not in a public forum. It's the make-allies-not-enemies thing; treat people gently, and it often redounds [sic] to your benefit.
But I do have a hard time suppressing various impulses, especially online. The impulse to flame; the impulse to make clever jabs at someone else's expense; the impulse to sarcasm and snideness. Even the impulse to punish "wrongdoings." And when someone misunderstands something I've said and attacks me for it, the impulse to respond, to explain, to try to make myself understood, is almost overwhelming (and deeply intertwingled with the urge to attack back).
But I'm trying to teach myself to let things go, to choose my battles, to focus on the important things. Hard to do when one is, like me, obsessed with details, and inclined to spew massive quantities of verbiage at the drop of a hat. But perhaps a goal to approach rather than to achieve.
The past year or so, I've spent an awful lot of time rewriting emails and entries and postings. Sometimes, especially in email, my first attempt is vitriolic and pointed; it helps a lot to keep an eye on that and avoid sending the mail until I've had a chance to look it over in a calmer frame of mind. I used to maintain my self-righteous frame of mind right up until the moment I sent the mail (even if I waited for days before sending it), at which point I would suddenly think "Ack, what did I just do?" and start dreading the inevitable response. But these days, after I've had some sleep and some food, the nastily clever sarcasm usually doesn't seem like such a good idea, and I can sometimes start to be respectful to the person I'm arguing with. I tone down the most egregious turns of phrase, qualify extreme statements, and try to remove sarcasm entirely. Discussion goes much better when there's mutual respect, when the people involved aren't trying to score debate-team points by skewering their opponents.
Of course, constructive criticism can be extremely helpful—but usually only if it's presented in a way in which the recipient can hear it for what it is. I'm not so good at either end of that; I'm thin-skinned about criticism of me, and for someone who earns a living communicating I sometimes seem to be remarkably bad at phrasing things in ways that won't be misinterpreted by the people I'm talking to.
Hrm. I don't know if I have a point here. Mostly just a general wish that people, including me, would more often strive for civility in their interactions where possible, and make an effort to understand what the other people in an argument or discussion are really saying, where they're coming from, why they might've said that, how they might've meant it if it wasn't an attack.
Like I said, I'm often not so good at those things. But I'd like to be better.
(It's presumably apparent to some of you that this was partly sparked by a recent interaction I engaged in in an online forum. But it's actually stuff I've been thinking about in other contexts as well, so don't read too many specifics into this entry.)