People start and engage in conversation on the Internet, just as they also do in real life. Different conversations have different reasons, of course, but they also have different styles. These flavours or methods of going in the desired direction can affect the content of the conversation by biasing it. The conversation will progress using positive or negative, constructive or destructive expression. If the reason for the conversation is predominantly an exercise in purely the style of the conversation, it would be fair to say that it will feature no actual productive outcome at the destination. There’s no end product — because in those cases that simply isn’t the reason to have the conversation.
I would suggest developing an alertness for ‘where this conversation is going’ both online and in real life, in terms of not only the outcome or reason for the communication, but also for the style. It might be helpful to remove yourself from the situations in which a certain kind of communication is evidently of a destructive and negative style, as you’re sure to have more productive things to be doing at that particular time.
If you have to be present, you don’t have to participate. If you have to participate, try and steer or shift the focus around to make the purpose of the time spent more positive and generative if you can. Perhaps you could draw to the attention of the other participants that what’s going on is unconstructive and unhelpful — you’ll have to play that by ear. Online, it is easy to get swept into posts on forums that degenerate into absurd displays of ego protection in the guise of expertise, or even plain immature negativity. In real life, you’ll also notice the differences in styles of meetings, gatherings, in business and in more relaxed scenarios. Spot those unconstructive style differences early, and if you can, abandon the endeavour — there’s no requirement to be part of such a waste of time and energy.
