You behave like you’ve seen in films

Everything you know about how to act in life, what will happen in life, and what the possibilities are in life, you got from stories. Books, comics, films, pop videos, television, adverts. All the interactions, all the characterisations, all the ways of speaking looking and posturing — all written and imagined by writers. True, they’re often observed from life, and often not, but such scenes to play, actions to perform and attitudes to strike are also abstracted and distorted for dramatic effect. All the behavioural transactions we exhibit are inherited from those we’ve seen other people perform, otherwise it’s not a valid currency. The most memorable and vivid examples of such transactions are often those transmitted through mass media.

The boring sections of life, any interstitial inconsequential ‘glue’ in-between the notable parts, is edited out while dramatic situations are exaggerated. This is then passed on via contemporary culture through generations until the original direction or observation is lost. These snippets and expressions and communications become normalised as “the” way to do things. But we can’t actually invent any of these things ourselves in isolation without being heavily influenced by what we see and experience around us and most of what we experience in volume is stories. In todays terms, this means stories transmitted in mass media. Everything we know about how to act in life we learned from films and television, comics, books, etc.

You might be doubting me right now, ready to deny this and ready to argue back but consider the way in which you are picturing yourself retorting in your mind. You got that catalogue of moves and facial expressions and ways of speaking from somewhere. Maybe some children’s cartoon series, maybe a graphic novel, maybe a film you once saw. Maybe not. Maybe someone down the pub or at a party or club, who in turn got it from a cartoon or film or an advert on telly. Your lexicon of expressions and attitudes and actions are a validated mashup of the most vivid transactional moments in your media consumption.

Conversations come in different flavours

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.