I thought very hard about whether I should write this. Two weeks ago, I decided that I want to stop sharing my opinions on the internet. After all, if I’m going to add my voice to a discussion, I need to be damn sure that it’s actually going to contribute, and since I’m not really an expert on anything, this doesn’t happen very often. Perhaps, after years of being stubborn and arrogant, I’ve just gotten tired of preaching half-baked nonsense when there are so many more meaningful things I could be doing instead.

But one thing I do feel qualified to talk about is perspective - specifically, what happens when we lose it. Perspective is part of being a functional adult. It allows us to calibrate our reactions to things. Perspective is not just saying “this stuff is important, and this stuff is not.” Rather, it’s the way we decide how to approach problems, and it keeps our emotions in check when things go awry. And I’m beginning to realize that the culture of the internet impairs our ability to do this.

Thanks to services like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, we’ve grown used to expressing ourselves in bite-sized chunks of raw data. This is not necessarily a bad thing per se, but it comes with a nasty side effect: when everything you say has to fit into a strict limit, be it 140 characters or 256 or whatever, you’re naturally going to deliver all of your thoughts at the same level of detail. And for human beings, that very quickly begins to imply the same level of importance as well.

Humans are incredibly sensitive to communication, even (especially) when we hear ourselves communicate. You know how they say if you force yourself to smile when you’re sad, you actually start feeling a little better? That’s because communication is a feedback loop. Whatever we broadcast to the world also influences us, because our emotions still react as though it came from without. Over the course of a week, you might post these two status updates:

“Coldstone was out of cookie dough ice cream. FML”

“My dog died in her sleep last night. FML”

Rationally speaking, you probably understand which of these things is more significant. But when they’re both so condensed, your emotions have a hard time making that distinction. How long could you talk about Coldstone running out of a flavour? Two, maybe three minutes? But that was your dog. You loved that dog. You have memories and experiences and a hundred thousand little things that might pour out of you for hours and hours because you fucking miss your beautiful goddamn dog.

But there they are, eight words apiece. The human brain makes a lot of shortcuts, and one of those shortcuts is the leap from level of detail to level of importance. After a while, whatever you can fit into a text field becomes your standard for what matters to you. Maybe that still matters a lot, but you’ve set a standard nonetheless. Anything you say is going to fit within that standard. Sooner or later, everything becomes just as big a deal as everything else, and it takes the same amount of time for you to forget about the massacre of 100 sled dogs in British Columbia as it takes for you to forget about some sophomoric bullshit a game designer said.

Sooner or later.

You’ll wake up one morning, the global climate will be laughing in your face, a multinational democratic revolution will be sweeping across the Middle East, and you’ll genuinely believe that the best use of your time is to childishly disrupt what should have been a constructive, rational debate about the boundaries of feminism to spit venom and bile all over your Twitter feed.

Okay, the dickwolves thing. I know. Look, here’s what happened: Mike and Jerry of Penny Arcade made a lame comic with a rape joke in it. A number of women (and probably some dudes) were justifiably outraged by the tasteless joke and complained to Mike and Jerry. A few of them invoked the contentious topic of “rape culture”, which appears to imply that American society as a whole tacitly condones rape. This is a pretty big generalization, and it has the (probably unintentional) side effect of making decent, respectful men feel guilty just for having a Y chromosome.

Confronted with this minor fallacy amongst other, more legitimate complaints, Mike and Jerry could have just said “we’re sorry, we didn’t realize so many people would be offended, we thrive on tasteless jokes so sometimes we can’t be sure where to draw the line, etc.” I’m sure an apology would have been enough for everyone involved. But they chose instead to act snide and petulant. This was stupid.

In response to this stupidity, the voices of dissent quickly turned to vitriol. Railing against everything Penny Arcade stood for, they coalesced into a focused beam of hate and burned Mike and Jerry at the stake. Maybe even that was justifiable. I’m nowhere near educated enough to judge.

Regardless, things got out of hand. And because the debate was happening on the internet, people who should have been explaining their views with the utmost precision and clarity decided that they would rather reduce everything to pithy 140-character slogans, which then bounced off each other in midflight like collinear bullets. With reason and grace all but abandoned, the combatants pummeled each other with threats and acid cruelty until there was no longer a debate to be had. Everyone had already decided that The Other Guys were industrial-grade assholes, and the only thing left to do was to make a bigger dogpile than they did and shout them down until they surrendered.

No one has surrendered yet.

Here’s the alarming thing: I have seen precious few attempts - on either side of the discussion - to empathize with the opposition. Dude, people are in Cairo right now playing dodgeball with Molotov cocktails and you mean to tell me you can’t at least try to understand each other?

Perhaps there’s a crucial element to this whole situation that has managed to escape me. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to be raped, so maybe the extremity of the emotional damage is enough to excuse a lack of empathy toward people who don’t understand your pain. But then again, maybe watching an angry mob eviscerate your entire body of work over a single misstep is traumatic enough to justify acting like a douchebag on the internet.

I certainly don’t agree with either of those possibilities, but I can still contemplate their existence, and I can do my best to factor them into the discussion. And look: I’m a writer and a programmer. I am probably the most narcissistic, self-absorbed human being on the western hemisphere. If I can do it, then so can everyone else.

I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way we’ve come to understand arguments. Usually, when discussing a difference of opinion in person, we’re acutely aware of the person with whom we’re conversing. We read facial expressions, body language, subtle hints in vocal tone. Our exchange is fluid, points being raised, disputed, molded and compromised in an uninterrupted two-way flow. These are the discussions that lead to growth. Even if we don’t agree by the end, we’ve at least learned more about our own beliefs simply by having to explain them.

But on the internet, we exchange chunks of text, prepared statements zipping back and forth in all their premeditated glory, never once meeting in the middle. Point, counterpoint, countercounterpoint, ad nauseam. What is there to do but pick apart the other guy’s words? You found a flaw in one of his assumptions! His entire argument is a flimsy house of cards! SEND IN THE CAVALRY ETC.

When did arguments become wars? When did we, as a people, come to this weird consensus that the whole point of having an argument is to shut down the opposition and win? Where is our desire for understanding and harmony?

I’ll tell you what the real point of an argument is: the point of having an argument is to not have an argument anymore. “Winning” is only one way to get there. Yes, sometimes one side really is right and the other is wrong. But to not even contemplate the possibility that the truth lies somewhere in between is, quite frankly, selling your own intellect short.

Arguments are not supposed to be like war, they’re supposed to be like sex. Those engaged in debate should be tuning into each other, open and attentive. Look for common ground and explore from there. Even if you remain convinced that the other is wrong, at least grant them the courtesy of your best, calmest explanation. If agreement is still impossible, enjoy the fact that you did your best and move on.

Have I always followed this advice? Fuck no. I’ve said some pretty awful things on the internet. Most of them aren’t even that hard to find. But I like to think that gives me intimate experience with the dangers of not keeping things in perspective. I was never really an adult until I started trying to do that. Still trying every day. In fact, I failed at it this afternoon during a dispute over a proposed design change to my final project game at Full Sail. So you can’t be perfect.

But you can try.