Social media is great for interacting and meeting new people, but sometimes social media can be a double-edged sword.
I love Twitter. It’s by far my favorite social media platform. I’ll often interact with somebody I learn about through a retweet, and many times that has lead to new online friends who I interact with often.
Sometimes, and especially on Twitter where you have the 140 character limit, it’s possible for messages to get confused and for a conflagration to emerge where none was intended.
What you never can know are the personal biases of strangers on the other end of the internet. Is there a knee-jerk reaction to any discussion about certain topics? Is there some situation you unknowingly walked into?
You simply can’t know these things. I recently had an interaction with a person who was put under the spotlight and dissected by a former candidate for president of SFWA. (A controversial man in his own right.) We had two completely different theses we were each discussing, but that wasn’t clear to either one of us until some time after things started.
By that time, it turned into something where I just wanted it to end, but I also didn’t want to leave on bad terms. Did I? Maybe someday I will find out. In the mean time, I get offline and go do something else.
