Someone is wrong on the Internet.
It happens every second of every day.
Someone is wrong on the Internet.
The natural response (eg. my natural response) is to spend hours pointing out to her why she’s so very wrong about Benedict Cumberbatch being sexy and not looking like Voldemort*, why she is wrong about Twilight being a timeless classic, why she is wrong about funding social justice programs with tax dollars.
Lately, though, I’ve discovered a mantra that is working quite well for me. It came about when I started realising just how much of my time I’ve burned through–FORTY THREE YEARS!–and just how much I presumably have left.
“I don’t owe you the courtesy of my time.”
I rarely say it to the wrong person. I just stop engaging. I figure I don’t even owe them the courtesy of telling them I don’t owe them the courtesy. Half the time they aren’t even people I KNOW at all. They’re friends of friends or “manager”s of friends (why does an author have a “manager”?). Or they’re strangers on a forum for A Song Of Ice And Fire or strangers who like to visit Walt Disney World.
I don’t owe you the courtesy of my time.
It’s been very freeing.
It also can serve as proof to the people that I do engage with that I value them and their opinions. If I’m reading your stuff or talking to you about shoes and cakes and Calvinism I am giving you the one currency I have at my fingertips, the once currency I can’t borrow.
Someone will always be wrong on the Internet. Long after my time is wholly spent this will continue. I can’t stop it. But I can live my days without the grief of trying to hold back the tide.
*I realised once that I thought he was attractive. Then I realised it was the commutative principle of Sherlock Holmes’ innate attractiveness whereby I think anyone who plays him is attractive not because of who they are but because they are playing him.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
I am ALMOST a generation older than you are, and when I realized this, it was indeed liberating. Some of my friends don’t understand why I don’t engage, but for me, it’s like continuing to read a bad book. Life is too short, and by doing so, you’re denying your time to things you can change, friends you like, or books you’d enjoy.
I’ve turned away from SO many internet arguments lately. I just choose not to engage because (unless it’s a comment of this nature) I don’t want to be a hit and run commenter.
Yes.
I once told someone who was upset about not being able to reach me by phone, “I reserve the right to be unreachable.”
I need to tattoo this on the backs of my hands where I’ll see it while I’m sitting here typing. I have such a hard time letting people be wrong on the internet…yet I also have learned what a time-suck it is when I try to set them straight.
Something I am LEARNING. It’s still very hard sometimes, but I’m getting better about allowing someone to be wrong on the internet.
At the end of the day, the result tends to be that my blood pressure goes up and that person continues to be wrong on the internet, so is it worth it?
Believe me. If it were easy I would’ve done better even three or four years ago.
It depends on the nature and the context of the being wrong, though, doesn’t it? If there’s someone commenting about how all kittens should be given to budding psychopaths to cut up, and it’s at a site where I often comment myself, and I (or at least a critical proportion of the regular commenters at the site) don’t respond to such commenter, then the ASPCA (or just any person who dislikes cutting up kittens for fun) would be fully justified in pointing out that site (and, by extension, me) as enabling psychopaths. I would feel that I had the choice of speaking up or ceasing to hang out at that site. There is some merit to the idea that the standard you walk past is the standard you express.
Well if a bunch of people stop by Betsy’s and start saying rankly wrong things about, say, women wearing red lipstick deserving to be raped, you better believe I’ll give the courtesy of my time not to them but to the women I’m defending by responding to them.
That’s different than spending three hours on FB arguing with some friend of a friend about self-publishing.
There are instances where I look at my engaging in a topic as owing something to those either participating in or the subject of the conversation.
Oh, absolutely, there’s a line and everyone needs to figure out where to draw it for themselves. And one can’t fight every good fight, not without being superhuman. But the temptation to say “it upsets me to engage with people from the Society for Cutting up Kittens and it exhausts me to engage with the We Rape Red Lipstick folks, so I’ll sit those fights out” needs to be resisted as much as one can. IMO, of course.
In my case the line is drawn like this:
–If what you’re saying hurts or could potentially cause hurt to another living creature, I will speak up.
–If what you’re saying is just general not-something-we-agree-on, I’ll move right along.
This means I’ll speak up against Republicans who are against foreign aid for third world countries but I won’t speak up against people who are just talking about the general merits of social conservatism. (That’s an example of a conversation that I see frequently where I can draw a clear and distinct line between stuff I don’t fully agree with and stuff that harms others.)
This also means that I have to draw a firm line between “what is being said right now” and “where I can see their slippery slope leading them.” Because with a lot of things I don’t agree with I can see a slippery slope possibly taking them to impaling babies on spikes but I can’t argue against every eventuality of another person’s thought. I mean, innately I COULD. But I’m not gonna.
And this is why we love you.