There you are, scrolling through the news feed of your favorite social media platform, when what do you see? A post by a friend that’s utterly outlandish! You can hardly believe it, how could they believe THAT?! You limber up your fingers and thumbs and get ready to tell them how wrong they are…or you decide it’s not worth it and unfriend them immediately and never have contact with them again.
Has this happened to you or someone you know? So many of us are relying on social media to keep connected with others during these challenging times, yet few of us know how to effectively disagree online, and there’s so much to disagree about!
Just like the fight or flight response to danger, many of us do the same with disagreements on social media, but instead it’s fight or unfriend. Even though it’s online, there are real dangers in either strategy: feelings get hurt, relationships get severed, positions get entrenched, fake news spreads, and we become more and more siloed in our ways of thinking.
What if there are other options, besides fight or unfriend? There are! Join this workshop where we’ll discuss better ways to disagree online. We’ll go over simple techniques that can help you keep friends, create openness to other ways of thinking, and just make the internet a little less toxic. There will also be practice and group discussion to cultivate ideas for more effective says to disagree online.
Takeaways from Cordell’s clinic include:
- Understanding the importance of engaging in online disagreements
- Learning some dos and don’ts of effectively engaging in arguments on social media
- Making the internet a little less toxic
