Y'know, the more I think about it, the more I feel like a major unacknowledged aspect of Why The Internet & Social Media Are Frequently Terrible is that written communication is a *skill* - or a set of skills, rather - where you can't progress if you don't acknowledge that fact.
The default assumption is these days that internetting is just like talking - which, okay, that's *sometimes* true, but with verbal speech, we all know there's a difference between talking with friends and teaching a class or giving a public speech. Same thing with being online.
Just. I think there's a bigger overlap between Asshole Internet Behaviour and Terrible Written Communication Skills than is often appreciated. The assholes are still real, unfortunately, but a lot pf people just really suck at writing and have no idea that's a problem here.
And of equal or even greater importance? A lot of people have TERRIBLE reading comprehension skills, or at the very least a habit of reacting before they've read something closely enough to understand it, and don't understand how this impacts conversation.
The number of arguments I've seen unfold just because one party (or both parties, sometimes) has aggressively misread something and then doubled down on their interpretation because Pointing Out Mistakes Means We're Mortal Enemies is... many. SO MANY ARGUMENTS.
Which, sidebar, is one of the reasons why internet slang/emojis/formatting is so important - it helps to convey tone and inflection in a medium without those things, attempting to compensate for lack of familiarity with the speaker by use of a shared written dialect.
ANYWAY. I'm not going anywhere particular with this; it just bugs me that writing is so often undervalued as a skill that even when - or maybe because - most of us do some form of it every day, it's not viewed as something you can be meaningfully bad or good at outside of books.
