(09 Mar 2016, 11:34 am)James101 wrote Unfortunately I think the ability not to care what others think of you is not something everyone can do. It's much easier to not speak about a person in a way to cause upset than it is for the subject to change their outlook. I don't think it's possible for many people to decide to not care anymore.
As a casual observer who's probably not spoken to many of you in reality there certainly seems to be a lot of enthusiast politics! People are naturally not all going to enjoy each others company but it's never nessacary to take it to the next level with sly digs veiled as innocent comments.
Anyhoo, that got deep. Back to buses....
(09 Mar 2016, 12:33 pm)LeeCalder wrote It's not that easy for everyone though.
I know what I want to say, but I can't in fear of other people having a different opinion, and then conversation turns negative.
It's also quite hard for me to venture into different areas alone to take photos, in fear of someone saying something or challenging what I'm doing, which is why I usually try to side by someone.
I enjoy talking to people in person, but I can't express myself properly on social media for the reasons outlined above.
Quite.
People need to treat each other with respect, really.
It's obvious that the "tit" exchange above was reciprocal and light hearted with (presumably) no offense intended or taken. It would be very different to say to someone "you're a tit" completely out of the blue without the self deprecating prompt as provided by Davie, though. That can rightly be perceived as just plain abusive.
Social media is a bit of a mixed bag for people who struggle socially in any way. On one hand, it provides a medium where you can "speak" in your own time without someone diving in before you've formulated your thoughts and found a way of expressing them. I can spend ages writing gibberish and deleting it again, before I finally come up with some gibberish that I'm happy to put my name to.
But then there are the problems that Lee struggles with. One being that other people find it easy to write whatever they want and that, in some cases, they do so behind the veil of a screen and might be more blunt or rude than they would ever dare be in real life. The other is the fact that when the words alone are being used as the means of communication, all those other social cues, such as facial expression and body language are missing. That's why you can't really get away with saying, for example, "you're such a tit" out of the blue. Without body language and facial expression, it's impossible to tell whether the intent is a fairly benign "you daft 'apeth" or something rather more sneery and derogatory.