Coffee Chat: Go Away Silly Trends!

It's Coffee Chat Tuesday!  Written on a Monday night.  Oh yes, I'm sneaky like that.

This week we are filling in the blank: I would like to see               trend disappear in 2014.

There are a few "trends" I'm not a fan of but the one I'll bite from is cyber bullying.

I would like to see the cyber bullying trend disappear in 2014.

Will this happen?  Now way!  But I'd like it to.  It would  be nice.

I'll admit that I'm extra sensitive on the subject these days.  That sensitivity is what causes me to see it all over the place and sometimes in the simplest forms, perhaps with someone I know as the instigator of the negativity.

The fact is that cyber bullying, in my opinion, is easy to get involved in.  It really takes just one person to make something blow up on the internet.  Even when I don't agree with what the person being "bullied" has said/done, I still feel empathy for that person.

So often people are downright mean and dirty when it's just words typed across a screen.  I've been guilty of being that person.  I'm not proud of it.  In the moment I would say I didn't even realize the weight of my written words.

For me, writing through the internet can be very personal and liberating; yet at the same time I don't see a human being staring back at me.  I just see my own words with my tone and my expressions.  Oh yeah, you guys can't hear my tone or see my expressions.  All you can see are my words.

With twitter, instagram, Facebook, youtube and a host of other networking sites, it doesn't take much for a story to spread through the cyber space.  On the brighter side perhaps this causes some to think twice before writing something that is potentially going to be misconstrued as something different than the original intent.

Personally, in a perfect world, I hope we each would approach each other in a private message about the offense before sharing it with the general public - if it needs to shared at all.

Time Out For Mom