Kate Anthony

OTI Europe Ltd | Consultancy, Personal Training and Research for Online Therapeutic Services

   
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No, YOU hang up!

November 26, 2014 by Kate Anthony

Ending conversations can sometimes be awkward, particularly if we are online.  If we are in the physical presence of someone, there are clues from our body language that we are about to move away – sometimes a kiss on the cheek, a handshake, or a facial expression that denotes a cheery farewell or that the situation is at an end.  But what is the protocol when we are online? Have we got used to the often unfamiliar ending of a communication, or do we need to take more care to ensure we have prepared for when a chat comes to an end?

A colleague of mine once told me that she found the end of a social conversation with her daughter on Skype unbearable because she had to ID-100146553actively turn the camera off, even though this was done by clicking a phone-down icon.  She felt that she was somehow clicking an off button on her daughter herself, leaving the teenager statically in place for ever, rather than ending a call.  Another felt that her continued presence on a platform such as Google, denoted by the green “available” dot, meant that she felt pressured to make herself invisible after a chat session, despite a clear goodbye once the chat session had been ended.

And yet, when texting via our phones, we rarely actively end a conversation, leaving an endlessly open channel of communication which remains formally unended!  And now we switch from platform to platform and device to device to communicate – just yesterday I held one conversation via my laptop, smartphone and tablet via text message, GoogleChat and Hangouts.  I don’t dare download SnapChat…

I’ve been thinking about this because we need to prepare clients for the end of a session which by its nature has less formality than closing a door behind someone, as we generally do after a face-to-face session.  As part of their learning, Online Therapy Institute students learn how to do this effectively, both for synchronous communication and for those exchange-of-message situations that don’t take place at the same time, such as when we use email. Our face-to-face clients have the formality of a clock denoting a set time, getting up from the chair, a door opening and closing, and then the journey home to mark an ending.  When working online, we tend to be in the same position with the same screen after therapy has ended – this doesn’t tend to foster the sense of closure that we need to hold the client until the next session.

Or perhaps I am over-thinking this!

But before I say goodbye, take some time to consider how that your last goodbye at the end of the session may have felt to the other person.  Was it too abrupt, leaving them uncared for and brushed off? Or did you over-compensate for the lack of physical presence, wanting to be the last person to speak before the camera went off or to have the last word in the overall therapy contract via email?

It’s sometimes a fine line to manage closure – perhaps a little mindfulness of how we actively do it may be in order to ensure the other person isn’t left hanging!

Goodbye!

P.S thanks to FreeDigitalPhotos.Net and Stuart Miles for the image!  Goodbye!

Trolls .v. Abusers – Let’s Clarify a Bit

October 19, 2014 by Kate Anthony

I’ve posted about trolling before when I returned from a conference – and feel inspired to do so again having returned from another!  I went to a colleague’s workshop on CyberTrauma recently, and spent a very enjoyable day with counsellors, teachers, and other people with an interest in e-safety when it comes to working with children.  One of the most interesting debates was around trolling, and how this can be misunderstood in the context of the Internet as a result of media attention that aims to highlight the negative behaviours online that we encounter.

Here’s how I see it: it’s all down to the intention of the poster.

Cyberbullying is not trolling. Nor are flames or flamewars. Nor is downright online abuse of another human being or beings online when done anonymously through a public forum such as Twitter.  I do feel that the recent legal moves towards prosecution of those who engage in online abuse is a good thing, as I do feel that this addresses the incongruent gap between what is “real” abuse and what is “unreal” (as in: “it’s virtual so it doesn’t exist” – a phrase that has haunted my career when looking at the validity of online relationships, and which inspired one of my favourite self-penned articles back in 2001).

But trolling itself need not be abusive. It certainly can be irritating, frustrating, annoying, and create hours of time spent moderating forum posts, tweets, and blog comments when time could be better spent on something else. And it is true to say that it can often be abusive in nature and appear insulting (at best). But while trolling can be abusive, that does not mean that that is the central aim of trolling behaviour. The central aim of trolling is to lead the audience away from the intention of the initial poster.  It’s a smoke and mirrors exercise to draw attention to a new topic – one that is seemingly related but in effect creates a different conversation, ensuring the original point-of-vibluehaired_trollew is lost.  Take away the insults, threats, verbal abuse and (usually) bad spelling/use of caps and what you can see is an artform.  Done well, trolling is actually quite clever.  And a lot of the time, it’s actually quite funny (remember Rickrolling? That’s a classic example of trolling).

There are plenty of lists of the top examples of trolling over the last 25 years online, and plenty of articles discussing it (here’s a good simple one from Urban75).  I’m finding that within my work conversations it’s getting increasingly hard to distinguish between good old trolling and internet abuse, and that makes life difficult when training and offering informed opinion about how society could or should treats trolls, particularly within the field of mental health.

In the past few years the phrase “don’t feed the trolls” became a meme in itself – and when re-dressed as “don’t feed the online abusers” it makes perfect sense (although that attitude has changed in light of online abuse being (rightly) taken as a criminal matter rather than simply an annoyance).

But let’s be clearer in our definitions of what is trolling and what is online abuse – it’s going to make addressing mental health issues caused or exacerbated by types of online behaviour WAY easier.

🙂

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