Keyboard Rage. What is it, do I have it, and can it be cured?

You have seen it hundreds of time. You read a thread that your gut tells you is going to get someone’s blood boiling. Not so much a troll posting, but more that the topic is one that gets people’s fingers itching to type a response … and respond they do! The conversation gets heated and comments start getting personal, and before you know it there are insults flying around left, right and center.

Rather than taking time-out to consider a response, or even inhaling and exhaling in order to try and calm themselves down, a person’s fingers take control of their brain, and without even giving it any thought their fingers are striking the keyboard harder and harder. They are hidden by the pixels on the screen, safe in a virtual world where no one knows their name. They get taken over by “Keyboard Rage” and assume another persona. It’s at times like these when I want to wag a finger at them and suggest that they, “step away from the keyboard so no one will get hurt.”

I’m convinced that once the keyboard has relinquished its grip, and that person resumes regular face to face contact with another human being that they would not behave in the same manner.
Those that suffer from this affliction don’t even limit themselves to the discussion forum or groups either, as they’ve been known to take things to private messages, and even emails. I’ve lost count of the amount of complaints I’ve received over the years from members who have been sent inappropriate and insulting personal messages because someone did not agree with a comment he or she had posted on the forum. On occasion, even after polite warnings to stop, I have resorted to banning such members from our community. This has resulted in the person concerned sending me disturbing messages containing veiled threats to my person, and lots of swear words. (I just like to add that it’s down to this type of behaviour that my knowledge of different swear words has increased exponentially ) In the midst of their keyboard rage they feel they are justified in behaving in this manner. I can only hope that those same people don’t get behind me in a car, because I’m convinced that “Road Rage” and “Keyboard Rage” go hand in hand, and I would hate to see how they react if I looked at them the wrong way through the driver-side window.

As community managers we need to encourage our moderators to lead by example: to ask them to stop and pause before reacting to a heated situation instead of jumping right in. The last thing we want to happen is that our moderators end up getting sucked into a disagreement, and then becoming infected with the keyboard rage virus themselves. If that occurs it could become an epidemic and spread all across the community and will become extremely hard to reign it in.

Community managers have to try and minimize this “disease” and to always remember to take the time to consider how best to handle a thread, or situation, where community members have let keyboard rage get the better of them. We have to be diplomats, counsellors, and comedians, because in order to turn an inflamed conversation around we need to display humour, understanding and diplomacy. Only then can we hope to rid our communities of this affliction.