That said, many of us continue to ruffle the same feathers many years in, without learning from our mistakes — sometimes willfully so. Those are the people I wonder about.

At one point, I was just irate with the hotel because when I filled out a customer survey, I noted the incident on it and the person who replied came across as if I didn't know what I was talking about, and proceeded to tell me what happened. At the time I was poised to write a scathing review of the hotel, but decided to hold back. In retrospect, I'm glad I did. Not only did the hotel explain things and we worked it out, but I feel that it would have been unfair to the employees that work exceptionally hard, as well as the manager, to publish it. I was angry; but I got over it AND it was partly my own fault for over-reacting.

That's probably a lesson everyone could use. Give it a few days, even a week before you hit that publish button. You just might change your mind.

In order for any group to perform to its fullest, it has to self-develop the rules of its own governance. In the case of social media, we're seeing group dynamics on a positively glogal scale…group dynamics complicated exponentially by the fact that new members join the group every day. That means the traditional pattern of group dynamics–forming, storming, norming, and performing–get disrupted any time a new and (for whatever reason) powerful voice comes along.

It feels to me like we are largely in the storming stage, where a group fights out competing ideologies. Which styles (broadcast or engagement), which values (moderation or extremism), which purpose (relationship building or selling) will win out?

But what scares me is that some groups never leave the storming stage–and that, I think, would be an epic loss in this case, as the power for harnessing the power of community towards change has never been greater.

The solution–at least so say the organizational behavior experts–lies in tolerance and in discussion.

But where is the flame-free forum? How can we find a way to understand, to find the middle ground? How do we convince ourselves to move beyond our first instinct, the one that tells us to stop the conversation, rather than continue it?

–Tamsen (@tamadear, @Sametz)

I know I've probably erred on the wrong side of things too. It's almost always when I've been too quick to come down on one side of an argument, I've noticed.

In some cases, I have to wonder if the medium — specifically Twitter — is having too much of an impact of how people come off. This seems particularly true when people start tweeting about how boring/poorly constructed/overly basic someone's talk at a conference or event has been. I've always found that to be really tacky and just flat-out rude, but I also know it's hard to be constructive in 140 characters. Since Twitter is so convenient, much more so than emailing or talking directly with the speaker, I think people find it too tempting to tweet rather than choose another medium that doesn't make it seem like they are shooting off their mouth so much.

Or maybe they really are just jerks, regardless of character limit.

That said, many of us continue to ruffle the same feathers many years in, without learning from our mistakes — sometimes willfully so. Those are the people I wonder about.

At one point, I was just irate with the hotel because when I filled out a customer survey, I noted the incident on it and the person who replied came across as if I didn't know what I was talking about, and proceeded to tell me what happened. At the time I was poised to write a scathing review of the hotel, but decided to hold back. In retrospect, I'm glad I did. Not only did the hotel explain things and we worked it out, but I feel that it would have been unfair to the employees that work exceptionally hard, as well as the manager, to publish it. I was angry; but I got over it AND it was partly my own fault for over-reacting.

That's probably a lesson everyone could use. Give it a few days, even a week before you hit that publish button. You just might change your mind.

In order for any group to perform to its fullest, it has to self-develop the rules of its own governance. In the case of social media, we're seeing group dynamics on a positively glogal scale…group dynamics complicated exponentially by the fact that new members join the group every day. That means the traditional pattern of group dynamics–forming, storming, norming, and performing–get disrupted any time a new and (for whatever reason) powerful voice comes along.

It feels to me like we are largely in the storming stage, where a group fights out competing ideologies. Which styles (broadcast or engagement), which values (moderation or extremism), which purpose (relationship building or selling) will win out?

But what scares me is that some groups never leave the storming stage–and that, I think, would be an epic loss in this case, as the power for harnessing the power of community towards change has never been greater.

The solution–at least so say the organizational behavior experts–lies in tolerance and in discussion.

But where is the flame-free forum? How can we find a way to understand, to find the middle ground? How do we convince ourselves to move beyond our first instinct, the one that tells us to stop the conversation, rather than continue it?

–Tamsen (@tamadear, @Sametz)