The communication patterns between people in real life have gradually come to resemble more and more the ways in which we communicate online, mostly via social media platforms. From ghosting behavior all the way to trolling, people are transforming themselves to resemble more and more the digital platforms they use on a daily basis.

One of the more pernicious habits is the policing of tone. Tone, of course, comes across in how you as a reader–or a listener–either read or hear the words I and others write, or say. Tone itself is a weird combination of word choice, affect, and volume. Tone attendance combines all of those ingredients with the tendency of humans to make other people into avatars in their own brains. And then to proceed to project themselves and their reactions onto the avatars they have made in their own heads.

Avatars, of course, that resemble the people who are writing or talking, not even a little bit. Sure, in a personal, intimate relationship, tone policing probably makes a lot of sense as a way to keep the peace and prevent small issues from becoming larger conflicts. But in the impersonal, distant, and unknowable interactions we have with the avatars of people in online communication, tone policing makes little sense. Because you don’t know the person on the other end of the interaction. As a matter of fact, it might not even be a person. That interlocutor might be a bot, an AI, or even a hired hand from another country.

This method of communication behavior monitoring is now spilling over increasingly into the real world, in real interactions, between real people. Of course, the difference is that, in the real world, if people attempt to monitor and correct the tones of other people with whom they are not in a relationship, or in the thinnest of relationships, conflict is sure to result. Particularly when those who will not be policed meet those who do the policing.

Projection should only happen in a movie theater. Assumptions of motives without sufficient understanding of the other person in a communication interaction will inevitably lead to attempts to police the tones of others, while resisting policing of their own tones. The solution to all of this lies in putting away social media and cleaving to real relationships with real people in real life.