The polite victory

I’ve discussed before how manners matter online. A bizarre exchange illustrates this and how you can lose an argument by being rude online.

The exchange started with a New York Times article on the Qantas A380 emergency in Singapore. The final paragraph in the piece claimed the airliner’s Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) didn’t work properly;

“Even the cockpit voice recorder did not work right, according to a report by Australian investigators. It failed to halt when the plane landed, and because it operated in a two-hour loop, the critical periods were recorded over.”

That nugget of information lead me to tweet out the following;

A few hours later, the following tweets appear;

On protesting I wasn’t posting “deliberate & malicious misinformation”, I’m then told I’m a liar;

From there conversation doesn’t go far and I end up blocking the guy so I can no longer see his twitter posts.

The funny thing is the gentleman is correct in saying the A380’s CVR worked properly, as the Australian Transport Safety Board states on their website;

“The cockpit voice recorder was transported to the ATSB’s technical facilities in Canberra, Australia for download and analysis. Over 2 hours of cockpit audio was recovered. However, due to the failure of the No 1 engine to shutdown in Singapore, and therefore continuing power supply to the recorder, the audio at the time of the engine failure well over 2 hours before the No 1 engine could be shut down, was overwritten. That said, elements of the available audio are expected to be of assistance to the investigation.”

QF32’s Cockpit Voice Recorder didn’t fail, it’s designed to turn off when the engines shut down and as the crew couldn’t turn one of the engines off the CVR kept going and ultimately overwrote the critical parts of the flight. Which isn’t the fault of the recorder at all.

I was wrong.

Now, had the gentleman suggested something along the lines of “Paul, you’re misinformed. CVR worked fine. Read the ATSB report” I’d have read the correct report, apologised and moved on. However this gentleman chose to be rude and aggressive.

Thankfully the worst that can happen online is a flurry of rude words followed by one or both of the people blocking the other, in the real world behaving like this – say by barrelling up to someone in a bar and calling them liar – probably isn’t going to work out as well.

Which shows how in the online world, just as in the real, offline community, manners do matter.

Choose your words before disagreeing with someone, just as being aggressive at the school hall isn’t going to work out well, it probably won’t online either.

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