Trust me, I may not have been working in offices but I do have my own experiences

I sometimes felt as if I was working in an occupational therapy room attached to the ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest .

Waaaaaay back when I used to do support there was a lot of game-playing (i.e., lying) by people trying to get their requests moved up the line. When I did consulting there was a lot of BCC'ing managers on e-mails when clients thought a consultant wasn't doing what they were supposed to be doing. Everybody was trying to get "free"/non-billable hours worked by claiming that consultants did something wrong or were wasting time. I hated consulting.

Now I'm a department head and my peers have no idea what my department really does or how we do it, so it's hard for anyone to mess with us. I'm also in a really good spot with my boss (the president of the company), so in the infrequent event that another director tries to go over my head, he just refers them back to me and refuses to get involved. This leaves people with no recourse but to be nice. Really, though, there's very little of that going on. My boss won't hire people that he thinks are going to create drama, and I've seen people "let go" for refusing to play nice, so there really isn't much nonsense here.

Same here however I win most of my debates by using truth and actual facts and that's more than enough to silence anyone, however there is the occasional troll that enters the fray and no matter how well you debate with them the only answer that works is to simply block them .

One person's truth can be another person's fallacy. So often, even truths are relative, and absolute ones are hard to come by, and I am saying this as a very anolytical and scientifically trained person (in physics actually).

What strikes me about this entire discussion is, that it equates debates, disagreements, and other minor conflicts with war. And the aim seems to be to completely overpower and vanquish the opponent, in a win-lose battle for supremacy, or at least to undermine them as much as possible. (I have sometimes wondered if that is a cultural trait linked with specific national histories, but that might be stretching it a bit too far, and is beside the point, anyway.)

Engaging in win-lose battles is especially easy over the Internet or over e-mail, where the opponent is not in direct view, and is not immediately perceivable as another human being. (That is, by the way, also the reason why road rage is so easily triggered, with all those impersonal metal boxes behaving in such an infuriating manner.) When you directly engage with another person, it is much easier to try to understand their point of view, figure out where any differences lie, and try to help them understand why you might think differently. I would also suggest, that unless one is able to present to oneself the arguments made by one's opponent, and the justifications as the opponent would express them, one is not engaged constructively, and there is little chance of arriving at a mutual understanding. But, like I said, that is difficult to do over electronic communications, and would need some extra effort. I would recommend always walking over to the other person to have a discussion, if at all possible.

I do fear, that a large part of the electronically communicating generation is likely to end up with horrendously dysfunctional social skills.

By the way, concerning trolls, I believe the best approach is not to feed them. And that applies also in real life, where it is wisest to avoid people, who cannot be reasoned with, if at all possible. Beating a troll to death is more likely to damage you than the troll, and I am speaking of social skills here.

I was actually in a political argument with someone on Facebook for the last 2 days. She isn't a troll but is so radical in her beliefs that her way of thinking is the only right one. I could get the actual proof and confessions from the sources and lay it out before her and she would still disregard them.