Do you know "why" you are doing the things you do? What is the overall aim of your interactions and are the actions you take indicative of that?

I've seen a LOT of online fighting recently and it often seems that the people in these Twitter arguments don't really know what they are trying to achieve outside of having the last Tweet in the fight.

It makes me think of how when an interaction shifts from a discussion to an argument the purpose moves, it may start out as "understand the other side better" then it may move to "make them change their mind" before eventually degrading simply to "win". And once it's at win, our actions will shift to match this new goal.

Think about this principal and ask yourself the following two questions regularly:

1- what am I trying to achieve?

2- does what I am doing reflect that?