The Sacco Scandal

Now a days, everyone has their own personal device such as an iPhone or a smartphone in general. Older generational people would say that it is bad, but people our age would say it is great. Since we have this great technology it is sometimes good and other times bad. For instance, someone could go on twitter right now and say something completely rude to someone and it could make that person get really sad or mad. According to Rothwell, “Flaming is a cyber-term for an abusive, attacking written message between Internet users...” (Rothwell 247). Flaming is a big part of our society now, many kids and or teens find it super easy to attack someone online than rather to say it to the persons face. I find this completely ridiculous because if you …show more content…
Her tweet seemed very offensive even though everyone did not know the exact meaning of it or who she even was. According to Rothwell, “Constructive conflict is characterized by communication that is cooperative, supportive, and flexible” (Rothwell 256). I feel like that is exactly what the two did. She sent the man an email asking if they could go and talk, the after getting to know each other they ended up talking about the incident. Justine Sacco then said, “This trip, she explained, made her think about how so many westerners consider HIV/AIDS an "African thing," when of course there is a domestic AIDS epidemic” (Biddle). Sam Biddle took it the wrong way and had no idea what she actually meant and he knew that right after that day, how easy it is to bash someone over the internet. If they would not have met up at all Sam would not have known exactly the person Justine was and since he did, he realized that she is not a so called “racist” at all. For the second tactic I believe the two used to resolve their conflict was the smoothing method. According to Rothwell, “Smoothing is the act of calming the agitated feelings of others during a conflict episode” (Rothwell 266). I really think that they used this method because they ended up getting together and did not talk about the problem right from the beginning. They talked about other things and then about half way into their meeting so to say they brought it up. I think the smoothing method worked because they were really calm and did it in a social atmosphere. Justine did not at all blow up on Sam so that was a good thing. Since they waited so long to see each other the feelings were brought down so then she had time to think about it. The smoothing method is a very effective method during any sort of argument and I really encourage myself and others to use that method for the greater