I recently humiliated someone very dear to me—publicly—and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I wish he hadn’t felt humiliated; on the other, I don’t regret what I did. This, I guess, is how feuds start.

It began when he forwarded an email to me and about twenty other people. He didn’t write anything himself, he simply forwarded the email. I felt the message was offensive, so I basically hit reply-all and called the author of the forwarded email an uninformed idiot. I hit reply-all because I felt it was important for someone stand up publicly and oppose the message.

My friend shot back an angry response that began, “thanks for calling me an uninformed idiot.” He went on to say I had humiliated him and our relationship was finished. “Don’t bother responding,” he said.

Of course I had to respond. I started by saying that I did not call him an uninformed idiot, I called the writer of the forwarded email an uninformed idiot. My thought was, “can’t he read?” How could he mistake the meaning of what I wrote? But later it occurred to me that maybe he identified so closely with the writer’s message that he felt almost like he had written it himself.

Is this a creeping byproduct of the age we live in? That we communicate by clipping things off the Internet and sending them out as our own thoughts? It begins by simply sharing things we like; nothing wrong with that. We all do it, and Facebook wouldn’t exist without it. But it is so easy to do, and it’s so difficult to think things through on our own, that the temptation is to let the Web speak for us. We don’t even have to paraphrase anymore, everything that can be said is waiting out there to be cut and pasted into our lives.

I never really thought about this until my friend’s email, but I see it on Facebook all the time, most apparently in the little inspirational messages that seem to be a cottage industry.

I admit that I post articles by people I agree with—if nobody did that, Facebook would slow to a trickle.

But I don’t think I ever blur the line between my thoughts and the writer’s thoughts. Maybe it’s because in my work I have to be clear about who said what and who gets credit. Or maybe it’s because I don’t believe in anything, deep down.

Image: Illustration by Wendy Wahman.