Rejection is a psychic and emotional wound that almost everyone may sustain in their daily life. Receiving perpetual rejection does not often make a man brawny. Instead, it paves the way for you to reject other people.
In Shakespeare’s 17th century tragedy Hamlet, following being shunned multiple times by Ophelia, Hamlet eventually has enough and unleashes and unbridles his exasperation. Meanwhile, in cyberspace, online rejection is a subcategory of social disbarring. Due to multiple reasons, you may reject others from social engagements.
However, a considerable number of these contributing reasons have no relevance to the person who gets rejected. On the other hand, there are far better reasons to block someone, the online analogue of social rejection. The majority of those who block others do it predominantly out of emotional self-protection. The blocker is not able to assemble the fortitude to inform the party being blocked that their declared engrossment is not reciprocal. It is widely known that the highest number of online blockings are done to circumvent an emotionally challenging online exchange.
It is further remarked that people with relatively low self-assurance and egotism are more likely to dodge revealing their proclivity or expressing voraciously what they do and what they do not require. In contrast, people with mean or greater self-esteem are more likely to be fittingly insistent and express their perspective and intentions without going ahead with blocking. Humans are social and tribal creatures and enjoy the company of others, notably those who legitimise their conception of the world. A lot of people may conceal or seek to cease the expression of any conceptions of the world which challenge their own.
Wilful and deliberate deafness is much serene rather than confronting with other social circumstances. Man is able to block out any conceptions of the world that they are not willing to hear immediately. They are not required to be polite and astute: they are also not supposed to give explanations on their dislike. Their conception of the world runs no risk of being impugned or argued. Undoubtedly, everyone is convinced that everyone needs social acceptance.
Social rejection
As someone is blocked online, the blocker is engaging in an act of social rejection where they know that it negatively affects with the psychological well-being of the party that is deserted. In many cases, it is argued that the blocker intentionally tries to damage or hurt the party being blocked psychologically.
Everyone on planet Earth has experienced the trauma of social rejection and its enormous painful agony. The emotional and psychological pain inflicted on the person being blocked is of immense degree of hard feelings. Regardless of their self-assurance and self-esteem, socially ostracised people undergo emotional pain even for a short period of time. Since, social repudiation and blocking attack four universal human needs, it disturbs and damages the sense of egotism that any human may more or less experience at certain stages of their lifetime. Involved in the four universal human needs are: individual’s need to belong, in order to have control in social situations, maintaining self-esteem and assurance as well as having a sense of material existence.
It is also revealed that some cases of anxiety and depression are associated with the aspect of social rejection, psychological torment and abuse. Ostracism is apparently a psychological torture meted out with people who are not prepared to be abide by group norms. Even after doing something as lenient and forgiving as declaring a different or exigent and demanding worldview, the blocker predominantly advocates the act of blocking where the people being blocked get socially abandoned with a psychological torture.
It is noted that people are able to either block or foist disservice, once they have othered someone. The blocker himself refers to someone as “other”, and that may inflict a heavy heart blow for the party being blocked. Once someone is othered, the target of social segregation deserves a deterrent.
This is the act of blocking that crops up after a series of mental stages in the mind of the blocker. The person being blocked is classified as different from others. Others are considered to be bluffing, basically in some unspecified way. Shielding or averting actions are required by the threats from others.
Action against the other is thereafter condoned, executed and accomplished. In all its forms, ‘Xenophobia’ is a dismissal and non-acceptance of the people who are different. Blocking others online in many cases does not have a predominant relationship with regard to any act that the person being blocked has done; it is centrally due to the fact that the blocker being intolerable and unbearable with differences.
Research
Decades of research conducted on Xenophobia reveals that Xenophobic people are more totalitarian, tyrannical and insecure when they get exposed to people outside their group. That may also be the case with blockers: they are more probable to block anybody who is not part and parcel of their homogeneous group.
Self-esteem, conceit and haughtiness are some factors that may drive the would-be blockers. It paves the way for an immoderate and undue way of thinking that can be classified as “I am right, but you have faults. I am good, but you are not so. It is my way but not yours and so on”. The concept of “Other” may bring out serious repercussions. Wars are waged and fought against the “Other”.
Blocking “others” is just like waging a war against someone who is disliked by the blocker. Having an awareness on the negative consequences of creating “others” not only in a conflict and war situation but also in any of the same in the day today life of an individual seems to be a mandatory element that can avoid or mitigate the degree of anger and hatred among people. “Othering” is not a healthy tool that can be used in a cordial, amicable and democratic society.