I asked a number of journalists whose job it is to be attacked by people online, and they said they simply don’t respond. An editor at The New Yorker said, “The rule about engaging is that you should never engage.” A former Gawker employee said a mantra at the company is to, “Never complain, never explain.” A co-worker at The New York Times told me, “Don’t feed the trolls.” And another said that angry tweets are simply “spitballs on a battleship.”

But being a battleship for most people is really difficult. The impulse is to reply to someone who has called you names with louder and meaner name-calling. And social media seems like it was designed to help perpetuate conflict, not help people avoid it.

“One of the many problems when you respond to something digitally is that it is so instant,” said Bernie Mayer, the author of several books on conflict resolution and a professor at the Creighton University School of Law in Omaha. “One of the things we know that helps people in conflict is to slow things down a little.”

We can toss that solution right out the window. If there’s one thing that all these social media sites are great at, it’s the opposite of slowing down. Most sites are designed to let you know, in real time, when someone wants to engage with you.

Dr. Mayer noted that beyond speed, another problem with digital arguments is that people can’t detect tone, facial expression and, most of all, sarcasm. Numerous research studies have found that people try to detect these things, often looking for social cues in grammar and use of emoticons. But in a 140-character fight, that’s almost impossible.

Take the short sentence, “Yeah, you’re right.” In the middle of an argument on Twitter that could easily read as sarcasm, even if the person is being sincere. As the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Nowhere is that more true than with digital conversations.