The Internet is famously poor at conveying a speaker's tone, conveyed in face-to-face communication by body language, facial cues, voice inflection, etc. Internet conflict is often laid entirely at the feet of speakers, and they are pressed to be ever-more fastidious in their comments and postings.
What's not frequently talked about is what happens on the reader's side, or what would be in face-to-face communication the listener's side.
When reading, it would seem that the brain fills in the whole absent speaker, constructed from a few flimsy textual cues, in one's mind's ear, as if the person were actually beside you. Of course, the textual cues being far fewer in number, the speaker that the brain constructs--her emotional state, the intended force she gives to her language--is wildly prone to error. Moreover, readers also tend to display an irrational conviction that the construct they assign to a set of text--the voice, with which they think it is being conveyed--is somehow required by the textual cues--is the single one available from the given textual hints. There is then no other conclusion than that the speaker was deliberately callous, rude, arrogant, haughty, insensitive, and so forth.
Perhaps Internet mis-communication isn't completely a speaker or writer-side problem. Readers could also pay attention to how the brain constructs what's heard in the mind's ear.
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