It's a typical afternoon, you're scrolling down your newsfeed, liking videos of puppies and taking Buzzfeed quizzes when, out of nowhere, you stumble across a status that forces you to slow your scroll. The poster said something you don't agree with, perhaps even something unsavory, and, regardless of OP's intention, it's provoked a negative reaction from you. You click the comment box, thinking "should I say something? I don't really want to start an argument, and certainly not on Facebook"... After a moment, you click out of the empty comment box and continue scrolling.

We've all been there, especially those of us who have grown up with social media as a daily fixture in our lives. We've been taught that an Internet argument is rarely worth our time, that it will just turn into a flame war, and that we should ignore it, maybe block that poster from our newsfeed if they really continue to irk us, and continue on with our lives.

But, recently, I started to wonder if that was really the appropriate response. If I were out with friends and one of them said something I didn't agree with, or even found offensive, would I sit idly by? Probably not. I believe it is our responsibility as good friends and good people to discuss the things we disagree on, and that we ought to say something if we believe someone has said something offensive. It's important to converse, to debate, to educate, and to learn from each other, especially in situations where somebody could be hurting others.

This left me wondering, then, why social media is any different? I mean, certainly there are things said on social media that are not worth arguing over, or situations in which a healthy discussion could not possibly be fostered. But what about the situations where it's worth a chance? Why was I spending so much time forming opinions, but hiding behind a screen, afraid to actively stand behind them?

As a millennial, I spend a lot of time connected to social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, you name it, so I understand that there's really no argument against the idea that our culture is shifting to a more virtual one. According to this article for The Telegraph, the average person uses social media for around one hour and 40 minutes each day. If you ask The Wallstreet Journal, millennials in particular spend an average of about three hours per day interacting on social media according to data released in 2014. If such a large percentage of our person-to-person interactions are online, then we need to stop treating them differently than other kinds of social interactions. After all, though there's a mask of even semi-anonymity we can have on the Internet, we can't ignore the fact that there are other people on the end of every "like" and "lol." So when someone posts something we don't agree with, something we're offended by, something we think is just plain rude, we've got to step up and say something about it. Isn't it true that it is our job as socially responsible humans to talk about our differences, to educate each other, to listen and to learn from each other as best we can?

For those of you who already do this, keep it up. Your thoughts and opinions deserve a chance to be heard, and your courage in making them heard is admirable. But for those of us who don't (myself most definitely included), it's time for us to step up our game and be the active, thoughtful, and smart people that we all can be. After all, we're all already talking. We need to start typing, too.