When I first started messing around with online social aggregators/messageboards, I almost immediately fell prey to what I've come to call the Ring of Gyges effect, wherein I became a bigger asshole online than I was in real life, because I didn't feel accountable for my responses/online actions. I mean, I didn't go around all killing kings and raping queens, but I definitely said some shitty things to people in ways that I wouldn't have in real life. Eventually, I interacted with some people online that I really admired, realized that they got their points across while maintaining a civil tone to anybody and everybody, re-read what I'd said to others, realized what a terrible person I'd projected into the digital world, and devised an online code of conduct for myself to avoid further embarrassments.
I currently go out of my way to make sure I don't mistreat others online to a point at which I've actually become nicer as a digital creation than I am in real life. If I disagree with a point, I take pains to present my argument in non-judgmental terms; if I really can't stand somebody's POV, I refrain from saying anything at all. I reach out to people I wouldn't otherwise in everyday life and try to make sure that everybody comes out of interactions happy. I swear a lot less. A whole lot less. I've decided that the best protection from becoming all id online is to let the super-ego take over as much as possible (Only exception being when I get really bored at night, drink six fingers of Kirkland brand bourbon and start asking myself questions on Hubski).
As an offshoot, I'm not only nicer online, but a whole lot duller. Given that my real life sense of humor relies heavily on the holy trinity of sarcasm, cynicism and irony, and that those very qualities hold within them way too much potential for misinterpretation online, where plain text tends to strip the proper tones and inflections from our thoughts, I've decided to avoid that tack altogether. Which means I come off more often than not as alternately humorless, cheeseball, and self-important. In real life, I like to think that I'm only self-important, but fucking hilariously so when it counts.
Oh, right, #askhubski generally includes a question. Question: how does the internet shape your persona? Are you a better person here than in real life? Harsher? Exactly the same? I find myself wondering about everybody within every interaction that I have online. Am I interacting with them really, or am I interacting with the delicate architecture that they've constructed to idealize themselves, broadly summarize themselves, debase themselves or otherwise mislead their audience for their or their audience's purposes? Who are you, really?
NB: quick assurance to everybody I've talked with here: none of this is to say that I smile through my teeth at you online and then shit on you in real life. I mean everything I say here, and I genuinely enjoy interacting with you all; I just make sure that I limit the things that I say here to the nicer side of my thought process, as I don't feel like the world needs any more carelessly malicious blather. It's shitty enough to subject your good friends to your rotten side; it's arguably way worse to throw it at strangers who can't pull it from your greater context and may or may not know what to do with it.
For the most part I'm pretty passive online, I dont usually post a lot in discussion forums even though I read huge amounts of them. This also means I don't generally get involved in flamewars at all. Normally I see a comment or post I find interesting and consider writing a reply (like this one), I then start typing a short reply (like I'm doing now) which vaguely expresses my thoughts, I normally write, revise, edit, read, reread re-edit the post several times before hitting submit (like I am doing with this comment). Once I get to this point there is a 90% chance I will say 'screw it', delete the post without submitting and move on. (If you are reading this then you know it was one of the lucky survivors that made it.) In real life I'm pretty laid back so perhaps that explains my ghostly online persona.
You've described my MO as of late pretty succinctly here. I find that writing a comment, with a series of edits, helps me to understand how I personally feel about a particular topic. Once I've ironed out the creases of an idea in my mind, it's less important to me that other people hear it.
That's funny, I go exactly the opposite way. I write out a response, and if it's nice and clear I post it because it feels like an idea worth sharing. Better clarified the idea, the more I feel justified in sharing it. Every once in a while, I'll type out a long-winded response, realize 75 percent of the way through that it's either inane or just based on some huge fallacy I didn't see before typing, and then delete it. Sometimes those are my favorite responses, come to think of it, because they end up re-shaping some basic assumption I'd held for a long time. But yeah, the ones I discard are the ones I don't think are worth sharing.
This comes up so much I wrote an essay to link to. I'll temper it, though; I've done a lot of reading and research since and have come to a few conclusions. 1) Those who did not experience "the internet" as an extension of their lives are far more likely to devalue honesty and self-truthfulness in online interaction 2) Those who devalue honesty and self-truthfulness in online interaction are deficient at expressing themselves as they intend to 3) Those who are deficient at expressing themselves as they intend to often find themselves in conflicts they did not intend 4) If you can't say what you mean it's not my problem if you accidentally offend me, it's yours. I get in a lot of fights online. From my perspective, they invariably come about because I state something impersonal, someone comes back with a personal attack, and I demolish them (because they're never good enough to withstand the onslaught) at which point I'm the meanie. The essay linked above reflects the decision - the cold, calculated, reasoned decision - that it's more efficient to be a dick than to not be a dick. The disagreement is still there, only by making the opponent take things to the ad hominem place he's really coming from, we can move on quicker without me spending too much time playing footsie with assholes who don't know how to get their point across without being dicks. If I were to write a sequel, I would title it "it's not your fault you're an asshole. Me? I do it on purpose to save us both time."
I have a response to your Hubski post, and a response to your Reddit post. They may or may not directly contradict each other. They may also meander into irrelevant territory- I've had a lot of coffee. To the Hubski post: I disagree to a degree on point (1). I feel like those who don't experience the net as an extension of their lives are actually more likely to unwittingly present a more honest face in online interaction. I don't know whether they devalue honesty per se, but I get the sinking feeling that the people you're talking about are a lot more open and honest in a really ugly way online than they are in real life, purely by virtue of not drawing that link between physical life and digital life. Goes back to the whole Ring of Gyges thing- I've seen a lot of folks on Reddit espousing this notion that morality is a) an entirely social construct, b) as such, malleable, c) not worthy of "rational" consideration and can thereby d) be more or less disregarded online, where free speech can do no wrong, and anything cast up in the name of free speech is worth serious ("serious") consideration. This notion comes out in a variety of ways, be it within the AskReddit format, where grotesque confession is often celebrated; AdviceAnimals, where there's a meme for the specific purpose of airing dirty laundry in a "funny" way; in plain old everyday comments, often those upvoted to the top of the thread, that spout some pretty serious invective; or else whenever there's a much-publicized brouhaha over the outing of some controvertial sub or user (ahem ViolentAcrez). This last one always culminates in widespread discussions/feedback loops on the subject of free speech, where a very vocal, very upvoted contingent argue that if it isn't illegal, it ought to be allowed and even celebrated as part of the Great Digital Tradition. As if legality was the only watermark for socially permissible interaction, and all free speech is noble purely by virtue of being free. Anyhow, all this is to say: the internet makes our person invisible, and that provides a huge incentive to be more honest in some ways than we might be in real life. For better or worse, I feel like people are much better at expressing themselves as they intend to, and it just turns out that a lot of peoples' intentions are rotten. I guess this is what I meant about the whole "people being worse online than they are in real life" thing, and it ties nicely into your Reddit post. I don't have a problem with you or anybody demolishing an unworthy post- especially in the instance that the response is calibrated specifically to preempt further useless discussion. I have a problem with people being so gleefully and blithely ugly. And I think there's a big difference there. The ugliness I'm talking about is less academic, more bloody-minded. It's kids calling OP a "faggot" because they heard that's the cool way to respond. It's grown-ass men curating nasty subs simply because it's technically legal. It's prevalent in a million tiny little interactions that, when taken individually mean next to nothing but when taken en masse present such a dour portrait of humanity's secret self that I had to a) devise my own online code of conduct just so I felt like there was no way to even accidentally toe that line and b) eventually abandon Reddit altogether because it just became too pervasive. Maybe that makes me a delicate flower, but I guess I've decided there are worse things to be. When you get down to it, I'm more for being dishonest in some ways online. Or just more controlled. Or is control in the face of anonymity just another form of dishonesty? Which is why I asked the question in the first place- it's interesting to figure out what kind of dishonest people here are choosing to be, and how that shapes our interactions with each other. On your side, it sounds like you've carefully crafted this narrator that refuses to suffer fools gladly, and deals with foolishness in a way that you, the author, wouldn't in real life. I've gone something of the opposite route, but it's no less dishonest and no better or worse (I hope)- the person I present online is as of now unflinchingly affable; I still dismiss valueless interactions, but I choose to do it by being as respectful as possible and, if met with further disrespect, assume the person I'm talking to just isn't worth talking to, and I stop talking. One more thing on the note of narrative versus authorial intent- there's a weird tension between your two posts. In one (the Reddit one) you posit that we know more about yesterday's waiter than we do about those we interact with online. And as such, sounds like you're saying that we're a bunch of characters interacting with other characters rather than real people interacting with other real people. e.g. I don't know you at all, so I shouldn't take it personally when kleinbl00 insults fuffle. But in the Hubski post, the implication is that a) you're very good at expressing yourself as you intend to, and thus b) you DO experience the internet as an extension of your life, replete with all the psychological/social bleed-through that entails. Which seems to run in direct contradiction with your Reddit point. How do you jive those two? Or is that what you meant about having come to new conclusions? Or am I missing a vital point? Anyhow, that's kind of apropos of nothing, just nagging at me.
So a couple things: You may feel that way, but your feelings on the subject are completely, documentably, demonstrably 100% wrong. Jeron Lanier spends a chapter on dishonesty and online cultures in You Are Not A Gadget and the nature of identity and the fluidity anonymity grants online have been a central theme of not one, not two, but three books by Sherry Turkle. Your "feelings" on the subject are internal, reflect your own emotions, and are absolutely 100% wrong in regards to common, greater trends that have been clinically documented since the rise of online identity. "A lot of folks on Reddit espousing" anything is one thing - but they know as much about it as you do. They're going on instinct as much as you are. And as we've had computers as part of our daily lives for exactly one generation, nobody has any "instinct" to go on. If by "honest" you mean "tactless" then you are correct. If by "honest" you mean "honest" then you are, as mentioned before, baselessly, groundlessly wrong. Yup. And Reddit is Thunderdome. I've been good at fighting online for more than a decade but Reddit made me absolutely lethal. It's the same problem as everywhere, though - you have to learn the lingua franca for anywhere you're at or else you can't communicate, and Reddit's default communication standards are cruel. So when I'm elsewhere, I have to reef myself in... and when I'm on Reddit, I have to let myself out. That is because you have demonstrated a naive inexperience with the online world. The fact that you think "honesty" and "tact" are interchangeable concepts proves my core point better than anything else you could have written. "Honesty" is being true in the interests of fostering communication. "tact" is being mildly duplicitous in the interests of fostering communication. Your mistake is that you think the cruelty of online interaction fosters communication - it doesn't. It's monkeys screeching at each other from treetops. Nope. I've written an apologia as to why I do not imprint my personal expectations on online communications and argue that nobody else should do so to me. That's because you started out with an incorrect thesis, backed it up with incorrect evidence and reached incorrect conclusions. From a psychosocial standpoint, "me" as in this thing that you are reading is made up of text. That text contains exactly zero body language, exactly zero facial cues, exactly zero vocal inflection and exactly zero shared experience. You know less about me from what I have written here than you do about the waiter that refills your coffee. If this is not the case, it is evidence that you're not paying attention to your waiter, which also furthers my point. No. NO. NO. You don't know me at all, so who the fuck do you think you are to have "expectations" of me. Here's the part you're not getting: there are over 400 people on Reddit that have told me, via PM, that they look up to me. That they always look out for my posts. There are over two dozen people who have asked for life advice. There are a half-dozen people for whom I have gotten jobs. There are three people for whom I have greatly reduced prison sentences. But there are over three million people on Reddit. I interact with people regularly. I interact with people above and beyond the boundaries of Reddit. But I also regularly get people professing their "disappointment" in me because I did not live up to some construct of me they have in their head. The entire point of the essay linked is to explain why, in no uncertain terms, those who are "disappointed" in me are "disappointed" in their construct of me, and who the fuck do they think they are expecting anything of me at all? Easily. All you have to do is read what I wrote for what I wrote, rather than what you want it to say. But, as my ENTIRE ORIGINAL POINT EXPLAINED, "kids these days" suck ass at this. The fact that you wrote a 500 word essay saying "you're wrong" only illustrates that "you're wrong" is your way of saying "I don't understand." Which, again, is my point. You tell me. Are you?I feel like those who don't experience the net as an extension of their lives are actually more likely to unwittingly present a more honest face in online interaction.
the internet makes our person invisible, and that provides a huge incentive to be more honest in some ways than we might be in real life.
I have a problem with people being so gleefully and blithely ugly.
When you get down to it, I'm more for being dishonest in some ways online.
Or just more controlled.
On your side, it sounds like you've carefully crafted this narrator that refuses to suffer fools gladly, and deals with foolishness in a way that you, the author, wouldn't in real life.
One more thing on the note of narrative versus authorial intent- there's a weird tension between your two posts.
And as such, sounds like you're saying that we're a bunch of characters interacting with other characters rather than real people interacting with other real people.
e.g. I don't know you at all, so I shouldn't take it personally when kleinbl00 insults fuffle.
Which seems to run in direct contradiction with your Reddit point. How do you jive those two?
Or am I missing a vital point?
So, what you're saying is... you might have a job you can get me...? Thanks man, I owe you a biggie. I dunno, I'm pretty sure we're saying the same thing after around P3. But that can wait for a second. In regards to P1-3: sounds like some good reading. I kind of love this field of discussion, but as you may have surmised, haven't gotten to study up on it in any academic sense. I'll have to check those out. Regarding the whole "honesty" versus "tact" thing- you've got my idea a little spun around. I don't equate honesty with tact. But I come close to equating the inverse, and your words read as though you kind of agree- "'tact' is being mildly duplicitous in the interests of fostering communication." So yeah, I believe that in some cases, no, a lot of cases, tact is a form of dishonesty. Or at least a bending of light around honesty, which is, by any other name, dishonesty. And I don't think this is a particularly naive or offensive viewpoint, but rather an interesting one. That's me and the ol' feelings again, though! After that, it sounds like we're saying the same thing. Except for the waiter thing, which, I gotta admit, I didn't go out yesterday for a meal. But! I'd argue for the hell of it that a "waiter" (or, I guess in your original words waitress) is a role being played by a person. Something along the lines of "user" as a role being played by me. Each role requires a certain amount of shaping/shading/ignoring of the truth to function as it should in its setting. Thus, I can look at my waiter, but I'd have a hell of a time seeing the person behind the waiter's costume. In something of the way I can see the username, but not the user behind it. Each has its strengths and weaknesses as far as the parameters of human interactions go. Yeah, with my hypothetical waiter, I can observe metalanguage in a way I can't with people online. But then again, that metalanguage is still being strained through the waiter persona. So unless I'm really really good at registering, say, pupil dilation and sweat levels and tiny facial movements (and I live in the Pac NW, so half of that hypothetical face will be covered by beard), I'm only going to see what the person lets me see through the "waiter" disguise. Anyhow, conversely, with online interaction, I only see what the author lets through to the narrator. And that doesn't include metalanguage, unless you count italics or emboldening or caps- thanks for employing all three by the by, it helps me "get" what you're saying! But even the way somebody crafts their online persona might tell us something of the person behind that persona. In a way that we don't learn from the waiter, who's constrained not only by their social role, but their professional one. They can only volunteer so much in the name of being a waiter before they're tipped poorly or fired. With online interaction, I'm allowed to be much less tactful/much more honest because they only thing riding on it is my online reputation, which may or may not have any meaning to me. So there's that. Only other thing I'd say is that I never really said you were wrong, only that I disagreed. Also, that I may or may not have understood a few points. But I think you clarified some of them, so there's that! Seriously though, give me a job I need money.
Well, what can you do? And where can you do it? As to the rest, you are - again - overestimating the context one can get from the written word and underestimating the context you can get from interpersonal interaction. Hell, let's skip interaction. Let's just go to the context that's possible from an image. What can you surmise about this person? We're not jumping to conclusions, now. We can see that he's a young adult male. We can guess as to a few other things and those guesses will help establish our other assumptions about him. It's not a lot to go on, but it's enough to distinguish them pretty distinctly from this person: ...yet they both come up for the image search "waiter." Compare and contrast by what you can tell about a person from their name: You seem to be insisting that you can somehow "learn" something about a person by interacting with them online. I'll say for the third time that you are grossly, demonstrably, succinctly incorrect. You can disagree with that all you want, but it will not change the fact that the facts, the research and the general experience of online interaction are at odds with your theories. And, once again, my assertion is that those who grew up "online" are worse at picking up the differences. How old are you?
I'm 30. Just on the cusp, but spent most of my formative years internet-free. As for marketable skills: I've done audio editing for a good ten years, but I've only been decent at it for four or five. Done some production work (spanning from setting up for live events to recording to "can I get you more coffee?"), learning more about recording but didn't go to school for it because of the cost. Studying under some Real Deals, though. And I've got a good ear. I have no experience waiting tables, so that's right out.
You already figured that out from another exchange we had. Who says you can't tell anything about a person from brief online interactions? I'm only halfway serious about the job thing. Truth be told, I don't know if I can stand Seattle much longer- we're probably making tracks in the next year. I appreciate even the ghost of seriously considering my request, though.
;-) But there you go - there's no reason to presume I would remember the exchange. I trade emails with seven or eight Redditors regularly. They initially found me through Reddit. But I cannot - for the life of me - keep track of who they are on Reddit. We remember the details that are important, and in a sea with no memory, details like that drift away.
Ok, so do you act like an asshole all the time or do you 'switch' it on when the person you are speaking to (or someone who has responded to you) triggers one of your tripwires? The problem with this approach is that I have no idea how you will respond, are you going to go all controlled-rage on me or give a reasoned reply. I get what you are doing (I think), I'm all about efficiency myself in fact, but don't you run the risk of making your Internet a little darker and meaner by playing the dick card so often?it's not your fault you're an asshole. Me? I do it on purpose to save us both time.
the cold, calculated, reasoned decision - that it's more efficient to be a dick than to not be a dick
There are sixteen footnotes to that essay. You haven't clicked a single one of them. There are six replies to this very discussion from me. You haven't read a single one of them. Give me a reason why I should answer you, considering your "question" is readily and easily answered by material I posted nearly a week ago (and wrote nearly three years ago), particularly when your real "question" is to allege that somehow I'm dragging down the tenor of discussion for people everywhere? You don't get what I'm doing. You want to paint me as the meanie because you lack the attention span to pay attention to the discussion. If you can actually read anything I wrote and still come back with "I have no idea how you will respond" it is a sign that you WILLFULLY don't want to think about how I will respond. Why should I respect that?
Thanks for answering my question though.There are sixteen footnotes to that essay. You haven't clicked a single one of them.
Sweet jesus! Sixteen footnotes! I was hoping this was one of those easy to summarize methods of communication. I don't think I have the time to invest in this one. I'm out.
"Weight" isn't the right way to look at it, I think. It's not that there's a scale of importance where the virtual is automatically less than the actual. While Reddit was busy tearing me to shreds, someone commented in one of the worstofs about me that "he takes things too seriously like someone who grew up before the Internet." That hit home - those of us who reached adolescence before Internet flame wars were more likely to be impacted by Internet flame wars. To me it seemed like an acknowledgement that those who grew up "after the Internet" took pride in diminished empathy. It saddened me, but it felt accurate. 'cuz the thing is, I give my online interactions the importance that the situation allows... and I generally start off with the assumption that the person I'm talking to is just like me. Backintheday you interacted with people online because eventually you'd meet them out in the world - and that is clearly no longer the case. So I guess I'm stuck in a "pen pal" mentality, whereby everybody I talk to is likely to be someone I run into at a party eventually. It probably gives me a thin skin because lots of people online these days act as if they'll never interact with anybody in person ever, so it gives them license. That license offends me, which offends them, because it's only the Internet, right? Thus we end up having a disagreement because they don't have the empathy to treat me like a human and I don't have the dispassion to treat them like a machine.
Yes, I can see how attributions would contribute to potential online conflicts. I will admit, I have read through a few of the conflicts here on hubski and have been a bit puzzled about what went on. One problem I have with interacting with others online is that usually there's no introduction, no handshake or even a, "oh hey, this is so-and-so, who's a friend of a friend." I hear what you're saying about diminished empathy though, as it applies to people who grew up "after the internet." I think you're right that some certainly take pride in it, though for others including myself I think it's sometimes a default position when interacting with the faceless. One reason I signed up for the pen pal project was because the last and only pen pal I had was in grade school. Thinking back, I remember I thought my pen pal was a real dickbag until our teachers had us exchange pictures. Suddenly, he became a real person to me instead of some kid from some hick town in Montana I'd never heard of who really liked wolves. This time around, I'm excited by the prospect of interacting with another person through the medium of writing in a way that doesn't occur to me to get excited about when interacting with others on the internet, but after reading through your response it's something I will definitely think about. Anyway, it's interesting to get different perspectives on these extended human interactions.
Yep. "context and what to make of it." I think people who grew up without online communication know that they're lacking a lot of context and tend to temper their conversations accordingly. I think people who grew up with online communication don't recognize all the context they're missing and fill in from their own preconceptions.
It's really not that different. I'm very music and arts oriented in real-life, laid back and don't get too worked up over much. I find a lot of different things interesting, and Hubski has a habit of piquing my interest. Much like real life, I might read something and not make much of a comment on it but at least spend some time thinking on it. This was probably the most boring response out of this entire thread, but there you have it.
I'm more-or-less the same, but I'm much less appropriate in person. I pretty much lived on Usenet and irc until about halfway through college, so that's the way of interacting with people that comes most natural to me. I have to make an effort to speak when it's polite or expected but I don't have anything substantial to say, from being either too terse or too longwinded when I do, or from thinking too long before speaking and letting a silence drag on long enough to make people uncomfortable. I've gotten pretty good at it when I know I need to, but when I'm distracted or unprepared I usually only realize I must have seemed rude hours later.
Like many here I've had an internet presence for a long time and I think we all go through an adjustment period. One thing I have noticed by interacting through others on the internet is that I can't rely on my appearance as I sometimes to do in real life. I'm not saying I'm incredibly handsome or anything, but I generally come across as somewhat imposing at times as I'm tall and well built, have black hair and most of the time I look very serious or angry, or so I've often been told. After meeting me though, people tend to consider me as a fairly nice, intelligent guy, if on the goofy side with a bit of a temper and a really sharp tongue. Anyway, in my real life I tend to control the tension in social situations as kind of an extension of my own feeling of well-being. Maybe it comes from getting so much unwanted attention as a kid, even though I'm the type that thrives on approval and attention. Online there is no first impression other than the first thing you've typed that another user sees. I hear you about being duller online than in real life, but honestly I get the impression that people with colorful personas on the internet tend to be shitty to be around in real life or incredibly boring. I'd say that online I tend to be the way I am with people I know, and am friendly with, but not necessarily close to. I also talk about poetry more online. If I'm being totally honest, a lot of people that are really into poetry and throw around surnames with great familiarity, for example, "oh, I simply love Plath!" tend to suck balls and not in any way that gives me pleasure. Not even from the degradation angle. It seems easier to find reasonable people who are into a bit of poetry here and there in online communities. Maybe it seems that way because where I live there is a strong anti-intellectual undercurrent (generally with an ill-concealed wish to be considered intelligent and well-spoken) amongst those I most often end up interacting with on a day-to-day basis and poetry is seen as something pretentious and anachronistic. I'd argue that the "working-class hero" posturing is both and worse. In any case, from my experience on the internet I've come to understand yet another way that the people around me are multifaceted. People I might tend to dismiss for whatever reason in regular life I might get into interesting discussions with on the internet. For me, the internet experience adds a certain depth to some areas of life and makes others more shallow.
It's funny, I get so hung up on the potential for bad behavior on the Internet that I often forget how liberating in a positive sense it can be. We get to share passions that we may feel discouraged in sharing in everyday life (poetry, in your case; in my case, myself (just kidding (kind of))), and you're right, we don't have to worry about how our physical representation colors how we're perceived. I have less of a problem with this in real life, since there's very little about my presence that's imposing. Sounds like kind of an awesome problem to have, actually. Re. The difficulty finding people in real life to talk to in acceptable terms about poetry vs. relative ease online: I have a couple close friends from college who a) bent all their academic willpower towards loving/understanding/crafting good poetry and b) put some of their most beautiful thoughts into poetic form during that time. To the best of my knowledge, neither of them now has anything to do with poetry. Seems like with poetry more than any other art form, there's this tendency for real-world interactions/expectations to smooth out every creative wrinkle, and to re-direct that energy into more, what, "acceptable" applications? I have no idea why. But you hear a lot of people say things like "I want to be a writer," or "I want to be a musician." You seldom hear "I'm gonna be poet-laureate." People get out of school and suddenly that side of their life seems to just languish in a way we don't generally expect our passions to languish. Sports? Fine to talk about sports. Visual art? Sure, there's a marketplace for that. Poetry? Where does it go? Of my two poet friends, one writes for a hotel-reviewing blog and the other edits an agricultural publication. Something about this is heartbreaking to me- not that they had to settle, because who doesn't, but that there are so few ways for people to leverage that passion into real-world interactions. I like to think that at least one of them (the better poet of the two) still secretly writes volumes in his spare time, and that the world's a better place for that output, whether it knows it or not. Hell, maybe they've found their own messageboards. This went off on a tangent. Can't remember my original point and there's little way to navigate back to it, as I'm typing on an iPad which, for all of the hype is an incredibly unintuitive word-processing device and seems by design to be fundamentally incompatible with my thought-process. Was I talking about the Internet? Poetry? Waffles? Dog grooming tips? No idea. Thanks, technology.
Yep, not a lot of love for poetry and you're right, the numbers dwindle sharply after college. I don't know why either. Plenty of "serious" poets had day jobs. I guess it's either in you to keep that love going or not. I hope your friends get back to it, or as you say, are secretly writing volumes. I like letting my mind wander, especially on the internet. No need to adhere so strictly to the point in an exchange like ours, I think. Also, as for my physical presence. It does have its moments, but dudes are always trying to crush my hand and making pointed comments like, "oh, I see you've met my wife." Whateva
Context is everything, though. On hubski I'm surrounded by intelligence; I'm therefore more inclined to argue, because turning someone on hubski's opinion is a whole lot more interesting than attempting to persuade a native goddamn Oklahoman of anything rational. I think most people who know me offline, including my family, would be surprised at how much I care about certain issues, and how developed many of my opinions are. I just don't bother talking to people about those sorts of things -- why bother when most of the intelligent responses are on hubski, etc? It's a sad truth. (There's the additional caveat of anonymity -- I'm not the sort of person you take seriously; I fuck around a lot and get drunk, fall off the furniture, quote Community to begin and end most conversations god help me, and so on. So people see what they expect to see, which is fair and natural.)I currently go out of my way to make sure I don't mistreat others online to a point at which I've actually become nicer as a digital creation than I am in real life.
To a lesser degree I have had that same feeling/process. I'm still pretty harsh in general, but I think not quite as harsh as I am offline, when I bother.
My online persona is smarter, i think more about stuff that matters or intrests me. Irl i am a douche. I am a contradiction.
More or less pretty much the same. I don't really act like an asshole, and much like real life, if people annoy me or I think their douchebags/assholes I just don't talk to them again. In real life I don't feel required to interact with anyone I dislike nor let rage or pride get the best of me, and that carries into online too. Someone replies to me and says a bunch of shit and seems uptight/mad/assholish, I just don't respond to them anymore and ignore them. Same as I would in "meatspace". Otherwise, I act similar, but obviously how you act in text and tiered internet discussions is always bound to come off differently than how you would have a physical in-person discussion. People respond differently when they have time to think, time to look up facts, time to research, time to fact check, time to cool down or time to induce rage, etc. So there's always bound to be SOME differences between internet and real life interactions, but for the most part I think many of us try to be the same people. On the internet, the only thing I'm quicker to do is write someone off, because people don't filter their opinions, or hate, or rage, or pride on the internet, it just spills out. And unlike real life, where sometimes through work, family, or social circles, there are obligations to "keep the peace and be nice", that doesn't exist on the internet. If someone seems like a complete douche or asshole on the internet it's sooooo much easier for me to just block/ignore them for the rest of our dealings, where as in real life that can create a little more drama and has to be done more delicately in many cases. But online, I can just skip that tip-toeing and go straight to ignoring and pretending they don't exist.
If you want your online persona to reflect your offline one, you have to write with the voice of who you think are. So you have to be good at acting (a difficult skill) and you have to be sure of who you are. It's a damn hard thing to get right and I envy those people to whom it seems to come naturally.
Or else you have to be really really bad at acting, and then there'll be less of a chance that you intentionally misrepresent yourself online. Who you think you are may or may not reflect who you actually are- more likely it reflects the qualities you see as the most vital to your "you-ness." But if you're actively promoting these qualities, it's probably at the sacrifice of all those subconscious characteristics that you present throughout your day. I can try to paint a decent picture of myself on Hubski, but the very act of trying to paint the picture makes it less accurate. Might just be that the person least likely to give an accurate representation of you is you. For my part, I wish I was less conscious about how I present myself. I think I'd get my personality across a whole lot clearer that way.
Yeah I'll be honest a lot of what you said didn't occur to me at all writing that last comment, perhaps because I was so hung up on what my writing looked like :P AFK people engage in lots of different kinds of discussions, small talk, deep conversations, random stupid riffing. You get different communities online that are biased towards different kinds of communicating but I think you need to be exposed to a variety of them to really get a good idea of someone's personality. That said, looking at peoples' comments it's pretty easy to see who puts thought into their contributions and who doesn't. Positive signs would be things like including relevant hyperlinks, backing up opinions while negative signs would be things like using memes as stock responses, pedantry. I'm sure a list of them exists somewhere. So it could be that those superficial indicators have more impact on whether people think you're "painting a decent picture" of yourself online. I find that to be a pretty comforting thought.
really not much difference I am grouchy I tell people the are just having fun they do not know what they are talking about. All my published papers are about how the assumptions of social science and economics are wrong. I guess the biggest difference is that in real life I am a sexy black woman not a beardy jewy guy.