The skewed nature of on-line personas

Yes, what’s really bizarre is many frequent posters aren’t anonymous, having met each other in person.

I wonder if there might be something social or biological at work. If you speak with someone in person, and they say something you don’t agree with, you may turn defensive, but your brain is going to stop you from doing or saying something which might earn you a face full of knuckles. There’s something about being in the physical presence of others which brings on-line (so to speak) our decades of social training. We naturally want to get along with others and take the means of least provocation when conflicts arise. The same mechanisms prevent us from being total asses, which limit things like gloating, criticizing, and boasting.

Now. take the same person and the same scenarios and put him/her in front of a computer screen, and you’ve got an entirely different subset of variables. Sure, we know people are on the receiving end of our posts, but they’re not physically there. Our inhibiting mechanisms are largely off-line. Also, people hide behind usernames, which further depersonalizes communication.

But even beyond all that, I suspect there’s something in the nature of the medium which provokes us into acting in what would be considered grossly anti-social ways in f2f communication. We stand behind positions we may not even care about. We exaggerate claims to gain bonus points in discussions which may have limited importance and dubious merit. We nitpick over trivial details in order to ‘win’ an argument.

And yet, I have seen other, more positive forms of behavior emerge in on-line forums. People tend to form cliques or groups on scales much smaller than the total number of forum participants. People also tend to fall in line behind self-assumed forum leaders (who may or may not be staff). I find this behavior tribal - similar to the most common answer to the question, “How many names are in your address book?” (The typical answer is 100-150, which roughly jibes with the size of hunter/gatherer communities.)

I also agree with the poster who said the most balanced people are those who are roughly similar in person and on-line. Over time, many of us try to improve our social skills and become better people. Surely, when we notice ourselves acting erratically or bizarrely on these forums, we should try to adjust that behavior, or at least limit those tendencies. That doesn’t mean we should all be chipper PC Mouseketeers, but I mean, hey, by definition this is a community, and one would think that it’s a good thing to transfer f2f community building skills to this sort of on-line community. I’m not talking about constantly policing oneself, but having a general set of principles in mind, to draw on or at least consider when one finds oneself lost in The Land of Personal Ass-Making.

I’m even worse in person.

Shut the fuck up!

Tigerman walks away…

:wink:

Well, I see the people I know well here… people I have met in their real life, so to speak.

The ones I like the most are the ones who have the same online persona as they have off line.

Get Chung talking about Taiwanese politics… he only made one post actually on the subject, but came down on the green side, and against a fellow moderator big time.

Sandman, a bit more relaxed, I would say.

Rascal… also the same story.

Alleycat, seems more tense off line, especially when the toiled is flowing over. :smiling_imp:

Hexuan, well very relaxed guy off line.

Wilbur, nice in both places, and talks about the same things off line, but he spreads his wealth of experience on the topic of life a great deal more generously off line. :notworthy:

Huang Guang Chen - don’t get me started there. Enough to say, that he’s a more mellow person on the forums than off them.

All more or less the same way online as they are off line, but with small variations, I would say.

It is clear that I am in no way the same way on the forums as I am off them. Ask Wilbur

Yes. Because they seem nice.

Brian

Sometimes I get so bored…

Frred Smith is exactly the same in person except he’s more corporeal.

Corporeal of what? The good ship lollipop?

:ponder: isn’t it that he’s more corporeal in person than … on-line ?

[quote=“Gubo”]A lot of Forumosans have met one another.[quote]
Heaven forbid. reaching for kava kava

[quote=“banshette”][quote=“Gubo”]A lot of Forumosans have met one another.[quote]
Heaven forbid. reaching for kava kava[/quote][/quote][/quote]

Come speak English with us at Alleycat’s this Thursday. Near Shi-Da. Lishui Rd and XinYi Rd…and meet a few fellow SAs.

His pizza is fabulous as is his caesar salad and spinach cheese calzone. All of this can be washed down with good house red.

Absolutely agree. The person who is hexuan is…words fail me. I, on the other hand am always nice, kind, generous and understanding.

BroonAwful

[quote=“skeptic yank”]for those of you who have met in the real world as well as on-line: are you kinder to those you have met face-to-face on-line than some still faceless person?

if so, why?[/quote]

I used to almost dread meeting people offline from here because then I felt guilty if I wanted to say something inflammatory because now I had a face with the name. It was also a humbling experience the first times I met a number of people from here (Games Club about two years ago and the first Happy Hour), they made comments about what I had posted. I had forgotten that other people read that.

To tell the truth, I don’t particularly like going onto other forums now. I think knowing people both offline and online helps curb things quite a bit and it makes me more interested in reading their posts than when it’s random people. At the risk of sounding extremely cheesy, Forumosa really is a community. Maybe it’s because I’ve met so many of posters from here. Maybe it’s because we are all in a unique life experience. I’m not sure. I just know that you just don’t get that feeling with other online forums.

people read things you post?!? What’s the world coming to???

:laughing:

Dread not, dear ImaniOU. From now on (until I have another attitude adjustment), I shall post in a whimsical manner. Whimsy is the word.

I completely disagree with you, you worm.

Grease is the word…

It’s got groove, it’s got meaning.

:wink:

Most people here can go skew themselves as far as I’m concerned.

Ahhhhh…A Self-Kebob…

Dem’s good eatin’.