On-line vs. real life personas - Page 2

People do seem pretty quick to anger on these boards (but that might be true of most boards in general). For me, the key thing has always been to stay as cordial as possible, and to engage people's arguments, and not the tone with which they address me. I've found that if I remain civil with people who are not being entirely amenable themselves, they'll usually adjust their tone accordingly, or if they're more troll-ish and just looking for someone to get upset, won't respond at all.

I'm just pretty good at not losing my temper.

Sort of off topic, but would you guys say that there has been a marked drop-off in the quality of discussion over the years this board has existed, or are things about the same?

My dad collected swords. Me and my brother were always picking them up and hacking away at each other with them when we were kids.

This gave my dad convulsions; not so much because we might hurt ourselves as because some of the swords were pretty valuable. He also collected armor, and when I was a kid I got to go out for Halloween as a Roman Centurion with a metal breastplate and edged weapon and everything. Swords are pretty great.

Wow. What a great post. I don't even know where to begin. Thanks for the well-thought-out response.

I think along similar lines as you, Geoff, although I don't know if I would go so far as to call different facets of our personas "fictions." I kinda follow the existentialist tenet that we are neither more nor less than the sum of all the things we do in our lives, that it's the actual and not the potential that really defines us.

As for your statement "None of us is what we seem," I would amend it to read "None of us is merely what we seem to be at any given moment." To that end, we are constantly defining ourselves based on what we choose to do. And thus, these different personas we adapt are not so much a "fiction" as a re-definition of the self.

I would posit that the real "fiction" is the idea that there are more or less valid personas; whichever one we occupy is the one we legitamately are at that moment. This is what bothers me most when I see so many posts on this site involving people being really, really nasty to each other. I would imagine many rationalize this by calling it a fiction, if they think about it at all, which seems unlikely. The selves we post as are as much our legitimate self as that which we take to work with us, or to dinner with mom (and I too, would never dream of swearing in front of mine, believe me), or to call each other nasty names and accuse each other of secretly being virgins on at aint it cool news.

Some might even postulate that this anonymous self we access on these boards is an even more valid or immediate one, insofar as we can say what we think or feel almost entirely without reprisal (as JohnShade mentioned earlier), or having to run into them at work or at the mall and wonder what they really think of us: the cloak of anonymity provided here allows us a reprieve from the social niceties expected in the "real" world. I think this is why I try so rigorously to be really polite and cordial here - because it would just be so easy not to.

I guess my initial post was a poll of sorts, to see how many people thought about this, and if so, where they fell in the spectrum of persona.

Thanks for the great post, Geoff. It gave me something to think about, and helped me figure out what I thought on this topic, and helped (momentarily, at least), deal with why I started this thread in the first place.

This was a super-long post, but if you do read it, I would love to hear your thoughts on my perambulations and circumlocutions. Thanks for all the great responses, everybody!!

Intense megalomania, perhaps. An unceasing desire to make the Fantastic Four look bad in public??

That's a good point though Belethedheliel. DOOM!, do you really talk like that outside of message boards (I mean, I've done weirder things, so it's not outside the realm of possibility).

Belethedheliel, what's the derivation of your name, if you don't mind my asking. It has a lot of "e's" in it.

Hey Geoff. Somehow I missed your post.

I've really never been very good at conformity, and I fear that it's lead many to think I'm rather snobbish.

In the way use the word fiction/fictional, I presume you are prescribing a primacy to the life we lead outside of the internet that supercedes the authenticity of the selves we inhabit here, and that there is an inherent tendency towards disingenuousness, or at the very least, a less immediate relation to each other than we would have in the "real" world.

Would you say that's because of the anonymity provided by the board, or just the "artificial" nature of our interaction (given that we only have the words we type, but can't use tone of voice, body language, or any other sensory cues that are so vital to communication and co-existence)?

You also said something interesting which I've quoted above. Would you think then, that newer posters are more likely to adopt characteristics of posters who have been here longer in an effort to fit in (in terms of tone, language choices, etc.)? A sort of mimetic camoflauge?

Edit:

You know what, I just re-read your last post, and that's exactly what you're saying. Sorry. Sloppy reading on my part.

Oh hell yes. I finally get what you've been saying. All this time I've been thinking about the forums here as merely an aggregate of interactions between individuals, but ultimately that's only a part of the picture. While individuals are interacting with each other, we also have individuals starting or responding to threads/thread posts within the context of a group of individuals, and a group is an altogether different entity. It's kind of like going to high school all over again.

As you might have divined, I am very recalcitrant to identify with groups and somewhat insular, which leads to the development of certain blind spots. In this case, I have only been thinking of individual interactions. But the "group" of this message board has its own identity, just as tangible and "real" as that of the individual posters. But the "group" is no less nebulous and resistant to categorization for its palpable presence, (i.e., it's an entity, but not an individual). I haven't been taking that into account in my thinking, although I'm sure it's been a huge factor in my general reluctance to post on these boards (I've posted as many times in the last week as I usually do in a month and a half or so).

Thank you for pointing this out to me.

This passage seems very "obvious" to me now, but I had not been thinking along these lines (did I mention I'm somewhat insular?) Of course! familiarity is crucial as well. Someone on the boards who knows me can address me based on past experience and general impression. Posters who interact with me for the first time have no experience of "me" to draw upon, so they have to extrapolate experience from the "group" entity, apply their perception of me to it, and then decide how to address me (Am I a troll, or a shill, or whatever). And this is the same set of deliberations posters have to make all the time.

Your post has been immensely helpful, and happily, has answered the question underlying my initial post.

Wow. Thanks Geoff. That was pretty great. I need to think about this some more just let it soak around in my brain, but I think it will definitely help me empathize with posters who seem quick to ridicule others.

I think I would request Brad drop the "faux" prefix from that sentence. Geoff Foster seems pretty darned smart to me.

Although I suppose you could argue that I'm j
ust identifying with him as my "faux-intellectual" high-ideal.

Hey Geoff.

I think I see where you're going with this. Now if we can only create a spiral of silence for some of the people who post at CHUD... (just kidding).

I wonder if the anonymity provided here counteracts against that phenomenon. The theory does seem to presuppose a unified media voice for a topic and population though, doesn't it? It would seem that any region that allows for a dissenting media viewpoint would counteract or diminish the inculcation of the spiral within a populace. It seems very telling that this theory comes from someone who lived through a time when absolutely no dissenting voice was brooked.

And Mr. Tom Fuchs, isn't Helvectica sort of a "girly" font?? (smiley face thing here to indicate I'm just joking)

You're right. My real name's Chris Ferreira, I'm a struggling guitar teacher in Seattle. I'm not really that secretive, it just never occurred to me to use my real name as my screen name.

As for "anonymous:" this is poor word choice on my part. I've been somewhat carelessly substituting the word "anonymous" for what I really mean, which is literal physical proximity.

I'm really talking about face-to-face in-the-same-room proximate interaction. I know I've harped on this pretty much to death (as Ali Mohamed pointed out up above) in my posting, but just to clarify, this message board is sort of an abstract, which I think allows people to "act out" in ways that they might not if they were in the same room with a person.

(Edited here for clarity) There's a sort of "reciprocity disconnect," if you will, that I feel is intrinsic to internet name-calling. To me, insulting someone on the internet feels inherently dishonest. Here's a weird example: It's as if Person A was at Person B's house, got really mad at B but didn't say anything, excused themself and drove home, and then called B's house, called B a "dick" (or whatever) and then hung up really fast, and disconnected their phone. (Does that make any sense? This was a really difficult concept to articulate).

That doesn't mean that everyone does this, or that many people do it most of the time, but I guess it does preoccupy my thinking. Not that I expect it will ever change, I was just interested if other posters noticed this/thought about it.

So obviously, this "reciprocity-disconnect" can be bad (breakdown of the social niceties I invest so much in); but it can also obviously, be a good thing, if it allows people to be honest with each other and say what they really feel, when they might not in a face-to-face situation.

It's this perceived disingenuousness that bothers me, more than just the rudeness. I guess I'm getting hung up on a principle.

I am curious though, why did all of you guys who have pseudonyms drop them and decide to use your real names?

Sorry for the lack of clarity. To paraphrase Samurai Cat: "I will endeavor to express myself with considerably more felicitousness."

(Please keep in mind that I haven't read the book, but just read the summations at the website and at wikipedia, so this might be an overly-reductionist critique, but here goes).

If the spiral is a function of the media reinforcment of one side of an argument over another, it seems like the media would have to have a concensus on the issue.

To be more specific, let's take handguns (I come from a family of gun-worshippers). For the sake of this argument, suppose Anytown has a voting population of 10,000, and the population is split evenly on the issue of whether or not handguns should be made illegal to own within the town.

According to the theory, whichever side has the media's public endorsement is going to have the advantage (in terms of the Spiral of Silence theory), because though the town itself is split evenly, one side will have the perceived advantage.

Now assume that this town has two local television stations; each owned by separate interests. It seems that each side would have to "own" both stations opinion on the issue in order to obtain an advantage. If one station said "ban handguns," and the other said "don't ban," then (all other things being equal), the two factions would be at an impasse. It seems that, in order to start a media-spiral, one faction would have to have captured a predominant number of media outlets within that voting district, and that with the wide array of media for spreading information, developing a media monopoly becomes increasingly difficult.

What do you think? I know my brothers would say this is shockingly naive, as it's well-known that the "liberal commies" have a stranglehold on American television media.

I hope this is somewhat clear.

Forgive my free associations; socio-political realities aren't my strength. I was just following a line of thinking. But you're right, I would imagine whoever controls television, (for now at least) seems to be able to broadcast to the biggest audience, I would think.

My brother did an informal poll at his workplace a few years ago, and was disturbed to learn that most of his colleagues voted almost-solely based upon television ads. This unnerved him greatly, and I can see why.

However he's convinced that the television news medium is own by the liberals pushing their pro-communist agenda, while the conservative radio media is our last line of democratic defense. I'm not really that political but these seem like pretty gross generalizations.

Interestingly, a lot of my friends where I live now find themselves on the opposite end of the political spectrum, and feel than tv news is beholden to corporate interests. Sadly, the two groups seem to be very divisive and mistrusting of each other. As someone who doesn't fall into either camp, it's kind of distressing to see this "us vs. them" philosophy become all-pervasive.

Sorry if this thread got too negative.

Yeah, I was definitely wondering about that when I asked the question. Maybe it's just a normal "acting out" response, getting to say things to people you couldn't really ever say in a "real-world" context. A way to open the release valve on all the stuff we find ourselves constrained from saying in the classroom, workplace, or home. In that sense, maybe all the ad hominem attacks are sort of healthy.

But yeah, I was quite pleased that so many of the people that posted were "on-topic" and quite amicable. Thanks everybody!!

No hard feelings. From reading my initial post in this thread, I can see how it might easily be interpreted as a diatribe against the site in general. I really was just trying to establish a context for the real point of the thread, which was to get feedback from other posters.

Well, I'm already largely resigned to the fact that I'll never know for sure. But as I said way way bove somewhere, even the people who respond less than sincerely still told me something, you know?

Maybe because I'm so distanced from it myself, I find human behavior endlessly fascinating. As for why people act out like this -- that's a very complex question, or at least a very simple question that would require a very complex answer. Part of it is surely the "anonymity" factor, and I think another factor is the distance between posters, the abstraction of this board might possibly be sort of de-humanizing. It's one think to tell someone to go "f---" themselves or wish a disease on their mother when they can't really reciprocate in any significant way, but I suspect it's also a lot easier to type those words into a black screen than to say it to another human being, even if you were guaranteed that there was no danger of reprisal. Since they can't see the reaction of the person they're attacking/insulting, their societal inhibitions aren't triggered as readily. Just a thought.