Our posts, Our selves

Great Debates
1

You can tell a lot about a person by what they post on the board.
Is the above statement true?
When I read your posts, am I getting a tiny glimpse into who you really are? Or simply who you wish to be?
Is it fair for me to judge someone based on what they’ve posted to the board? If not, how can I gather any information at all about them?

How much can I read into what someone posts? Certainly, I can make no assumptions, but what can their style and posting habits tell me about them? (And am I hearing it right, or destined to misunderstand?)

I have already reached some conclusions, but my remaining questions can only be answered from inside your collective minds.

2

I’m picturing you sitting there, fingers tented, eyebrows raised, leaning back in a chocolately leather chair…ah yes wolfstu, we meet again.

But seriously. I tried when i first got here to be what I thought would be an “ideal message board personality”. I said, by god I’m going to shake things up around here.

Frankly, it became too much work, flirting, talking in nothing but double entendre all the time, trying to be shocking just for shock’s sake. I quit. Yes, I still flirt and still act goofy, but it’s much much closer to my actual personality…I just leave out the boring parts I hope.

So whatever you think of my posts, good or bad, that’s me…jarbabyj…playboy centerfold.

jarbaby

3

I am precisely who I appear to be in my posts. Quite frankly, I am more myself here than I can be IRL. I deeply enjoy philosophical/political debates with people who disagree with me, but IRL people rarely have time for them. I love to flirt with my female friends, but IRL a lot of them work with me and/or are my techical subordinates, so fear of harrassing them stymies me. I am also definitely a wise-ass, but again many of my interactions IRL are in the context of work, so I self-censor.

BTW, isn’t this more of a MPSIMS thread?

Sua

4

Honestly, I think in the general case we know people better from messge boarding than we would IRL since in anonymity the societal inhibitions are largely down.

I would never volunteer as much information about myself as I do here; as such, it is more of me, or at least who I would be were it not for fear of retribution or punishment or whatever other evils societal standards can impose on a guy. Or gal, as the case may be, but in my case its a guy.

5

My working assumption has always tended to be, words mean what they mean.

Another is, a person is what they do. What they say–in this case, type–is an observable facet of what they do, not the entirety.

I don’t understand why you (generic “you” here, applicable to…whoever it may apply to, not applying to everyone else) would ever feel the need to “judge someone” by what they’ve posted. Evaluate the posts and their contents instead–that’s the facet you’re able to. Some posters may assume airs, trying with varying degrees of success to sound brighter, more interesting, etc., than they “really” are. Others write with a more honest voice. None of that matters much, though–what matters is the content of what they write. Should you start meeting with them away from the boards, then further aspects of them matter as well.

As far as “reading into” goes, that’s just part of human nature. It’s a balancing act between empathy and projection, with the latter always being easier (and thus more common). My own working assumption to combat that tendency is, words mean what they mean. When someone writes something, it’s because they intended to write it using those words, at the time they did so.

It’s no stretch of the imagination to realize that there’s probably quite a few people who would take some umbrage at that philosophy. And that’s understandable, too. What I think balances it out is the “at the time they did so” portion. Held to, it minimizes silly things like grudges and ongoing feuds.

It’s all a great big “it depends”. In my case, I would think most people could tell by my style a few things: I don’t flirt much, I have a tendency to ramble, spend a lot of time being quiet, punctuated with non-sequitors, an overfondness for parenthetical remarks that pepper run-on sentences like tripwires, occasional impatience when people do trip up and fail to follow along, and that I like to club baby seals.

Well, one of those might not be a valid reading-into.

Anyway, the single most reliable thing you can tell about someone from their postings, is whether or not you’re personally interested in reading what they have to say regularly. All else is conjecture.

6

what clubs do baby seals like to go to? Dance clubs or more like gaming?

7

It depends on the baby seal. Pay attention, dammit!

8

Well, in real life I’m an ardently pro-Confederate politically right-wing Christian fundamentalist. I do wonder how well my “real self” comes across in some of my posts here.

9

Comparatively I don’t have very many posts, but so far, yes, it’s pretty much me. I’m quite a bit more outgoing and outspoken on the boards than face to face. But my opinions, interests, intelligence and writing skills (or lack thereof) are pretty much the same.

Abby

10

Let me see if I can make this make any kind of sense. Granted, this is my first message board–actually it’s the only one I read–and I’m not really sure how folks are supposed to conduct themselves on message boards, but I view the posts that I read as an extended, interactive novel. The more I read, the more the characters develop slowly in my mind. The plot constantly shifts, sometimes the genre shifts from drama to poetry to romance to technical textbook writing, sometimes folks do things I wouldn’t expect them to do, and some parts are boring so I skip/skim over them, but for the most part it’s a good read. There are some fictional aspects to this extended novel, for I presume most people post under a name that is not their true one IRL, and because there is a degree of anonymity here, folks may feel freer to act in ways that they would not IRL. However, I think that overall there’s a consistency to what folks post and how they express themselves in their posts.

Here’s another way of looking at it. Say you pick up a stack of papers and start reading through them, and you come to one where the handwriting looks familiar, and you recognize that it was you that wrote it? Well, I think that applies here. Once every blue moon I’ll happen on a thread I posted to a while ago and re-read it, and I’m always amazed when I come to what I wrote. I think: Damn that sounds like me. Then I look at the poster, and sure enough it is me. :slight_smile: The same applies to other posters whom I read regularly. Now I’m not saying that by reading what folks post, I or anyone else can really know/understand who they really are. However, we do have our own particular styles, personality handprints, whatever you want to call it. I think that’s in part what enables the mods to spot formerly banned folks who return under the guise of another handle.

11

What Sua said is scarily, scarily true for myself also.

12

Who is MrO? Some say that he is a wandering doer of good, a bodhisattva, a kind and calm soul. Others call him scoundrel, atheist, anarchist–a godless charlatan, seeking to corrupt modern society for his own perverse amusement. The truth?

Well…

I think the answer to both questions is yes, and more: I think when we read posts, we see each other becoming what we want to be. Of course we do this in real life too, with each choice we make and each sentence we utter. But here the constraints are different. We have a little more time to compose our thoughts. We haven’t always known each other like family members have; we have fewer preconceptions about each other (speaking here as a newbie). We’re more free to design our identity.

That’s not to say it’s fake. Except for a few trolls and freaks, I think the identity we create is the one we see for ourselves. To some extent, that’s part of who we are.

Wow, man, I didn’t realize I could say things like that without being stoned.

13

Who is MrO? Some say that he is a wandering doer of good, a bodhisattva, a kind and calm soul. Others call him scoundrel, atheist, anarchist–a godless charlatan, seeking to corrupt modern society for his own perverse amusement. The truth?

Well…

I think the answer to both questions is yes, and more: I think when we read posts, we see each other becoming what we want to be. Of course we do this in real life too, with each choice we make and each sentence we utter. But here the constraints are different. We have a little more time to compose our thoughts. We haven’t always known each other like family members have; we have fewer preconceptions about each other (speaking here as a newbie). We’re more free to design our identity.

That’s not to say it’s fake. Except for a few trolls and freaks, I think the identity we create is the one we see for ourselves. To some extent, that’s part of who we are.

Wow, man, I didn’t realize I could say things like that without being stoned.

14

[hijack]Anybody else laugh real hard when they saw the double post after MrO’s stoned remark?[/hijack]

Chuckling,

15

I’m not stoned! I’m not!

16

<snicker>

17

Although what you see now is very much a reflection of what I am now, it does not show much about my past, so the reflection is one-dimensional.

Also, there are significant aspects of my life which are too technical or too complex to be of interest to the boards, so I discuss them elsewhere.

Finally, I have never been one to put forth much in the way of juicy personal details.

All in all, my posts are as much of an indication of me as what most people get in real life unless they are close friends, for my I pretty much keep my life in discrete segments. I have friends and associates from a number of activities, and since these activiites are usually totally unrelated to each other, these people are either not aware of these other aspects of my life or only marginally aware.

Conclusion: my posts are a true reflection of a small part of me, but are not anything close to a reflection of all of me, but this is not much different than the glimpses into my life which people in real life have.

18

I contain far fewer typos and I come in three classic dimensions[sup]1[/sup]

[sup]1[/sup][sub]temporal dimension optional.[/sub]

19

I’m a little confused about why this is in Great Debates, but what the hell…

I know from long experience that while we can discern a certain amount from the way a person posts, it is never really the full picture. As to whether we are each being honest or real, that’s a different question, and one that was just asked, if I’m not mistaken… (my answer was yep, this is me. If I’m different in real life, it is only to the extent that I calibrate my conversation and my attitude according to the context.)

stoid

20

People show a lot about themselves in posts. Of course some of what they show is pretense, and some is simply insincere posturing. We all have our pretensions, and since we are safe at home, and anonymous, we can be beautiful, and sexy if we want.

For a hundred posts or so, you can pretty much be whatever you want to be. But once you have posted a thousand times, all hours of the day and night, and in good and bad moods, a lot more of who you are shines through who you pretend you are. The funniest part is that since you choose who to pretend to be all by your self, without the limits imposed by harsh reality, who you wish you were says a whole lot about who you really are, if anyone pays attention.

Which threads you post to, which forums you frequent, and who you respond to, both positive and negative responses, put you into a sociological matrix. You have a place in the community, whether you want to or not, even if it is the role of “anonymous stranger.” Since it is very hard to create a personality that is consistent without having that personality come from your own values, and feelings, if you aren’t honest about yourself, you will eventually be pretty widely perceived as either shallow, or phony. There are lots of perceptive people here.

A hundred lies are very hard to keep straight. Ten thousand honest answers however are but a brief glimpse of a person. Much easier to keep up, really.

Tris

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” ~ Aristotle ~