Degree of pregnancy
Amount of deadness
Level of uniquity
I’m 34 actually, but good point.
Sure, there is an aspect of internet communication that allows people to try to present themselves in particular ways. Due largely to the fact that the recipient has access to limited info. However, I suggest that the manner in which an individual presents themselves online certainly says SOMETHING about them.
Say I post something really nasty. That might be because I am a really nasty person. Or I encountered nasty people in the past so I know how they act. Or I am so creative that I can effectively portray a nasty person.
Maybe you would never learn the truth from electronic posts. Or even if you knew me IRL. But how does this differ from various IRL situations? Do your cow-orkers KNOW you like your friends and family do? Does anyone know you as well as you lover does? Does your lover know you as well as you do? And do you even fully know yourself? What truly motivates your actions, what you are capable of, etc.
Is there even ONLY ONE WAY of KNOWING a person? Maybe your family members/intimate friends perceive things about you that you are unaware of yourself. And which one of you is necessarily right or wrong?
The fact that a 40-yr old man presents himself online as a teenage girl, certainly does not mean that he IS a teenage girl. But it does suggest SOMETHING about him that makes him want to do so, and able to do so effectively.
Haven’t you encountered a situation where, say, you meet someone in a sports league, and feel they are the most competitive jerk you’ve ever seen. But if you meet them in a different setting and allow yourself to be openminded, you find that they are not at all competitive and jerky in other aspects of their life. The tough part is in trying to find out what it is that allows the same person to behave so differently in different situations.
The internet does allow a certain element of the population to engage in role-playing. I often hear people advocate role-shifting and sock puppets by saying, “Don’t pay attention to my identity - it is my IDEAS that matter.” Forgive this overgeneralization, but IME it is very common that such folk often have precious little in terms of actual ideas to communicate. I suspect they could invest the energy they spend in establishing and maintaining multiple personae, into actually advancing their thinking and communication. This approach, IMO, suggests a somewhat superficial “gamesman” attitude, which does little to advance effective communication.
IMO, the people who are most interested in communicating thoughts and information of value, are less likely to be interested in spending time and effort to create and maintain a consistent alter ego.
Sure, there are portions of our lives that we choose not to reveal on line. Same way we choose to keep sides of ourselves private IRL interactions. But that doesn’t mean that the portion we CHOOSE to reveal does not accurately represent SOMETHING in us. Moreover, a sensitive person can often may extrapolations about our inner/private self from those aspects of ourselves that we make public. Sure, sometimes these “guesses” are inaccurate, but certainly not always.
This I can relate to. Because of my ethnic background and upbringing I have a hard time interacting with people in real life. I pretty much don’t trust people.
Here, I’m able to open up more. The anonymity provided makes it possible for me to talk about me, my race and my family life with no repercussions. It can’t be used against me.
Hell, I’ve even become friendly with some fellow Dopers and, in real life, I ain’t friendly with many people.
That said, it took time for me to trust anyone here. I lurked for over a year before registering (then got lost in the winter of missed-content) to see what people were like, and I’m still just starting to come out of my shell.
Actually, now that I think of it, there are two walls to be broken.
The first involves your own inhibitions, i.e. issues you wouldn’t normally speak out on in public, but you feel more comfortable doing so here; and the second is the wall between you and other people as people in the flesh. I’ve only met one person from this message board, and for an exceedingly long time I didn’t have the courage to do so.
So, you get over the first hump when you post freely, and you get over the second hump when you meet people from online freely.
There are (at least) two factors in play here.
One is that it’s much easier, initially, to build an alternate (possibly, but not necessarily, false) persona online than it is in face-to-face interaction. Online the user has virtually total control as to the amount of information revealed about himself/herself. This is far less true in face-to-face interaction, where difficult-to-control body language and facial expressions often give away unwanted information; in addition, individuals who want to conceal (or misrepresent) their race, gender, disability, or other physical conditions may find this rather difficult in face-to-face interaction. For some people, this is very liberating, as it lets them interact “socially” without having to deal with the baggage of some personal situation. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
The other is that different people place a different level of significance on their online social interactions as opposed to their face-to-face social interactions. Someone with little or no social life outside of the Internet, or someone with a “double life” (has both a face-to-face social life and an Internet social life, but the two do not routinely mix, and may even be such that mixing would be awkward or even dangerous) will likely place a much greater importance on their online associations than would someone most of whose social life is face-to-face.
This is a common situation, by the way, for pre-transition transsexuals. A great many transsexuals find early refuge on the Internet, because it is much easier to “be a woman” on the Internet than it is to “be a woman” in face-to-face interaction. Many of us lead double lives for an extended period of time, spending inordinate amounts of time in online forums “being female” while continuing to carry on our facsimile male lives in the face-to-face world. (It should be noted that not all of the people who do this sort of thing will admit to being transsexuals – or whatever their personal issue is – in either forum. They may not even realize it themselves, at first.) The online identity usually merges with the face-to-face identity at transition (if this occurs), and quite frequently at this point (or some time thereafter) the importance of the independent online identity wanes. The online identity during the difficult pretransition period provides a source of individual affirmation as well as an opportunity to explore personal identity in a low-risk environment.
The original thread was not linked here on purpose. Believe me when I say that I’m quite familiar with how URLs are parsed in ubb and vbb software and have an exceptional working knowledge of html. The link to the thread was omitted by choice, because the heart of this debate has nothing to do with the thread it came from. It merely emerged from the midst of a regular flaming conversation. I do not wish that the nature of the thread that this debate found its roots in cloud the point that I’m trying to make. This debate has nothing to do with the events leading up to and culminating in the thread directed towards Joe_Cool. His name is only in this thread, because he became the example used in the debate originally. I can understand where one might say “well if you are going to use this member as an example, then I wish to know the entire background of your argument.” If that is the case, then you most likely aren’t going to find it in the thread that this debate originated from. I do not know if you spent the time to read through the entire thread from the BBQ Pit, Duck Duck Goose, but amidst actual quotes to things said in the past, there were a great deal of accusations of misinformation throughout the thread. I do not feel that read that thread alone will give enough background to give the user an opinion of the person of my example and to be quite honest, I do not want the user to take an opinion of another SDer from this thread. The purpose of this debate is NOT to bring upon an opinion on Joe_Cool or any other member for that matter. The thesis of this debate is “You can not get to truly know someone purely via interaction with them over the internet.” Athracite expressed interest in debating that point further, and that is why this thread is here right now.
gobear, I thank you for making a good point in this thread pertinent to the debate instead of just rehashing the original thread. It shows that you understand this thread really has so little to do with your thread, but instead is a legitimate question that arose from there.
Notthemama:
Awww. But your biscuits are so crunchy and buttery.
I agree with D_Nice on the issue of linking to the original thread. The original thread is a train wreck of no relevance at all to the topic under discussion, and offering a link merely invites a hijack.
Thank you (I guess) for the backhanded compliment.
Online life allows people the freedom to create personas that are completely unlike their own real-life personalities. A nerdy gamer can become the bluff, hearty Lord Warhammer; a lonely, overweight guy can become DoctorLove; a 17-year-old boy can AnitaMann.
Here on the Dope, there is a lot less of that because we meet each other IRL, so it’s more difficult to create a totally fictional persona. I also think people here are more honest because we’re about debate and discussion, and not getting laid. But even so, it seems to me that discussions can get out of hand because our only medium of communication is the printed word, which can’t convey the tone of voice or body language that may ameliorate the harsh content of a post
I’d be hesitant to assert what one of the most creative writers in modern history could and could not have “possibly fathomed”. I personally have no doubts that Vonnegut COULD have imagined a society where the masks were absolute and you only had to show what you wanted to show. In any event, the point elucidator was trying to make is one Earnest Hemmingway made in his short story “Shooting an Elephant” and is pretty close to the Vonnegut quote, but I think it’s more accurate.
“A man wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” Essentially, it’s not that you ARE what you pretend to be(as Vonnegut put it) but that you BECOME what you pretend to be.
If you act like a jerk online, I posit that will seep into your real life. If you’ve got some jerkish impulses, and you exhibit them online as opposed to suppressing them, as you would IRL if you didn’t have the outlet of the 'net, then I say your jerkish impulses will become more and more normal IRL. I’ve seen my online habits carry over into my real life. My wife and I even say (and I’m soooo embarassed to admit this) LOL(pronounced LOL) to each other sometimes. We both use the 'net for communication, so it’s a paradigm which has shifted from 'net only, to 'net and real life use.
I believe the number of people who can develop online habits/personae which do not, and never will, overlap with real life is extremely small.
Enjoy,
Steven
Actually, there’s a lot of truth to that.
I mean, think about it. Who I am as a person is a complicated interaction between the genes I received at conception and the accumulation of over thirty years of living. For someone to totally, completely, and thoroughly understand me would require a comprehensive familiarity with my entire life – not just the big events, like my automobile wreck at 16 or my chronic pneumothoraces at 20, but the medium-sized triumphs and traumas (e.g., getting dropped from a play my senior year in high school because I came down with chicken pox) and even all the tiny insignificant details (e.g. the rubber dinosaurs my grandmother bought me in South Dakota in the middle of a cross-country trip when I was 9). This, obviously, is not possible: You can’t experience thirty years of my life in less than thirty years.
So, we compromise. We summarize and judge and synthesize based on incomplete data. We can get a general sense of somebody’s character within a few minutes. This may change, depending on new input, or it may be reinforced. Over a period of years, we can get to know somebody very, very well indeed.
But think about the people closest to you – your parents, your siblings (if you have any), your lifelong friends. Do they sometimes surprise you? Can they still make choices and say things that you didn’t expect? Of course. I know my wife as well as I know anybody, including my blood relatives, and yet she shocked me a couple of months ago when, after an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I suggested it would be funny to go out onto the porch and yell, “Any vampires within earshot, you’re all invited in.” She’s a scientist. She knows there are no such thing as vampires, as well as I do. And yet she said, “Uh, no, I’d rather you didn’t.” I couldn’t believe it: She knows vampires don’t exist, but even so, she’s unwilling to engage in what is, on the zillion-to-one chance we’re wrong, a dangerous test.
So I think it’s reasonable to say that we can’t ever really truly know anybody as well as we know ourselves. You cannot see into someone else’s heart or mind. (Without using a drill, that is, ha ha.) All you have to go by is what you hear them say and see them do. Over a long period, you can draw some very accurate conclusions about someone’s character based on this evidence, but it’s never going to be a hundred percent accurate or complete. How do you think people manage to stay married to serial killers?
All we have here on the SDMB are words on a screen (disregarding the in-person meetings we have regularly, since those are attended by a comparative minority of members). Over time, tens of thousands of words can accumulate for an individual user; I suspect our more prolific posters (myself perhaps included) can top a hundred thousand words. This is a library of opinions, history, philosophy, events, contentions, gripes, crises, and whatever else is shared. Conclusions can be drawn, accurately or inaccurately. I know nothing of someone who has made one post. I feel like I know quite a bit about someone who has offered several hundred on a variety of topics. Am I justified in believing this? I think so. I may not have any idea what RickJay or gobear or Guinistasia or Spiritus Mundi or Gaudere or Sam Stone or Eve look like or sound like, or the strength and style of their handshakes or how they laugh or whether they bathe regularly or whether they slurp their soup or anything else that can be learned only through face-to-face interaction, but I am confident that I know their characters. I am confident that, were I to meet them in person, I would merely be filling in gaps rather than reinventing my impressions of them.
Sorry you don’t feel that way.
To present a slightly different point of view, and one probably more in line with the point of the OP, I don’t think it’s necessarily a matter of wearing masks, as much as the impossibility of forming a true opinion of a person based on the limited interaction available on the message board.
After all, we don’t often post on threads titled “Who are you really?” or “What are your defining characteristics?” We discuss issues, ask and answer factual questions, and shoot the breeze depending on the forum, but none of these is by any stretch a replacement for real life face to face interaction. We were (designed/evolved - take your pick) with the keen ability to pick up on visual, aural, and tactile cues that we may not even be consciously aware of, yet they help shape our perceptions of those we interact with.
NONE of that is available here, except to those of us who meet regularly. And even though many of us do choose to meet IRL, we are still very compartmentalized in that those from NYC, for example, know each other but may not have met anybody from Dallas or the Bay area (other than those few who have traveled, such as exTank, Demo, or Psycat).
Add to this the facts that some people, when meeting others from the board, might feel the subconscious need to extend or reinforce the opinions that others have formed of them online, and that a bar isn’t exactly a good place to get to know the real person anyway, we don’t know for certain that even our “Real Life” relationships and interactions are necessarily real.
I’ll spotlight myself as an example: The things I say here are my true and honest opinions, but they aren’t who I am. A disproportionately large fraction of what you (collectively) may know about me is based on what I’ve said in GD, whereas in real life I don’t spend my days arguing about what the bible says or what we should do about the middle east. Who I appear to be online is not me, but the reason is less that I’m attempting to project a false image than that you can’t discern the fullness of my being through this very narrow and focused question-and-answer session, any more than I can say I know the real Billdo or the real Vix or the real Green Bean through reading posts and meeting three or four times over a few years.
This reminded me of something Stephen King wrote in the Foreword to his first collection of short stories, Night Shift:
Reading through the forward to find that quote, I notice he touched on another very interesting point that I think is relevant to this discussion - the old parable of seven blind men touching the different parts of a thing to find out what it is: One said he felt a stone pillar, one a snake, one a palm leaf, one a wall, one a rope, one a bag, and the other a spear. They got together and described their findings to the town’s wise man who deduced that they had rather felt the leg, trunk, ear, flank, tail, mouth, and tusk of an elephant.
Online you may get a glimpse of D_Nice’s ear, gobear’s trunk, Cervaise’s tusk, and Anthracite’s leg, but you will never see the true person.
Wise words, Joe. I try to post with integrity, to say what I really feel and mean, to be the person on these threads that I am, or try to be, in real life. So, I’ve seen, do you and gobear. But as the thread not linked to here demonstrates vividly for me, it’s far too easy to generalize about somebody’s views from the few words they essay to comment on a given point, and miss the reality of the person behind those words.
The experience that you, gobear, and I had in that thread will always be a lesson to me not to assume why someone says what they say – though I may need to comment on a “You appear to think/believe/feel…” basis from time to time, I’ll never assume that I know who someone is.
Thank you and Jersey, and D_Nice and gobear, for that lesson.
I’ve got more than 3000 posts. Most of you don’t know me very well.
That’s not because the internet is not an intimate medium. It’s because I’m a loner, a rather private person. If we’d been to a couple hundred parties together, you’d acknowledge that you’d seen me and perhaps been in a circle of 6-7 people in which I was one of the ones exchanging words, and you might even remember something I’d said. You would not know me well.
I’ve heard people disparage email and the internet in general as ways of meeting people, and they prefer face-to-face, in-real-life venues…such as dances? bars? work?
(surely they are kidding?)
Classrooms perhaps. But you have so much more opportunity to get to know someone online, even if you do get some good insights into how someone else’s mind works by listening to them in the classroom. Besides, some of us are way beyond our student years.
I second ** Joe. ** As I said in the other thread, I have never failed to be surprised by the real people I thought I had a good idea of from our online interactions, and I have gotten that same reaction from others over and over again (surpise at who I am in person).
The blind men and the elephant is the PERFECT analogy.
I second ** Joe. ** As I said in the other thread, I have never failed to be surprised by the real people I thought I had a good idea of from our online interactions, and I have gotten that same reaction from others over and over again (surpise at who I am in person).
The blind men and the elephant is the PERFECT analogy.
It’s certainly true, interaction via the Internet presents a very incomplete picture of who a person is. The blind men and the elephant is indeed a good analogy, but I suggest the conclusion we seem to be drawing is inaccurate. Since we can’t get the full picture of a person, we’re saying this means we can’t criticize a person. From a wholistic standpoint I believe this is true. If you act like an ass about matters of race when you write opinions CONCERNING matters of race, then I think it’s fair to call you an ass in that respect. gobear made no claims about the condition of Joe_Cool’s teeth, or his weight, or whatever. He claimed he was a bigot based on bigoted statements and a liar based on the fact that, well, he was caught in lies.
Sure this doesn’t extrapolate to his personal hygiene or fashion sense, but to continue the blind men and the elephant analogy, when you feel a tusk, that’s still a tusk. You don’t know if it’s attached to a walrus or an elephant, but you can still tell it’s a tusk.
You may not be able to tell if a person is a TOTAL jerk from their lies or bigoted posts, but it’s pretty safe to say they lie(or at least lied, no gaurantee of future lies of course) and have acted like a bigot.
Summary: I don’t know enough about a person from internet exchanges to say they’re a total jerk, but I can certainly say they’re a jerk about things I’ve seen them be a jerk about.
Enjoy,
Steven
Even if he could have painted a fairly accurate picture of what the internet was going to become. Honestly, how many people from the internet do you think that Vonnegut has met? Or at the time of that quote, how many long time pen pals did he form real life relationships with?
And I don’t remember ever coming across Hemmingway on IRC. Sure we put up facades. We all do that just about every day, but the internet is a totally different beast altogether. The mask we choose to put on in real life has its own ramifications that we can not run from. If we decide to act in a certain manner online, there aren’t any consequences that can arise from it. You can simply click the “x” at the top right of your window and it all goes away, but you can’t do that in real life. If you don’t have to be honest online, then how is one supposed to get to know you? Sure that is the extreme case. Even if you are yourself online, no one will ever be able to simulate day to day life via the internet. My physical presence is part of who I am, but isn’t going to attach itself to my written word.
I know I haven’t posted that much for people to get an idea of it, but I still think everyone’s personal opinions will be nothing like what I am. Do I really come off like a 6’6" black man from Jersey who is into ren fests, is a published poet, and is currently in school for computer animation? I’m willing to wager that the image I paint in people’s heads is far from what I am. It has always been very difficult to gain the respect of others. My size and stature seem to intimidate people. When that happens my point is often clouded or not taken seriously.
When I’m on the internet though, I’m just as equal as everyone else and my word is what gets noticed, not myself. I therefore am a totally different person.