Real Life vs. Online Persona. (Anthracite you are personally invited)

Great Debates
61

For those of you who keep saying that posts-as-correspondence only gives you one-dimensional images of who the other person is:

What did you have in mind as a face-to-face comparison? I’ve got a roommate I know less well than I know some of you folks. He pays his share of the rent, I pay mine, we say “hi” in the hall. I know he has a sister and works, or did work, as a paralegal. That’s about it.

I’d know more about you if you lived with me AND sat down for an hour or so every evening and spoke to me from the heart. In real life that has only happened between me and my girlfriends. And I met most of them online and had most of those kinds of conversations online initially.

I dunno, I just don’t get it. I could be working next to you in the next office over, rooming with you (as I said), or going to the same school classroom with you. I don’t see it breeding any more communication than I tend to experience or establish online.

Maybe I just don’t know how to talk to people :frowning:

62

** Ahunter, ** it’s more like comparing the conversations we have here to having the same conversations in person, not a comparison between the conversations we have here vs. what you describe.

63

No, I agree with AHunter. It’s been said that if you talk to someone online for a week, it’s almost as if you’ve known them for a few months, since communication itself is that much more powerful. I don’t know the people I work with as well as I know some of you.

64

dantheman, I knew you were going to say exactly that.
since I know you SO well…

65

Stop flirting with me so shamelessly, vanilla, especially in such a serious thread.

[sub]ha, bet you didn’t know i’d say that[/sub]

66

I’m going to try one more time to make my point then I’ll bow out if it’s not clear because I’m out of ideas on how to re-phrase it.

I agree you can’t understand a person fully through text-based debate on a few issues. My point is that you CAN understand their position on the issue. If a person takes a pro-life standpoint in a debate about reproductive rights, unless they’re specifically playing devil’s advocate, I posit that you CAN assert that the person, the RL person, is pro-life.

The whole picutre is incomplete, but the pieces you CAN see, they’re crystal clear.

Enjoy,
Steven

67

Well sure, but that’s not really in question though, IMO. Obviously anybody who reads what I say on issue Foo knows beyond question whether I’m (at that moment) pro-Foo or anti-Foo. But my positions on issues are not ME. They’re only a small part of me. You can know that I’m anti-abortion and pro-gun and a Christian by reading my posts, but that’s a far cry from knowing who I am or what I’m like or how I’m likely to react to a given situation.

What you see of a person on this board is only a narrow view of them. You can’t claim to know somebody from interactions on a message board any more than you can say you know New York because you’ve seen some movies and don’t like pigeons.

You can know that there is an Empire State Building, that Times Square is busy, that there used to be a World Trade Center and there are some subways, but knowing ABOUT the city is not the same as KNOWING the city.

Knowing some things about Joe_Cool is not the same as knowing the person who calls himself Joe_Cool when he’s posting.

68

I’m not sure I can think of a better definition for “who I am” than the sum of my beliefs with a side of genetic info. If you buy the premise “I think, therefore I am” then you’re pretty much locked into the definition of self as a collection of ideals.

The interactions between these beliefs, and occasionally interaction with the genetic info, determines how I will behave. I’ll agree that the interactions can be complex, so knowing your belief on the issue of abortion doesn’t allow me to extrapolate and see if you’d be an abortion clinic bomber. To do that I’d need to know your beliefs on the sanctity of life, your beliefs on the rightness of law, and numerous things. It would take a vast amount of communication to determine all the beliefs that may combine to influence a certain decision. I’m not sure it’s possible.

Still if Person A says “I hate niggers, and all black people is niggers.” I maintain that Person B is perfectly justified in responding. “You’re a racist fuckwad.”
**

Knowing the beliefs Joe_Cool espouses on the Internet DOES translate into knowing what position Joe_Cool in real life holds(at that moment). Either that or it means Joe_Cool lies when he’s on the Internet.

Enjoy,
Steven

69

True, Mtgman, but (as I learned to my dismay) “Knowing the beliefs Joe_Cool [overtly] espouses on the Internet” does not translate into “knowing the beliefs Joe_Cool may or may not have that are often held by people who also hold the beliefs that Joe_Cool has espoused on any given thread.” And in this case, it gets personal – because several of us misread one thing Joe_Cool the particular poster here was saying in another thread for a blanket endorsement of a point of view that Joe_Cool explicitly denied he holds.

I’m a Christian who believes in the Resurrection. Knowing that and only that about me, what are my opinions about gay marriage, abortion, the school prayer issue, etc.? (I guarantee you’d get at least half of them wrong.)

70

I agree Polycarp and I don’t think I ever tried to extrapolate position on one issue from a stated position on another(in fact I totally raked december over the coals for doing exactly that in one thread). I’ve said, a couple of times, that it doesn’t extrapolate to other beliefs. I feel a tusk, that doesn’t mean you’re a walrus, you might be an elephant, or a saber-toothed tiger for all I know. All it means is, you have a tusk. Your tusk may even be different from other types of tusks, but things that apply to all tusks, still apply to yours.

Let’s stick with the racist angle, it’s pretty easy.
Fact: Person A holds racist opinions against Africans/African-Americans.

Fact: Some people who hold racist opinions against Africans/African-Americans also hold racist opinions against Asians/Asian-Americans.

Fact: Person A has no problem with Asians/Asian-Americans. They have never explicitly stated this in the conversations other parties on the Internet have to draw from.

Definition: People who hold racist opinions are racists. This may not be the best definition, but we’ll use it for our example. Other definitions may only include people who act on thier racist opinions to oppress the group they are prejudiced against. The one for this scenario does not.

Drawing the conclusion that Person A hates Asians/Asian-Americans is improper and I do not support such illogical inferences.

However, drawing the conclusion that Person A is a racist is perfectly proper. Keeping to the proper forms of logical deduction and reasoning is pretty safe. Person A may change their opinions, or the definition may change at some point, either of these changes would invalidate the assertion, but until that point, it’s valid and true.

The point of the OP was that inferences based upon communication through computer-based methods were necessariarlly invalid because of the nature of the medium. My point has been that, given accurate communication of the position, the conclusions CAN BE valid and true. It depends on the methodology used to reach those conclusions. Logical deductive reasoning with agreed-upon or standard definitions of the terms involved CAN reach true conclusions about a person.

It’s just that so few people are trained in logical deductive reasoning that you see wild jumps like you’re trying to tempt me into with your last statement. I don’t support those wild jumps, and I never have. I simply would like to point out the presence of those wild jumpers doesn’t invalidate the logical, properly reasoned jumps.

Enjoy,
Steven

71

The point is that you don’t know the sum of anyone’s beliefs. You know only a few things that we believe about a few topics that get asked about on SD. To think that you know somebody based on that is utterly ridiculous. You can tell a lot of things about someone from their writing, to be sure, but again, to know things about somebody is not to know them.

72

I give up. It is apparently impossible to communicate via the Internet, but not because it’s impossible to write your opinions down clearly. It’s impossible because people apparently don’t read.

sigh

Enjoy,
Steven

73

Heck Joe_ may even be _Warm sometimes…

74

Why should we privilege RL, whatever that is, over cyberspace? In each place, I show you facets of who I am. In each place, context matters and helps determine how I present myself and how I interact. Is the rest of my life more real? This seems like a pretty essentialist stance. I’m not sure that I have some inner, core self that is more like “the real me” out there than in here. Yes, you learn certain data out there, but I think it would be an error to assume that what you know of me in real life has more construct or face validity than what you get in here.

75

Why do we call face-to-face “Real Life”? Isn’t internet communication part of real life too?

76

Yeah, it is a bad slip that I make all the time, ironically. I guess “in person” would be better.

77

It’s just been impressed into our brains so often by people who are not online as much as some of us that “internet” does not equal “real life.” And as much as we explain that the two most certainly are one and the same, the technophobes in our lives don’t always want to believe it. Those of us who have met people from online have probably found it tough to explain the situation to those who aren’t online, who more often than not believe all people online are wackos, killers, and psychopaths.

78

LOL. Great line.:smiley:

This has been fascinating to read. Now, I need to get back to those categories so I can see where I belong.:cool:

79

Just a note… I was watching Dr. Phil yesterday (and whatever you think of his entertainment value or presentation, the substance of what he says is excellent, btw) and the show was about body language. According to the statistic he quoted (without attribution…it’s TV, not the SDMB)

So, if he’s right, then our interactions here are just a tiny fraction of our true selves. He said something on the show to the effect that the 7% is what you’d “type on a page” and the rest is all in our facial expressions and body language.

And that is why some of us think it’s actually silly to believe that any of us “knows” much of anything about who our fellow members truly are. There is just way, way too much missing information.

93%, in fact. :smiley:

80

funny, I’d always figured Stoid for a republican…