They love to take things the wrong way, and damn you for all eternity if you put just one word wrong.
My opinion here is that you're being a little bit harsh. With an online medium, there isn't (generally speaking) the immediacy of communication. You don't have the flow back and forth of ideas and thoughts; it's more stilted, more delays. There's also the lack of non-verbal cues - the tone of voice; the body language; the facial expression. All of these add an immense amount of information that too many people simply don't appreciate.
So people read something, and the tendency is to read into it what is already there in one's mind. I'm guilty of the same thing: I greeted a friend on MSN with "*doffs hat*"; she responded with a quote from the Two Ronnies. The line following that quote in the sketch was "Get lost" - and I was in a state of mind where I couldn't simply shrug off the possibility that she intended it in that particular way. She didn't, of course; it was just an off-the-cuff quote that was triggered by my greeting. We fill in the missing information in ways that are wildly off the mark, because we expect (at a low level) the information to be there ... and that leads to the misinterpretations and misunderstandings.
So I don't think it's that people love to take things the wrong way, as it is that there are nuances missing from a text-based medium (and even from an audio-only medium, such as the 'phone), leading to unintentional misinterpretations. The end result is as if people love to take things the wrong way, yes ... but I doubt that the majority of people deliberately set out to do so.
And of course, things that make us uncomfortable, like this post, automatically put us in a frame of mind where we're more likely to read nuances that aren't there, because we're uncomfortable, so our minds expect them ...
I'm rambling a bit, and there are probably some things I've overlooked in this stream of consciousness ... just thoughts to ponder (as if there aren't already enough in this post!) None of this is meant as a personal attack, just thoughts that have been bubbling around for a little while.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: I know I know I know.....
Date: 2010-03-05 05:00 am (UTC)My opinion here is that you're being a little bit harsh. With an online medium, there isn't (generally speaking) the immediacy of communication. You don't have the flow back and forth of ideas and thoughts; it's more stilted, more delays. There's also the lack of non-verbal cues - the tone of voice; the body language; the facial expression. All of these add an immense amount of information that too many people simply don't appreciate.
So people read something, and the tendency is to read into it what is already there in one's mind. I'm guilty of the same thing: I greeted a friend on MSN with "*doffs hat*"; she responded with a quote from the Two Ronnies. The line following that quote in the sketch was "Get lost" - and I was in a state of mind where I couldn't simply shrug off the possibility that she intended it in that particular way. She didn't, of course; it was just an off-the-cuff quote that was triggered by my greeting. We fill in the missing information in ways that are wildly off the mark, because we expect (at a low level) the information to be there ... and that leads to the misinterpretations and misunderstandings.
So I don't think it's that people love to take things the wrong way, as it is that there are nuances missing from a text-based medium (and even from an audio-only medium, such as the 'phone), leading to unintentional misinterpretations. The end result is as if people love to take things the wrong way, yes ... but I doubt that the majority of people deliberately set out to do so.
And of course, things that make us uncomfortable, like this post, automatically put us in a frame of mind where we're more likely to read nuances that aren't there, because we're uncomfortable, so our minds expect them ...
I'm rambling a bit, and there are probably some things I've overlooked in this stream of consciousness ... just thoughts to ponder (as if there aren't already enough in this post!) None of this is meant as a personal attack, just thoughts that have been bubbling around for a little while.