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| Tuesday May 27th 2003 |
Forums.. Are ya for 'em? | |
My favourite forum has just been through one of its worse times ever. (Not the AsianTS.com forum, another one!) Now it seems to have gotten its act together again, but for a while it was a pretty nasty place. (Good thing I wasn't here for the most of it, as I would have made things a lot worse.) Anyway it got me to thinking about the special make up of forum communities and what makes them tick, if indeed they do! When we talk together in person we can make our opinions known with a minimum of bother. Apart from the actual sounds we make we have body language and mental assumptions of our audience. The words we make sound different depending on what we want them to mean. Answers to questions and reactions to statements fly thick and fast in a live situation. Not so with the frustrating medium of internet communities. One of the biggest problems is that we don't really know our audience. We can't tell if they are upset or enamoured with our writings. We can't see how they react, and because we don't know them and they can't hurt us we often don't care! Compounded with this is the extra effort we have to make with our choice of words. If I look very happy, and I say 'I feel OK', the person I'm talking to will know that I am more than just 'OK'! This doesn't translate through the intangible medium of forums. But not only can the strength of our feelings be misunderstood, so can whole statements be mis-conceived. How many times have you read an answer to a post and thought 'but you've completely missed the point, fool.' And gone back later and thought 'Hmmm... I can see how they wouldn't have got that. Silly me!' So all of these things can inspire frustration, and a more simplified use of words that doesn't adequately describe our true feelings. Also the refuge of sarcasm or irony is out the window! Firstly because we don't know our audience well enough. Secondly they probably don't know how we are used to explaining things, and lastly because it just looks crap on paper to all but those that really know us! On a forum with many posters, egos often get the better of us, and there is a constant round of frustrating one-upmanship that usually involves just two people but which maybe 100 have to wade through! When I'm going one on one with some fool who refuses to see my point of view we can waste pages of tireless and mean spirited diatribes trying to make our points and winning our wars of popular opinion. Unfortunately this is as dull as shit to most people, but worse it deters others from posting more moderate thoughts. So my next point is that sometimes we hit the extremities at the cost of moderation. I can re-read a post and think 'Bloody hell. I went over the top there. That's not what I meant at all!' But worse, and this is me unfortunately, I don't even re-read most of the crap I write, and I stumble from one post to the next adding rubbish which whilst provocative is not really useful! So what is 'useful'? The points of an argument that you consider salient may not be the ones I would employ in literal combat. Have you ever had a chat with someone and tried to get them to talk about what you think is important, but they keep waffling on about stuff that matters to them. This ends up being a non converstation because no-one is listening, and to have a chat you have to have an audience of at least one, right? The worst of other posters often brings out the worst in us, too. To such an extent where middle ground is non existant and extremist views are a no mans land of volatile verbeage. It is amazing what we dare to say when the keyboard doesn't fight back. Is there such a thing as forum rage where we lash out at strangers for invading our pesonal space or cyber-turf? Well, maybe there is. If you are waiting for the answer to a post from a particular person the frustration wells inside and when they finally respond with what you knew they would anyway you can lash out at them with more verve than is probably needed. And what about the 'bio-rythems' of forums. It occured to me that these hysterical bouts of nastiness come in waves. Everyone feels mean and selfish at the same time. Then there are times when even our foes are magnanimous and concede points that make you think that they aren't quite so bad after all. But the most valuable way to hold fire in the face of misunderstanding or disagreement is always knowing a little about that person on a physical level. The posters you meet are harder to be mean to. That's because we make an effort to understand the people we know. We instinctively want to like the people we know face to face. It's easy to slam dunk insults on anonymous forum participants with their anonymous names and locations. It's wrong and selfish of me, but I often have less respect for people with silly avatars and daft names. It makes me think that they are silly and daft people because this is all I have to go on. When I see an elephant waving at me and a name I don't understand it is a lot harder to respect what that person is trying to say. The cooler the name and avatar the cooler person in my book. Is that wrong? I don't want to take this too personally, but the people who inspire my respect look good. I mean to say a rat is a rat right? ;-) | ||
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