--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu <noozg...@...> wrote: <snip> > Whatever happened to casual conversation?
Gee, there's plenty of it here. Not sure how you've managed to miss it. > We seem to be in an age of "exactitude" where everybody so > concerned that they may be wrong about something they spend > time looking stuff up on Google before they post. You seem to be reading an entirely different forum than I am. > Imagine if we were trying to have a conversation around a > table in restaurant or bar this way. Everyone would be > jumping on their laptop, tablet or smartphone before they > said a word. What more often happens, here and in live conversations, is that someone will say something that someone else finds dubious, and one or the other or both will check the Web to see if it can be verified. Of course, live conversations have a very different dynamic than those on electronic forums. In a live conversation, you get a response right away, whereas on an electronic forum there's usually a delay. So Web- checking tends to interrupt the flow of live conversations, but not of electronic ones. Several participants here would *benefit* from doing their Web checking before they post, though. They tend to spout off without having their facts in hand. And there's no point in having a discussion about, say, why over half of U.S. adults are taking prescription antidepressants, or why the U.S. has spent over half its GDP since WWII on defense, or how Obama managed to beat Hillary in a landslide in the primaries, if none of these is actually the case (all three--and many more-- from just one participant here). You can't have rational conversations when you have folks like this participating unless you have a way to determine what the real facts are. Of course, sometimes it doesn't help to check the Web. In searching for information about a <spit> feminist blogger, one person here found a photo of her on a blog accompanying a post trashing Obama, and assumed it was her blog and her post. This person then made a post on FFL trashing the <spit> feminist blogger at length for being an Obama-hating <spit> Hillary-lover. Unfortunately, it was the blog and the post of a rather well-known male rightwinger, and his post was trashing the <spit> feminist blogger for having made a pro-Obama, anti-Palin post on *her* blog. Doing Google searches is pretty much useless, in other words, if you don't actually read the material you find.
