Glen E. P. Ropella wrote: > Even worse, we've all become a bunch of bean counters (or at least > lawyers), reading what people _write_ rather than listening to what they > _mean_. I reckon that what many `real-life' individuals or groups often _mean_ is a subconscious impulse: to impose their personal set of issues on others and get people to go their way, so as to make their life better. They _mean_ to stick others in their mud, their group think, their business goals, etc. Joe's a good guy! (Where `good' is defined by `amenable to our needs'.) >> > This comes from several features. >> > >> > 1) Space I can communicate with people distributed over virtually any >> > geographic region without waiting for them to come to the same >> > location as I. >> > > Yes, but consider the _quality_ (a.k.a. character) of your > communications. Can you really _know_ someone who grew up and still > lives in Holland or Taiwan? Are you really communicating with them? Or > is your communication limited to some common denominator? > > > Sure, it's fun to engage in heavily abstracted dialog with your heavily > abstracted friends; but, of what _use_ is such behavior other than to > make you happy or to allow you to exploit? I'd say social networks mediated by technology can be interesting _because_ participants don't have to be intimate. Discussants who might not even be able to tolerate one another in person can find common ground. Take all of those mere common denominator discussions and contrast them against the alternative which is that they might not occur at all given personal idiosyncrasies, or geographic or cultural boundaries. I suggest redefining `common denominator' to as `dimensions of intersection' and remember there are billions of people all with different dimensions.
Perhaps it would be better if we could and did try infinitely hard to understand all of the details of all kinds of people, but the fact is almost no one does that, at least without having some professional responsibility to do it or appear to do it. As for "heavily abstracted dialog" it sounds a lot like scientific analysis and peer review to me. And as for exploitation, I can see your point, but the reverse can also be true. Manipulative people with professions like preachers and teachers rely on the fact that they have a captive audience that will confirm to a certain set of polite behaviors to make verbal communication work at all. In e-mail, such `presenters' can get shredded in short order. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
