Blogs, conversations and acrimony
August 1st, 2004 by Bill
Years ago I read a book about the psychology of the Internet. One of it’s main points was that online, where there is a degree of anonymity (meaning it’s not a face-to-face personal encounter), we’re much more willing to say things we otherwise would not.
There were good things and bad things about this. One of the good things was efficiency. People tended to get to the point and deal with it much more quickly because less time was spent on social niceties.
The down side was the knee-jerk response which led to misunderstandings and acrimony. Flame wars, as they are called.
On bulletin boards, one of the tips for effective use was to pause before responding to a post. If it angered you, wait a day before responding because quite often your initial reaction was misguided or more extreme than warranted. And often, you would find you had misread the post or the post could have been taken in several ways.
The idea was that an initial response, often emotional, was often not the right one. It could be wrong or, even if right, not very effective and could lead a discussion down a path to a dead end rather than towards a productive, on-going conversation.
I think about this when I think about blogs. One of their key strengths is immediacy. Something goes up on one blog and very quickly a response is up on another. The conversation is started and progressing. The downside of immediacy, however, is it can lead to misreadings, knee-jerk responses and misunderstandings.
I think this is why in the minds of some people, those people unfamiliar with the scope of blogs, they are associated with cranky people who just want to blather angrily at the world. In some cases, this is probably true. But it’s hardly true of the majority. At least, not that I’ve seen.
I was thinking about this when I was a looking at ChangeThis and their Read and Pass blog. I was mulling over what they hope to do. How do people who write blogs juggle the aspect of immediacy with the need for thoughtful conversations? I can’t speak for others, but I know that for myself I can ramble off the top of my head quite well. The problem is it’s not informed, it’s unstructured and off ill-considered. If I read something that annoys me, my first response is to tap out some sarcastic response.
For the most part, I’ve managed to curtail this. But at the same time, I’ve seen many conversations on blogs that I’ve wanted to toss my two cents into. I do, but generally I’m the last one in and the conversation has already moved elsewhere because, for me, a thoughtful response requires at least some time to formulate.
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