Zebonka12 wrote: It is a bit of a double-ended pointy stick, I think. One can go as far as saying "this is just the internet, you don't really know me". And yet, in a forum like this one, we're actually totally capable of cultivating whatever image of ourselves that we want to. I learned this the hard way when that idiot Nester started following me from thread to thread complaining about things I'd said. "I wasn't being serious", I complained; but how was he to know?
On the point of Amazon thinking Bob's a jerk, or vice versa; there is the possibility that this isn't just a breakdown in communication, or two people 'not really knowing each other'. They might genuinely feel that way if they'd met in person and been stuck talking to each other at a party. These things happen. I've been stuck talking with enough university students to know this painfully well.
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I think of forum participation as the rough equivalent of the kind of communication that goes on at a pub or coffee shop between a bunch of regulars and semi-regulars loosely bound by some common interest. Laughing, arguing, commiserating, learning from each other etc. I expect most people are guided by what is essentially a pretty straight forward social impulse fairly consistently whether it's in person or on the internet. If you're motivated to cultivate an overly narrow or false image of yourself, you're probably going to be motivated to do it across social situations, and I don't think most or even many people are. Of course I'm not intending to minimize the very particular communication we have or the very particular information we glean face to face, or to imply that online interactions are the same as being in someone's physical presence, but it's worth noting that real life impressions can have their own way of obscuring information too.
If you were tasked with putting together a Queenzone (or some other forum you participate in) dinner and pub night for yourself and say seven others, with the goal of putting together people who would find each other interesting and fun and for whom the conversation and laughter would flow, do you not think you could do that with a fair degree of eventual accuracy? I think you could.
Continuing to forcibly volunteer Bob & Amazon (thanks guys!) for these points, I doubt they would have had precisely that argument in person. There are strong motivations and instincts not to be yelling and snarking and insulting each other face to face, and there are non verbal cues that likely would have softened and reshaped the exchange to at least some degree. But with those filters gone, did we necessarily get something wildly inaccurate? Honestly in this case my guess is we just got a snappy short cut to the fact that fundamentally these are two people who don't have enough common ground and affinity to enjoy extensive interaction. We all have those. There's not much practical difference to hanging out around somebody for a year and figuring that out, or figuring it out in a few weeks, or a few days, or even a few posts on a discussion forum.
GratefulFan