Congeries of cross connected concepts
Via Brothers Judd we have this little quote:
According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.
I suspect this varies quite a bit depending on the depth of relationship between people. E.g., people who know me presume that anything I write or say is sarcastic and cynical, which is 90% accurate. On the other hand, interpreting random the writings of unknown people is undoubtedly much more difficult.
I suspect, though, that another fact affecting this is the loss of shared world view. Sarcasm and other non-literal meanings / moods require a shared world view so that statements can be viewed as outside of it (which is presumably why children understand irony before sarcasm, because irony depends only on its own internal structure, not reference to externalities).
Not only are there far more people interacting directly via text, but they are from a much wider variety of societies. Even in Anglospheric society, the loss of canonical texts makes a shared understanding more difficult. As icing on the cake, we have the standard Internet epigram “There is no belief so bizarre that you can’t find adherents somewhere on the Internet”. Nothing is guaranteed to be sufficiently out of bounds to be interpreted non-literally by everyone.
One is left wondering, however, why recovery from such errors is so uncommon. One of the things I find most congenial about the Brothers Judd is not that people don’t misinterpret, nor that they never write mean or nasty things, but that when such things do occur, there is an effort to recover and explain rather than (like a bad sitcom) compound the error with ever more intemperate language or demands of conformity1. So there must be more than simply lack of understanding fueling the flame wars. Perhaps it is the asynchronous nature, where a person has time to work himself in to a highly charged state, undistracted by cues that would be present in physical interaction. Or it could just be that people send off flame e-mail for the same reason they yell at their television when it doesn’t do what they want.
1 Because one solution to the shared world view problem is to require a very specific and fixed world view, ostracizing any who have a different one. While this is much more prevalent on the left than the right blogosphere, it is hardly unknown in the latter. On the other hand, one might argue that even the Brothers Judd is highly conformist, but at a more abstract level of requring politeness, logic and facts than than specific viewpoints based on those.
| cjm Friday, 17 February 2006 at 11:17 |  |
it all comes down to the probability of consequences for one’s words and actions. for the most part, flame wars preclude a physical confrontation and so people let their id’s loose (ala Forbidden Planet).
| Annoying Old Guy Friday, 17 February 2006 at 11:37 | |
That’s probably part of it as well. I remember a study done a decade or two ago, when e-mail was still a relatively new thing. They did an illegal pharmacuetical use survey on the same population base, one anonymous physical mail and another via e-mail. The percentage of people admitting to illegal activity was higher in the e-mail survey. People were more willing to admit it via non-anonymous e-mail than in an untraceable physical survey.
| cjm Friday, 17 February 2006 at 14:29 | |
interesting behavior there. funny how you can derive information indirectly.
| Jeff Guinn Saturday, 18 February 2006 at 04:39 | |
CJM said what I was going to; flame wars happen for the same reason some people drive like such jerks. They feel like they are immune from actual retribution.
BTW — Brothers Judd is, or has become, far more conformist. AOG is fully aware of how inflammatory and insulting my comments are, which means its either that, or failure to agree, that caused my recent banishment.
Although I’ll probably still be reading. I learn too much from many of your posts, AOG, to pass up the opportunity.
| cjm Saturday, 18 February 2006 at 14:06 | |
jg: i had noticed your absence but didn’t realize you had been banned. i am guessing you are joking when you refer to your style as “inflammatory”.
my “philosophy” regarding BrosJ is to make my point once, defend it once or twice and then leave it alone. it’s too much work trying to convince people of things, and i just don’t care if they agree with me or not. my goal is to become more knowledgeable, and more correct in the knowledge i already posess — not to act as some kind of guardian of the “truth”.
| Annoying Old Guy Saturday, 18 February 2006 at 16:50 | |
Oh man. If Jeff’s banned, I must be hanging by a thread. Although I had noticed that you, Jeff, did seem to get OJ much hotter under the collar than I did, although I could never quite figure out why. Our viewpoints were not, it seemed to me, sufficiently different to account for it.
| Annoying Old Guy Saturday, 18 February 2006 at 21:04 | |
I wrote that comment and just a short time later managed to get my first deleted comment over on this post. Basically, I analogized the antipathy some people feel toward Muslims to OJ’s view on witches, in contrast to his standard claims of racism. I’m sure if I called him on it, he’d say I was comparing witches to Muslims, rather than comparing prejudices.
Ah well, as cjm points out, life is to short to spend much of it on futile efforts.
| cjm Sunday, 19 February 2006 at 12:54 | |
i suspect he is cleaning house in preparation for his book coming out. i will be surprised if there isn’t an onslaught of comments in the amazon reviews that make some of judd’s more intemperate views more widely known — to the detriment of the book’s success. maybe not, but the internet has a long memory.
| Annoying Old Guy Sunday, 19 February 2006 at 14:27 | |
I am not sure I can believe that. It seems that banning people who know where the comments are buried is exactly wrong approach if he’s worried about that.
| Jeff Guinn Sunday, 19 February 2006 at 18:42 | |
I have a different take.
What got me banned is a post I made with respect to the evangelism shlamozzle at the AF Academy.
I suggested that appeals to free speech (which is the only thing the guidelines mentioned) missed the point. First, there is no such thing as free speech in the military; however, there is equal speech. If you allow Maj Dobson his say to the Lieutenants, then Maj Dawkins also gets a whack. Instead, the point is Article VI of the constitution, which prohibits religious test for office. (Since I don’t want to belabor this, here is a more extensive discussion).
Orrin completely deleted the contents of my post, and replaced it with the Constitution’s preamble.
I’m fully aware that it is his blog, and it is well within the bounds of ethical behavior for him to delete posts. It is getting rather closer to those bounds when the posts he deletes are replies to someone else, and even closer still when he deletes a post containing nothing other than a statement noting the previous post’s deletion.
But, IMHO, it is entirely over the ethical line for him to surreptitiously alter the contents of my post, and putting the result over my name. It compounds that failure by deleting my replies noting the changes.
So I took it up with him via email — and was rewarded with obfuscation and abuse in return for asking why he chose what was effectively a lie over other, more ethical avenues. And I have had every (of three) “test” posts deleted since, no matter how benign the content.
On the same day, Bret’s entire mathematical analysis of demographic trends (now here) in Europe was deleted. Most blogs don’t get something of that quality in their entire existence.
Orrin started doing this last June. First with deletions, then surreptitious alterations.
I really can’t fathom why, except for one wild guess: either he has become a Christian Reconstructionist, or has finally started acting on those beliefs.
Among the CR movement, Article VI is anathema, because it repudiates their core assumptions.
But, like I say, it is only a guess, and probably a lame one at that.
Sorry to blather on, but I am singularly disappointed. Brothers Judd (which contains nearly 100% of all my posts ever) has greatly widened my horizons. As much as the articles he posts, that is due to learning just as much from you, AOG, as well as guys like David Cohen.
| cjm Thursday, 23 February 2006 at 18:02 | |
try not to let it bug you too much, and keep reading :) not sure what makes him act funny — it has happened a couple of times to me, but not as severley as you have described. hopefully judd will come to realize that the real draw for his site is the quality of the readers/posters, and he will stop being so caprecious.
| Annoying Old Guy Thursday, 23 February 2006 at 18:13 | |
Oh, OJ has clearly stated that multiple times. On the other hand, we all understand that ultimately it is OJ’s virtual coffee shop, to do with as he pleases.
