291–300 of 406 posts
It's the internet. When you talk to people online, it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens. But it's much easier to talk online, so people get the wrong impression. You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There's also the interesting…
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There's definitely an aspect of "dehumanization," when it comes to remote communication (not just the Internet, but I think store-and-forward leaches the most humanity, compared to realtime). It's the having time to consider responses, that I think actually makes it more difficult to accept the person on the other end as "human," more than the physical separation. You can see this in formal debates, where the emotion…
The dehumanisation of online dialogue is interesting. Is it because of 'anonymity' or is there more at play?
A lot of it happens in out of band posts like these.
It seems to happen less in interactive (i.e. chat, etc.). Make no mistake, it absolutely happens there.
But not as much as in async posts (I don't think).
I don't think it happens much at all with video.
Most of it is surrounded by context (or lack of). How difficult it is to communicate (typing like this is not easy, and certainly not for the impatient).
I have to keep telling folks when they get that Look in their face because of what someone said or didn't say over email or an instant message to not judge on that. If it's that important to you, CALL them. TALK to them, you simply can not rely on typed conversations for anything that impacts you emotionally.
"What do you think they meant by that?" Oh no.
It's just an awful medium.
I've been interested in this general question for a while. Years ago I ran a startup that connected strangers for spoken conversations. After tests, we kept it to audio only - no video, no text, no profile info. That was what kept the conversations civil. Add video, or text, or profiles and behavior changed (basically became a dating site). Results: F-M talks were only about 10% longer than F-F and M-M talks. (Longer…
Wasn’t there a moderately popular audio-only social media startup a couple years ago?
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The dehumanisation of online dialogue is interesting. Is it because of 'anonymity' or is there more at play?
I think it's an exaggeration of the "city effect": the denser an environment is, the more likely it is that people who see you out to talk to you are going to have a negative agenda, because everyone else is trying to keep their head down. If you meet a stranger at the North Pole, where you're the only two humans around, you're going to talk to them. If you meet a stranger in a remote village, you're probably going t…
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No, I don't think it's anonymity. You can see absolutely rabid, hateful, unhinged things people post under their real names on Facebook, LinkedIn, nextdoor.
There is a kind of 'bubble effect' where people are wrapped in their own world. A similar effect can be seen once people drive a car and there's a behavior change towards other people on the road, and 'road rage' becoming a thing.
If I was in a grocery store and someone "cut me off" and forced me to slow down because they misjudged the timing, I would think nothing of it. I certainly wouldn't make an obscene gesture and shout at them.
I wish it would be normal scrolling.
It's not only the scrolling that isn't normal, I got dizzy when some image-like thingies starting flowing around the screen, had to close the browser tab at once. Maybe the page wanted to tell something, but whatever it is they could have done it via pure text form, that's what reading is all about.
Yeah, but maybe not for the reasons you think. I'm not sure the reasons are a priori discoverable, although they can be revealed by statistics. Or to put it another way "is it something in the water, or new car smell?" So something happens in groups which amplifies similarities.
The State of Washington collects voting results by precinct, and precinct sizes are typically in the hundreds of voters.
* http://athena.m3047.net/elections/36th-dist-colored.html
The distributions are not normal.
* http://athena.m3047.net/elections/dist-not-normal/distributi...
What got me started with this was King County making their canvass available in digital form. At the time I was feeling bored and like I needed some additional exercise, and publishing a quarterly zine and knocking on doors and delivering it to everyone in my precinct seemed like a natural thing to do; I had the thought that I might be able to see some effect, of some kind, in the canvass for my precinct (just a rather arbitrary notion, I like measuring things). As I kept doing this over a number of years it gained the attention of the established political order.
Anyway I started clustering the results because I had the software, and hammer... nail.
* http://athena.m3047.net/elections/perl/data-index.cgi?imagem...
One of Cialdini's "weapons of influence" is "liking", and again that may not mean exactly what you think it does. There was contemporaneous research going on about this. One of the notions was that you would be more likely to sway people who were "like" you. So where do you find these people? Well, maybe in precincts which vote similarly to yours. So this raises an issue for politicians: maybe they should identify people who are on their side in places where they are weak and prevail on those people to talk to their neighbors. Just a thought. But the reality was that trying to get for instance a "90%-er" to go to actively meet and court "40%-ers" was like asking them to lick dog vomit. On the other hand I used cluster correlations to identify an "like" precinct in another part of the City and took a walk; I was shocked at how similar it was in terms of physical features. I know, I know, confirmation bias.
* http://athena.m3047.net/elections/perl/cluster-correlate.cgi...
I suppose it does take a certain mindset to make knocking on stranger's doors a good time; and I don't know that that is a good idea everywhere. But I like talking to strangers, hearing their stories, and flipping each other shit. It's a skill which has served me well in my life.
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> For instance I was on a long haul flight earlier this year, and my neighbour told me everything about her divorce. Like a kind of therapy. this gets old fast, it's like being emotionally vomited on.
Only if the person is unable to tell if you’re actually engaged or just humoring them. Most people are actually pretty good at reading social cues.
I remember talking to a doctor once (in a social situation). We were talking about non doctor things and he mentioned that most people find out he's a doctor and start talking about medical issues.
I think this happens to some people (doctors, lawyers, police).
And to a smaller extent it happens to all of us (sometimes). Older people might talk about divorce, or their operations, or their kids.