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I had an interesting conversation earlier today. Let's say that we are in a small team, maybe five or six people. One person comes to work sad, upset. Nothing

I had an interesting conversation earlier today. Let's say that we are in a small team, maybe five or six people. One person comes to work sad, upset. Nothing has to be said. We stop what we're doing and help, right? We're not schmucks. We take time to listen, we reassure the person they're important, we celebrate their being part of our group. Now let's expand the scale several orders of magnitude and change the medium. We are now part of some online system: Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, whatever. There are tens of millions of people all in one big virtual room. Somebody mentions they are upset online. When we see something wrong or something we care about online, we type things in -- somewhere. We feel moved to act. Without something being said, the feelings don't exist to us. Does that really do what it's supposed to be doing? I know our motivations are good, and in many cases there are fine words provided, but are we really helping and caring about people simply because we're tweeting, retweeting, hashtagging, typing our personal stories in, and so forth? Is a text message saying "You are important to us" the same as going over to somebody, giving them a hug, having them look around the room at people who care about them, and telling them same thing? Assuming it is, there's huge bunch of people involved. On any one day, a million people could be living out some horrible experience because of something in their lives. How could we know unless they type things in, and what kinds of things are those folks going to feel if they type things in and nobody responds? I don't know which is worse. Maybe this type of communication is effectively showing our feelings and makes a difference -- and some people are just going to be ignored. Or maybe it's just so much self-stimulation, telling ourselves we're somehow doing something of importance when in fact all we're doing is making various people internet famous from day to day. We tech folks keep assuming that human communication somehow all boils down to bits moving over a wire. That may be a terribly lossy way of looking at it.

TimJYoung 8y ago
My wife and I had the same conversation a couple of days ago, and my wife made the exact same concise point: we keep telling ourselves that socializing online is the same as socializing in person, but it's a lie and the sooner that we stop, the better off we'll be.
eun34ntueon 8y ago
> are we really helping and caring about people simply because we're tweeting, retweeting, hashtagging, typing our personal stories in, and so forth? I think the people in the #metoo movement would say that, yes, simply getting the support of a retweet, or being able to tweet about an experience you had that hurt you is very useful and helpful.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  Let me tell you how my conversation happened. I stepped away from Twitter for several months. It was always such a dumpster fire. But I had been making these little funny memes about this book I did. Where would I put them? So I went back to see what it was like. (#info_ops hashtag if you're interested) I saw a couple of friends making a joke about gendered pronouns. I think people trying to control languages are silly, whether it's the Academy Franchaise or some other group. I love language. I collect idioms and quirks of various languages. It's emergent, unpredictable, uncontrollable. That's why it fascinates me. But this is not something I joke about because some people find the topic terribly serious. So I saw this tweet between a couple of friends talking about trying to remove gender. Without thinking much, I tweeted to them "Perhaps you should make a manual. Dang! Did it again!" and didn't think any more of it. I woke up this morning with 40+ notifications on Twitter. Holy cow! My hashtag thing has really taken off! Nope. It was thousands and thousands of people hearing my name first because of that joke. I apologized. I tried to mute the conversation. Finally I deleted the Tweet. Suddenly I was in the middle of a discussion around women in tech -- as an example of some jackass who could take things seriously enough. It still continues. I had quite a rant about it this morning. My friend pointed out that women in tech was a good cause. It is worthy of discussion. I agree. But this did not feel like a good experience to me. I had spent a lot of time trying entertain and engage people with little pictures and nobody cared. (Fine with me). But accidentally entering a conversation with a lot of emotion already loaded in? I had attention I didn't want. Yikes! We started talking about cause and effect. The interplay of emotions, intent, and actions among large groups. The internet is turning life from being active, participatory, and requiring observation to one of simple cause and effect. I create this stimulus. I get this result. I think #metoo has been a great thing. Way overdue. But you're answering a different question. You're answering the question about do some groups overall find social use out of the net? I hope so. I think they do. That's a top-down question and answer. My question was bottom-up and more in line with the article. Does reducing our communication to typing and bits moving around, overt and binary stimulus-response in a tightly-controlled pipe make for each person becoming a slightly better person the more it is done? Or is it fundamentally isolating and cruel, no matter what the content or who is doing it?
sudouser 8y ago
yep, I know some shut-ins that spend huge amount of time online... when chats started (Usenet), mostly geeks used it (myself included), the anti-socials!
magissima 8y ago
Maybe it was just the people I interacted with, but the more time I spent on twitter the more I became convinced that a lot of people were proud of being lonely and miserable. It was big part of why I quit.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  There's a danger here of stereotyping, taking people we disagree with, sticking them in a big bag, and then sticking a label on it. Having said that, there are emotionally ill people in the world. While some people focus on the psychopaths, there are also people who are depressed, sad, angry -- and want to be heard. They continue feeling this way no matter what your interaction with them is. If they are only 1% of the Twitter population, and Twitter has 100M subscribers, that's a million people. These people are emotionally injured and will remain so no matter how anybody responds. In fact, for some, interaction may exacerbate the problem. I don't know how you deal with that using automation. Seems like whatever you did would just make the problem worse.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    > there are emotionally ill people in the world. While some people focus on the psychopaths, there are also people who are depressed, sad, angry -- and want to be heard. They continue feeling this way no matter what your interaction with them is. I don't think I agree that emotionally ill people feel the same way no matter how others interact with them, if that's what you mean. In fact, how others interact can have a large effect, IME. These are human beings who, like you and me and all the others, have many complex factors guiding them; they are not automatons, not solely creations of their illness.
petra 8y ago
You're right. I remember reading some research comparing the emotional value of face-to-face, phone, and textual interactions. Text interactions got zero or near zero value. A phone interaction was better, but still of course, not as good as a face-to-face one. But i trully wonder if electronic communications(even assuming you can get high quality, face-to-face with eye contact and body language) are a valuable direction to go into for friendship ? maybe we humans aren't supposed to live in such huge groups, and do need the constancy of a tribe around us ?

TimJYoung 8y ago

My wife and I had the same conversation a couple of days ago, and my wife made the exact same concise point: we keep telling ourselves that socializing online is the same as socializing in person, but it's a lie and the sooner that we stop, the better off we'll be.

eun34ntueon 8y ago

> are we really helping and caring about people simply because we're tweeting, retweeting, hashtagging, typing our personal stories in, and so forth? I think the people in the #metoo movement would say that, yes, simply getting the support of a retweet, or being able to tweet about an experience you had that hurt you is very useful and helpful.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
Let me tell you how my conversation happened. I stepped away from Twitter for several months. It was always such a dumpster fire. But I had been making these little funny memes about this book I did. Where would I put them? So I went back to see what it was like. (#info_ops hashtag if you're interested) I saw a couple of friends making a joke about gendered pronouns. I think people trying to control languages are silly, whether it's the Academy Franchaise or some other group. I love language. I collect idioms and quirks of various languages. It's emergent, unpredictable, uncontrollable. That's why it fascinates me. But this is not something I joke about because some people find the topic terribly serious. So I saw this tweet between a couple of friends talking about trying to remove gender. Without thinking much, I tweeted to them "Perhaps you should make a manual. Dang! Did it again!" and didn't think any more of it. I woke up this morning with 40+ notifications on Twitter. Holy cow! My hashtag thing has really taken off! Nope. It was thousands and thousands of people hearing my name first because of that joke. I apologized. I tried to mute the conversation. Finally I deleted the Tweet. Suddenly I was in the middle of a discussion around women in tech -- as an example of some jackass who could take things seriously enough. It still continues. I had quite a rant about it this morning. My friend pointed out that women in tech was a good cause. It is worthy of discussion. I agree. But this did not feel like a good experience to me. I had spent a lot of time trying entertain and engage people with little pictures and nobody cared. (Fine with me). But accidentally entering a conversation with a lot of emotion already loaded in? I had attention I didn't want. Yikes! We started talking about cause and effect. The interplay of emotions, intent, and actions among large groups. The internet is turning life from being active, participatory, and requiring observation to one of simple cause and effect. I create this stimulus. I get this result. I think #metoo has been a great thing. Way overdue. But you're answering a different question. You're answering the question about do some groups overall find social use out of the net? I hope so. I think they do. That's a top-down question and answer. My question was bottom-up and more in line with the article. Does reducing our communication to typing and bits moving around, overt and binary stimulus-response in a tightly-controlled pipe make for each person becoming a slightly better person the more it is done? Or is it fundamentally isolating and cruel, no matter what the content or who is doing it?

sudouser 8y ago

yep, I know some shut-ins that spend huge amount of time online... when chats started (Usenet), mostly geeks used it (myself included), the anti-socials!

magissima 8y ago

Maybe it was just the people I interacted with, but the more time I spent on twitter the more I became convinced that a lot of people were proud of being lonely and miserable. It was big part of why I quit.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
There's a danger here of stereotyping, taking people we disagree with, sticking them in a big bag, and then sticking a label on it. Having said that, there are emotionally ill people in the world. While some people focus on the psychopaths, there are also people who are depressed, sad, angry -- and want to be heard. They continue feeling this way no matter what your interaction with them is. If they are only 1% of the Twitter population, and Twitter has 100M subscribers, that's a million people. These people are emotionally injured and will remain so no matter how anybody responds. In fact, for some, interaction may exacerbate the problem. I don't know how you deal with that using automation. Seems like whatever you did would just make the problem worse.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > there are emotionally ill people in the world. While some people focus on the psychopaths, there are also people who are depressed, sad, angry -- and want to be heard. They continue feeling this way no matter what your interaction with them is. I don't think I agree that emotionally ill people feel the same way no matter how others interact with them, if that's what you mean. In fact, how others interact can have a large effect, IME. These are human beings who, like you and me and all the others, have many complex factors guiding them; they are not automatons, not solely creations of their illness.

petra 8y ago

You're right. I remember reading some research comparing the emotional value of face-to-face, phone, and textual interactions. Text interactions got zero or near zero value. A phone interaction was better, but still of course, not as good as a face-to-face one. But i trully wonder if electronic communications(even assuming you can get high quality, face-to-face with eye contact and body language) are a valuable direction to go into for friendship ? maybe we humans aren't supposed to live in such huge groups, and do need the constancy of a tribe around us ?