the medium

yes.

i'm a nervous wreck on the phone except with REALLY close friends: strangers i can hardly bear to call (actually it's not so bad once the talking starts, but i can easily be thrown by intimatons of possible hostility)

so that's a difference: i've nevah been nervous posting

it's this thing

I depend alot on tones of voice and facial expressions I imagine in real life, because I can never say things the way I want to online. You'd have to meet me to know I guess.

The medium matters to me. Like Mark, I find talking on the phone to people I don't know well to be very difficult, to the extent that I have to seriously psyche myself up before ringing someone I might have met three or four times in real life. Sending an email is much easier, as is talking to them in person. Is suspect it's something to do with the combination of the absence of non-verbal cues and instantaneous communication.

what is this romance of which you speak?

i am what people perceive me to be.

the question being, am i what i am?

i am a tabula rasa. what im like and how i respond depends what you inscribe upon my canvas.

leverkuhn and his famulus.

death at one's shoulder at the marketplace in samsarra.

Surely the medium is the message.

Identify with this phone-phobia. Probably due to a) the uncomfortable silences and b) active commitment to extensive communication that phoning someone entails, but e-mail and face-to-face doesn't.

Clearly the medium does matter. It's an unfortunate fact that the more detached the medium is (ie. lack of physical/verbal contact), the more likely it is to be abused.

In this respect, communication via the internet is about as distopian as it gets.

Surely the medium is the message

hee hee! you took your time!

trevor, yes, the internet can be abused. but does this say more about the internet, or the person doing the 'abusing'? and the phone, how do you know the other person isn't taping what you say, to playback to great hilarity to friends later on. unlikely, yes, but you still trust no?

agree with everyone on the phone can be difficult thing, but that is not an intentional thing, is it?

The answer's not particularly palatable, but fairly obvious, and that's that the internet attracts a disproportionate number of people with "issues". The kind of issues it would be relatively easy to spot "in real life", but comparatively easy to conceal over the internet. I know I am not alone in experiencing this, and for better or for worse, it's made me a lot warier as a consequence.

yeh, you're probably right Trevor. i just find this stuff fascinating. however i am unconvinced that people are able to hide issues on the internet. obviously some are, but with many (and there are quite a few) it is like a beacon!

I don't know how easy those 'issues' really are to conceal on the internet. I myself am wary of online relationships - I've had more than my share of guys getting too attached, etc., but I've had that in real life as well. And there are people I've known who function okay socially, but if you live or work with them, you learn that they also have 'issues'. I've never been surprised by meeting people in person after meeting them online - I've only been 'surprised' to find that bad feelings I've had about certain people have been confirmed. Surprised because I come from a culture that devalues 'instinct' and values the literal, the benefit of the doubt.

The one thing that I've noticed about the internet, and which frustrates me, is its attraction for 'autistic' personality types - people who take things quite literally, who lack the ability to read between the lines, who insist that there is never anything more going on than what you can read explicitly. So IME, if there is one difference between online social discourse and RL conversation, it's the preponderance online of these people who lack social intuition, who can't 'read' people and who don't develop a sense of people's characters and a sensitivity to nuance in language. But you really can't hide that on the internet...at least not to people who are conditioned to be on guard against those kinds of people.