Do my posts seem arrogant and snotty? Do yours?

Does not knowing who you're talking to and what their frame of reference is make it harder to communicate?

Shouldn't the facelessness of internet communication produce a meritocracy of ideas, free of age-ism, looks-ism, racism, sexism and classism?

Do you have to use emoticons to keep from seeming like a prick? :3)?

I always feel like something which in my head, and in real life, would easily have sounded jocular and friendly, can come across as cold and direct mocking here. Like when I made that comment about "perosonae" on the Persona thread.

I've never got that impression from your posts Fritz.

Does anonymity make people more willing to be rude?

I could never be very rude to people I don't know at all.

I could never be very rude to people I don't know at all.

How does familiarity determine whether or not your behaviour is rude? If you get on a bus and start calling people names randomly, you're being rude whether you know them or not, right? ;-)

I'm still recovering from Ronan's brutal attack on 40-year-old accountants. ;=@>

Fritz, you strike me as one of the more good-natured and compassionate people on this site. Plus, you're really funny.

I'm hardly ever rude here or in real life. I'm pretty boring.

or are you saying that you personally don't have the inclination to be rude to people you don't know? (see how easy it is to get confused here?)

I'm rude everywhere.

If I know a person I am more likely to be able to tell how they will react. I like predicatability. I try my best not to be rude to anyone. But, you can be what appears as rude to some friends, because they will give as good as they get, it's part of the friendship. I wouldn't be rude to as stranger or on the net, as I do not have that level of familiarity.

Yeah, Fritz, don't knock yerself. I can be a terrible second-guesser of my sharper posts, usually I should just write them and never post them, so I get the frustrations out without acting saying anything to anyone! Sorta been my pattern over the years.

and i don't really have the inclination.

I wish I could be more argumentative (not that I'm saying that arguing is rude) sometimes. It'd be cool to be able to come up with the immediate comebacks or one liners (which, usually come to me, 3 hours too late) or use considerable knowlegde and wry intelligence to form articualte points.

yes and i really don't mean them to.

fritz - yrs do not...mine on the other hand remind me of what it was like in high school not to fit in no matter how much one tried.

Ronan, you overestimate your offensivess.

In response to the original post - no, maybe, yes, probably. I was actually just thinking of this after seeing someone in another thread very likely completely misunderstood the intent behind one of the posts (not leaving out the specifics to be oblique - have forgotten them!) and was suprised because I'd read into it the exact opposite.

Unless you're speaking very formally, it is very very easy to have things taken the wrong way. As for being inherent to the internet, perhaps not (people probably said this about phones at one point too) but it certainly amplifies a problem. Not many other forms of written communication are as directly conversational. I've had the most ludicrous internet fights over *nothing*. Developing a certain paranoia about it is probably normal.