Sukktastic Part I: LJ
Well, my participation on cereta's LJ entry didn't end well. "Better than RaceFail"--what a recommendation!

Late last night and this morning, for the first time since high school*, I felt like an extraterrestrial.

"On this planet, in online discussions, people use very similar responses if they disagree and want discussion or if they disagree and wish you'd go away. Response to the former is socially desirable, and response to the latter is socially taboo. The people of Earth seem to be able to tell the difference. Or perhaps they are not hurt when they are yelled at for not knowing the difference. Or perhaps they feel that they deserve the disapprobation."

"On this planet, 'You aren't listening' is considered helpful advice. It is not known whether Earth people consider this specific enough to be helpful or whether the insight about what is being missed is encoded in the way the utterance is formed."

Anyway, at least this time the negative people seemed to think I was a well-intentioned jerk rather than a don't-care-if-I-hurt-people jerk. And actually a fair number of people were happy that I would speak up for views they shared.

And later today I felt a bit less of a total failure at everything LJ. It's not like EVERYONE ELSE in these huge-o discussions has been a RAGING SUCCESS at being heard without being seen as disagreeable. In some ways, I think, there are just no protocols for a huge entry in which many different people wander in because of widespread links--and this is made worse, not better, by the fact that some small sub-groups have indeed formed protocols, and they then get upset that people from different sub-groups follow different protocols.

For now, this sub-group, people who read my LJ, and I seem to speak mostly the same language. And if not, we can explain without getting pissed off. That's a lot!


* In college I did not know how to get laid on this planet, but I had mastered the rudiments of communication.

Mood: not despairing