Rude People, Not Tech, Cause Bad Manners

[The Straight Story]

Rude People, Not Tech, Cause Bad Manners
By Regina Lynn Email 09.21.07 | 12:00 AM

I don't remember my university offering courses on how to make friends. It might have -- but I didn't know about it, and neither did any of my friends. No one ever mentioned hearing of such a thing.

Yet New York University now offers a seminar called Facebook in the Flesh, reports the New Yorker. The idea is to help freshmen who already know dozens of their classmates online but who worry they don't know how to make new friends in person. That's the fear and the whimsy behind NYU assistant dean David Schachter's decision to hold the workshop, even though he says he's never been on Facebook and his advice to students parallels exactly what users already do online.

The mind boggles.

It makes me think of the moaning and wailing surrounding mobile devices and how we supposedly don't connect "for real" anymore. How we're allegedly replacing real relationships with fake ones, true intimacy with illusion and strong social bonding with pseudo-social networking.

This is all because a lot of people apparently spend a lot of time conversing online rather than in the flesh. And in order to keep up with all these relationships, we're supposedly not being as attentive to the people around us as we should. Not our loved ones, mind you, but the people we encounter casually as we go about our lives: bank tellers, dog walkers, grocers.

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/sexdrive/2007/09/sexdrive_0921

[TwilightZone]

1. While that may be partly true, the anonymity of the Internet certainly makes people "braver"...

and they say things that they most certainly wouldn't say in person. Perhaps that attitude carries over to "real" life more than we might think.

[Raejeanowl]

2. You've Got Something There

I think it's very easy to forget you're dealing with real people having feelings, etc., and to be surprised that carryover of this insular, anonymous attitude has consequences in the "real world."

[Buns_of_Fire]

3. But there's a vice-versa there, too...

My online persona (such as it is) very closely mimics my real-life persona (IOW, I'm just as snarky and sarcastic in person as I am virtually). Perhaps it has something to do with generational differences -- my real-life persona was fully developed long before the advent of the internets and thus carried over to my virtual persona, whereas people "raised" on the internets may have had their online persona developed before their real-life persona had fully emerged.

Then again, social commentary isn't my forte in either world. Snarkiness and sarcasm is. ;-)