Randomly, I felt like posting these two things;
Egocentrism causes us to think we know a writer’s tone 90% of the time, although we only are correct about 56% of the time. This leads us to misinterpretation of the writer’s intended meaning, causing flame wars. (emphasis mine)—Flame War
Brevity and clarity are the most powerful tools in communications, and will save you many headaches.—How to Deal with Difficult People
7 Comments
now what could you be referring to, patrick? ;-)
randomly my lightspeedass ;)
Clarity I do alright. Brevity? Nah! Not so much.
Even if it does come from a specific context, it’s a good occasion to think about FW in general.
My own thinking, as a linguistic anthropologist, is that flame wars get started because it’s difficult to recover from breaks in communication. There’s nothing surprising about the fact that we misunderstand each other online. Part of it is tone but the larger issue is about the way we actually understand anything we read or hear. We’re not decoding sentences to restitute what was intended. We try to fit the input with the schemas we already have.
And this is a link to my blog post on communication breaks and flame wars. (Forgot Patrick’s commenting system doesn’t keep links.)
How were you posting the links? Links have been posted here before and I just tried using the actual link code and just by pasting a url in and both worked.
Stop talking about me damnit!
;)