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Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 11:59:01 -0400
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
Organization: No Conspiracy Here...
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Subject: Re: Creepy Behavior (was other stuff)
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This bit that I've left quoted is something that everyone should keep in mind.
It is the responsibility of the writer--NOT the reader--to add the intended tone
to their writing.  "It's just text, so you can't know," is a pathetic cop-out.
Read "The Adventures of Don Quixote."  Read "Hamlet."  Heck, read any Steven King
novel, or any of the better IF that's been produced (dragging this vaguely
on-topic).  Tone is something that the author imparts through much more than
facial expressions and vocal control, and has been done in text for centuries, if
not millenia.  Anyone telling you otherwise is extraordinarily lazy and probably
uses more "emoticons" than text in their e-mail.

So, yes.  Each of us projects a tone, knowingly or unknowingly.  And through that
tone, we each "assemble" the personality behind the tone in fragments.

And, to be precise, the view that many people (myself included) seem to be
assembling from posts written by various people is a small group of people (I'm
not pointing fingers, because quite honestly I haven't paid more than cursory
attention to most of these posts) who somehow consider literary and programming
skills to be impossible in a woman, are insensitive enough to be unable to
withhold such (juvenile) comments when requested, unable to treat such a person
like an equal, and insist on defending themselves to prove how "right" they are
when they're called on it.

This constructed view might be wrong and I acknowledge that possibility.  The
tone projected may stem from "awkwardness in the medium," and not from "core
personality traits."  So prove me (and the others who have expressed similar
views) wrong, not by yelling about your rights and your inability to communicate,
but by projecting the tone you want to project and by understanding that people
you deal with every day--just like "real people"--will occasionally react in ways
you didn't predict.  When it happens, it's best to assume that you crossed the
line, because 95% of the time, you did.

Now, hopefully nobody thinks I was singling them out or talking down to them.
However, if anyone does, feel free to blast me in personal e-mail and take this
irrelevant thread off the group.

....Unless we're going to turn this into a thread about "tone in IF."  I wouldn't
mind hearing a few views on that particular topic.

Tina wrote:
[...]

> Furthermore, the interactions one has with people online, regardless of
> whether or not it truly constitutes 'knowing' someone, is all there is to
> judge by in these cases. It is certainly appropriate to react entirely to
> the face that someone presents to one, regardless of how incomplete this
> may actually be in terms of how the person "actually" is. Here, how you
> "actually" are is that which comes across in your posts and other online
> interaction. That persona, if that is all it is, is still going to be
> judged and reacted to in a typically human fashion, just as a random
> passerby who one struck up a conversation would be, despite a lack of
> in-depth knowledge.

[...]


