I agree with the first statement. It's the second where I'm getting stumped - DOES meatspace have more value? Why? Is it because you can get to know people differently (presumably better) with facetime than through text?
In debates with others, I've gotten the impression that many people cannot communicate textually with as much ease or clarity as they can personally, so I suppose that might be a contributing factor.
There's a lot of non-verbal communication (such as facial expression, body language, tone of voice) when interacting ftf and this often helps to bridge the gap between what the person means and what actually comes out. I think it also gives a lot more insight into a person, letting me judge them better than on a screen. Interestingly, I don't like phone calls much b/c they seem to have all the disadvantages of online without any of the benefits, so I'd rather have an online conversation (either synchronous [IM] or asynchronous [email, LJ]) than a phone one, and I'd rather have face to face than online.
I like those terms for distinguishing whether something is real-time.
There's definitely a good amount of nonverbal communication in person, but I find that online discussions allow me to be a lot more exact in my language. IRL conversations don't allow me the tools to reconstruct my thoughts as I go. And it doesn't provide for easy logging, making reflection subject to the flaws of memory.
And then I suppose I may not be as skilled at providing and reading nonverbal communication as others are.
The terms synchronous/asynchronous are used extensively in the context of online courses.
That's exactly my point with phones - you don't get nearly as much of the nonverbal cues, but you don't get the time to go back and reconstruct what you're saying.
I used to prefer online conversation to phone conversation. But a few months out of college, I started having regular phone conversations with some of my college friends, and I realized just how much I was missing in online conversations by not having tone of voice and other cues--if you tell a joke and you hear the other person laugh, it's a lot more fun, even if you are lacking all the body language. I think IM is where I do the worst, with all the disadvantages of real-time conversation and none of the tone or body language cues, nor physical proximity to help give topics to restart dying conversations.
I still prefer e-mail for business-related things, except in those cases where it's urgent, or sufficiently complicated that I need someone to interrupt me if they don't understand.
My email style with business-related things is to be very factual, direct, and goal oriented. Unfortunately many of my cow orkers interpret this as being brusque, rude, or even angry. My English prof colleagues are trying to teach me to use "I" statements, which *I* on the other hand feel is a waste of electrons. I have no problem using "I" statements face to face or in personal online interactions, but in work emails I feel that it's important not to waste people's time and to get to the point since we all have so much to do. *grumble grumble*
Trying to picture a "cow orker"... I keep getting unfortunate flashes of images of a cow trying to rape an orc.
My mother, who is currently the chair of the curriculum committee at her school, has an arrangement worked out with one of the deans, who is a humanities person. When someone needs to be made to do something, my mother writes the e-mail, and when someone needs to be calmed down, the dean writes the e-mail. Unless the person in question is a science prof, in which case it's the other way around--my mother's matter-of-fact style is calmingly rational and unambiguous, and the dean's touchy-feely style is maybe a little frightening, but that can be effective for manipulation.
Do you think it's a culture of science thing? A number of my colleagues in social science and humanities have told me they think so, but there's a few particularly rambling people in my department so I'm not sure I agree.
I'm not sure it's a culture of science thing--at least not directly. It might be who self-selects into science, which in turn creates some degree of science culture (which might turn into a positive feedback loop). I suspect it's not so much a matter of being factual and direct, as preferring other people to be (thus the existance of rambly science professors; they might still appreciate your style). The sorts of people who self-select into science often like that kind of interaction, and prefer that others behave that way toward them. But there are a lot of people who feel really comfortable around my mother specifically because of her calm, direct, unemotional way of speaking and behaving, even when they themselves have vastly different styles. Also, animals and children seem to like it.
There are two problems with applying these receiving preferences to e-mails. The first is that e-mail lacks tone and body languge, making it harder to interpret. And the second is that e-mail is just simply not as personal as talking to someone face-to-face. And here is a case where even being on the phone is an improvement: it's very easy, when you recieve an e-mail, to not think about who it's from (beyond the ways in which that's specifically relevant to the e-mail), and so forget to apply what you know about the sender's personal habits and style to use as added context. With sufficient e-mail communication, you might remember their e-mail style, but... to a degree it's like receiving a communication from a stranger. That, combined with the lack of non-verbal cues, means that people will interpret e-mails as if they, themselves, had written them--much more than they'll do with oral communication (even a voice on the phone can act as a personality anchor to reminde someone of who it is they're talking with). So, if the e-mail is not written in the style that they would have used, they try to guess under what circumstances they would have written an e-mail phrased like that. Consequently, they might get the tone very, very wrong for reasons beyond simply not having as many cues to interpret it. So, my mother's style, which works very well in person even with a lot of humanities people, artists, and elementary school teachers, works very poorly in e-mail.
I tend towards the factual, direct, and goal oriented, except for it being misinterpreted most of the time, too (oddly, I seem to have less problem being direct and to the point in-person or on the phone, and I can tell immediately when that unnerves people - but in that case, I have a MUCH harder time altering my word choice and etc., and I can tell when people are unnerved because they expect a whole lot of unnecessary blather to take place). However, some rare organizations do have a culture where everyone does use "factual direct and goal oriented" as normal. Which takes some getting used to after so much, "If it isn't too much trouble, I'd really appreciate it if . . . "
And on the other hand, sometimes it really does seem like a person IS using "factual and direct" in email to be rude. It's a fine line.
A few people have told me they think it's b/c of my science background (and it's mostly social science and humanities people who have misinterpreted me), and this seems to jibe with what sildra said above. I'm not convinced though, as my department chair (he's biology and chemistry, and close to retirement) is one of the worst ramblers ever and department meetings have doubled in length since he took over for the old chair (biology, a woman, and older than me but younger than the current chair).
Oh, are cell phones and Facebook and video games all imaginary now? And about those games: Are board games okay? How about card games? How about 20 Questions? What about solitaire?
How about landline phones? Writing letters, on paper?
I get that you lose certain valuable aspects of communication when you are not talking face to face, but this question is poorly worded, unless its entire intent is to stir shit up. Plus, there are definite benefits of these un"real" things that you cannot get from "real" life. Like easy communication with people all over the world. Oh, sorry, I guess they must be imaginary!
This was not intended to provoke anger, so I'm sorry for doing so. My point in posting this was that I'm trying to understand my own thoughts here (and this is often the point of my "discuss!" posts) because I am conflicted. I am hopeful that through hearing others' opinions I'll be able to understand my own better.
I phrased it the way that I used to view things since my views are changing. I used to feel that (1) online relationships were not as deep or otherwise valid as face-to-face relationships, and (2) online activities (such as Facebook or playing Gears of War) were for people who have no real friends and/or wish to avoid interactions with people. The nature of how my peers use online activities appears to be changing however, so that they are used to enhance "real life" relationships rather than competing with or supplanting them, so this is making me question my original opinion.
Another related issue is that of the priority of online vs. face-to-face and related etiquette. Is it okay to talk on the cellphone while going through a grocery checkout line? In some massively multiplayer online games you're expected to make the game a priority so that if your guild has a raid, you're expected to be there even if it's your daughter's first piano recital the same night, while in other games people know that you have a real life and would berate you if you went on the raid instead of going to your son's soccer game. Is it socializing with friends if T$'s playing Gears of War and I'm on LJ and we're both in the living room, or are we being rude for ignoring each other?
Oh, it's just irritation, not anger :) (Badly worded surveys and "memes" on LJ irritate me the same way.)
In my experience, online relationships -do- tend to lack the same kind of depth you get in a relationship that has a face-to-face component. But I think a lot of that depends on the ability of the people involved to communicate well via text, and, in my experience, people with different text-based communication styles can get on each other's nerves in ways that normal communication mismatches tend not to. Or maybe that's just me.
Re:prioritizing online/phone vs. face-to-face - I think it depends on the circumstances. If I'm on the phone w/my parents, the SO had better have a GOOD reason to try and interrupt me. If I'm in the checkout line, though, the person at the register gets priority over the phone OR anyone I'm going through the line with, but I can see why other people don't feel they need to do that; it isn't like you need to really engage the cashier in deep - or even any - conversation.
It sounds like the MMOwhatevers are the same sort of thing that any extracurricular activity is: some get that you have other things in life that are more important than that activity, and others get bent out of shape if THAT activity is not your number 1.
Are you and T$ talking to each other while engaging in those activities, or are you just having some alone time while in the same space? I don't think that the latter is "ignoring" each other, unless one of you IS trying to socialize while doing that, and the other is just responding with grunts of disinterest (sometimes I wish the SO would share LESS of his email/web browsing when we are internetting in the same room, and sometimes I wish he were more in the "let's share what we're reading" mood).
That's how we treat it at work. Someone who is actually in the library has greater priority over phone calls and emails (unless the phone call is already in progress when the live person comes), because they have made the physical effort to be there.
Now that's interesting. When I walk in somewhere in person I'm usually more willing to be put on lower priority than when I call somewhere. Being put on hold on the phone is really boring to me, while if I'm there in person I can look at things around me. Also if I'm there in person I can understand better that the person in front of me is juggling three phone calls, her boss, two customers, and her computer crashed, while if I'm on the phone all I know is that she's ignoring ME.
I wish they'd do that at my library or at some other stores I go to! It's like when the phone rings everything stops and I have to wait until they hang up to get any service!
Social networking and video games are leisure activities. I agree that real life should take precedence over leisure activities. I see no reason to make the distinction between virtual and meatspace, though.
I agree that the more important distinction is between between commitments and leisure, not meatspace and cyber. My question was originally intending to focus more on the leisure: should meatspace or cyber take priority?
meatspace, because if someone is on the computer with you s/he can be doing a bunch of other things when you're otherwise engaged, but if someone is in meatspace with you s/he has committed a bunch of time to doing nothing else.
I think what makes the priority for me is how well you know the person, and the question then becomes whether you know the person at the other end of the communication, and whether data packets really can convey as much and as subtle information as facetime.
I think it depends on the individual situation. When I had my wisdom teeth out and an itchy rashy reaction to penecillin, I had to stand in front of the TV and yell at Bud to take me to a drug store so we could get Reactine. My itchy rashy reaction was definitely more important than Mythbusters. I was pretty annoyed.
Usually someone calls us on our cells when it's an emergency or we really need to be in touch with someone, usually we don't use them for social calls.
Real life should definitely take priority over video games!
I'm really bad at "should" and tend to focus more on what people are actually doing and why. When I was spending more time/effort on online stuff that was because of physical distance from my close friends and I also had a lot of time on my hands, so that seemed like a reasonable thing to do. Now that my close friends are mostly nearby in physical space and grad school is eating up a lot of my time, I find it's less worthwhile for me. In general, meatspace interactions have more richness and depth for the time/effort expended on them (meaning it's possible to get similar richness and depth out of online interactions but that requires more time/effort), so I'm finding that arranging my life in and around meatspace is overall easier and more fulfilling for me. (it helps that I have more control over my meatspace than I did when I was younger)
Because of my own tendencies, when people raise issues like this, I wonder if they're dissatisfied with their efforts to rationalize a gut response. It's a great way to get a topic going, but it always feels funny, because in the back of your mind there's this powerful, visceral motivation that really just demands validation rather than a candid honest discussion. I'm speaking in the general case of course, and in my own case; I can't read your mind. :)
A real risk with virtual systems, I find, is that they are very good at providing rewards for minimal effort. This can modify your behavior in a way that subverts what you would otherwise name as your goals and priorities. LJ comments are a pull system; you get a nasty jackpot sensation when you hit the refresh key.
A lot of us have desk jobs. Leaving work, only to plop yourself in front of a computer again is probably unhealthy.
But yeah, I would posit that the bigger problem isn't that people's priorities are wrong, but that simple reward systems subvert their priorities.
Oh, and once you shift your priorities to feel better about your behavior, you've pretty much, well, lost.
What's the line of demarcation? That's an easy thing for old people like us to say, but for people like my stepdaughter who are growing up with such things, it's like saying a telephone conversation isn't real communication. I'm not sure social networking can be separated from my real life.
If you were doing all three of those things (ftf, phone, online) at the same time, shame on you. :) Face to face is most important. Putting someone on hold when they're in front of you is rude. Putting someone on the phone on hold is slightly less rude. Putting someone on hold when you're chatting with them is least rude. And I think it's got to do with the number of senses you've got someone else tied up focusing on you. With FTF, it's all the senses. With phone, it's one (and a half?). With online, the expected number of senses is less than one (think shared?).
Unrelated, but I try to be as succinct as possible with my work email. I usually wind up rereading it five times or so and deleting words with no value. It increases the probability of someone reading the entire email. There's plenty of time to be friendly when interacting in person.
Also unrelated, I find that online is the easiest way of the three to say rude, crude, and ranty things. I think this is because it's so impersonal, and raw. All the rest of the online universe has already desensitized you from shocking comments. Maybe.
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Why does "real life" have greater value?
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The second part is an open question.
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There's definitely a good amount of nonverbal communication in person, but I find that online discussions allow me to be a lot more exact in my language. IRL conversations don't allow me the tools to reconstruct my thoughts as I go. And it doesn't provide for easy logging, making reflection subject to the flaws of memory.
And then I suppose I may not be as skilled at providing and reading nonverbal communication as others are.
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That's exactly my point with phones - you don't get nearly as much of the nonverbal cues, but you don't get the time to go back and reconstruct what you're saying.
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I still prefer e-mail for business-related things, except in those cases where it's urgent, or sufficiently complicated that I need someone to interrupt me if they don't understand.
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My mother, who is currently the chair of the curriculum committee at her school, has an arrangement worked out with one of the deans, who is a humanities person. When someone needs to be made to do something, my mother writes the e-mail, and when someone needs to be calmed down, the dean writes the e-mail. Unless the person in question is a science prof, in which case it's the other way around--my mother's matter-of-fact style is calmingly rational and unambiguous, and the dean's touchy-feely style is maybe a little frightening, but that can be effective for manipulation.
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Do you think it's a culture of science thing? A number of my colleagues in social science and humanities have told me they think so, but there's a few particularly rambling people in my department so I'm not sure I agree.
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I'm not sure it's a culture of science thing--at least not directly. It might be who self-selects into science, which in turn creates some degree of science culture (which might turn into a positive feedback loop). I suspect it's not so much a matter of being factual and direct, as preferring other people to be (thus the existance of rambly science professors; they might still appreciate your style). The sorts of people who self-select into science often like that kind of interaction, and prefer that others behave that way toward them. But there are a lot of people who feel really comfortable around my mother specifically because of her calm, direct, unemotional way of speaking and behaving, even when they themselves have vastly different styles. Also, animals and children seem to like it.
There are two problems with applying these receiving preferences to e-mails. The first is that e-mail lacks tone and body languge, making it harder to interpret. And the second is that e-mail is just simply not as personal as talking to someone face-to-face. And here is a case where even being on the phone is an improvement: it's very easy, when you recieve an e-mail, to not think about who it's from (beyond the ways in which that's specifically relevant to the e-mail), and so forget to apply what you know about the sender's personal habits and style to use as added context. With sufficient e-mail communication, you might remember their e-mail style, but... to a degree it's like receiving a communication from a stranger. That, combined with the lack of non-verbal cues, means that people will interpret e-mails as if they, themselves, had written them--much more than they'll do with oral communication (even a voice on the phone can act as a personality anchor to reminde someone of who it is they're talking with). So, if the e-mail is not written in the style that they would have used, they try to guess under what circumstances they would have written an e-mail phrased like that. Consequently, they might get the tone very, very wrong for reasons beyond simply not having as many cues to interpret it. So, my mother's style, which works very well in person even with a lot of humanities people, artists, and elementary school teachers, works very poorly in e-mail.
work email
And on the other hand, sometimes it really does seem like a person IS using "factual and direct" in email to be rude. It's a fine line.
Re: work email
I am going to rant
How about landline phones? Writing letters, on paper?
I get that you lose certain valuable aspects of communication when you are not talking face to face, but this question is poorly worded, unless its entire intent is to stir shit up. Plus, there are definite benefits of these un"real" things that you cannot get from "real" life. Like easy communication with people all over the world. Oh, sorry, I guess they must be imaginary!
Re: I am going to rant
I phrased it the way that I used to view things since my views are changing. I used to feel that (1) online relationships were not as deep or otherwise valid as face-to-face relationships, and (2) online activities (such as Facebook or playing Gears of War) were for people who have no real friends and/or wish to avoid interactions with people. The nature of how my peers use online activities appears to be changing however, so that they are used to enhance "real life" relationships rather than competing with or supplanting them, so this is making me question my original opinion.
Another related issue is that of the priority of online vs. face-to-face and related etiquette. Is it okay to talk on the cellphone while going through a grocery checkout line? In some massively multiplayer online games you're expected to make the game a priority so that if your guild has a raid, you're expected to be there even if it's your daughter's first piano recital the same night, while in other games people know that you have a real life and would berate you if you went on the raid instead of going to your son's soccer game. Is it socializing with friends if T$'s playing Gears of War and I'm on LJ and we're both in the living room, or are we being rude for ignoring each other?
Re: I am going to rant
In my experience, online relationships -do- tend to lack the same kind of depth you get in a relationship that has a face-to-face component. But I think a lot of that depends on the ability of the people involved to communicate well via text, and, in my experience, people with different text-based communication styles can get on each other's nerves in ways that normal communication mismatches tend not to. Or maybe that's just me.
Re:prioritizing online/phone vs. face-to-face - I think it depends on the circumstances. If I'm on the phone w/my parents, the SO had better have a GOOD reason to try and interrupt me. If I'm in the checkout line, though, the person at the register gets priority over the phone OR anyone I'm going through the line with, but I can see why other people don't feel they need to do that; it isn't like you need to really engage the cashier in deep - or even any - conversation.
It sounds like the MMOwhatevers are the same sort of thing that any extracurricular activity is: some get that you have other things in life that are more important than that activity, and others get bent out of shape if THAT activity is not your number 1.
Are you and T$ talking to each other while engaging in those activities, or are you just having some alone time while in the same space? I don't think that the latter is "ignoring" each other, unless one of you IS trying to socialize while doing that, and the other is just responding with grunts of disinterest (sometimes I wish the SO would share LESS of his email/web browsing when we are internetting in the same room, and sometimes I wish he were more in the "let's share what we're reading" mood).
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Usually someone calls us on our cells when it's an emergency or we really need to be in touch with someone, usually we don't use them for social calls.
Real life should definitely take priority over video games!
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A real risk with virtual systems, I find, is that they are very good at providing rewards for minimal effort. This can modify your behavior in a way that subverts what you would otherwise name as your goals and priorities. LJ comments are a pull system; you get a nasty jackpot sensation when you hit the refresh key.
A lot of us have desk jobs. Leaving work, only to plop yourself in front of a computer again is probably unhealthy.
But yeah, I would posit that the bigger problem isn't that people's priorities are wrong, but that simple reward systems subvert their priorities.
Oh, and once you shift your priorities to feel better about your behavior, you've pretty much, well, lost.
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Unrelated, but I try to be as succinct as possible with my work email. I usually wind up rereading it five times or so and deleting words with no value. It increases the probability of someone reading the entire email. There's plenty of time to be friendly when interacting in person.
Also unrelated, I find that online is the easiest way of the three to say rude, crude, and ranty things. I think this is because it's so impersonal, and raw. All the rest of the online universe has already desensitized you from shocking comments. Maybe.