Social graces and internet as a meeting ground

[azurelunatic]

Expanded slightly from a comment at the meeting of pyrogenic and metaphorge from different sectors of my social group

The internet gets a bad reputation because you can meet all sorts of weird people there. People who might not make it past the first "Ewww, they smell funny" in person can slip into one's life in a meeting of intellect as long as they have the courtesy formulae for their section of the internet memorized.

Face to face, you have a meeting of social graces before you have a meeting of minds, and people with the bad social graces get weeded out, and one can still be pleasant with people with good social graces and poor minds.

On the other hand, on the internet one has a meeting of minds before one has a meeting of social graces, so the people with the poor minds (and the poor online social graces) get weeded out first. Upon meeting face-to-face, one still has to weed for social graces.

Comments

[tyrsalvia.livejournal.com]

Fox pointed me at your post. I think it's that we've come to see this meeting of minds as being something you get when you really know someone (since it's not the first thing we get in person), so when we're in a situation that suddenly we know someone's mind but not their behavior, we're in an uncomfortable place of thinking we know the person but really not. Does that make sense? That was a little unweildy.

[azurelunatic]

And there's the "whatever I was expecting you to look like, you don't actually look like I thought you did" twitch, and the "I know your words but I don't know the tone of voice you're saying them in" twitch...

I've had some very weird moments in meeting people face-to-face after telephone correspondence. Those did not go dreadfully well, as I was exceedingly tongue-tied following up. I was nervous because I had the "I don't actually know you" feeling upon seeing them, and they were uncomfortable because instead of the verbose Lunatic they knew, they got a silent and withdrawn person.

On the other hand, finally meeting boojum face-to-face after seven years of assorted correspondence was a delight.