I wonder how many divers are afraid to post because of the fear of being bashed and just lurk. Too bad we dont have a Un-Thank you rating to classify those posters who consistently are sarcastic so we would know what to expect just by looking at there profile.
I'm sorry I got to this party late. I was on self-imposed anger management break for a few weeks because of repeatedly having heated discussions with a couple of users who I knew I should have been ignoring but didn't.
Your post has a lot to do with that so I'll get to giving my opinion in a second. First of all, however, I thank you for getting this discussion going. Nobody likes flaming but the fact that definitions like the following are slowly getting included in dictionaries shows us that it's a problem across the internet. On some sites it's worse than others, which has a lot to do with the policy and policing of individual discussions.
Flame (v): Computer Slang. to send an angry, critical, or disparaging electronic message.
Why I think this happens has to do with a few things:
1) I think that people are psychologically accustomed to interacting with computers as inanimate objects. As a culture, we dehumanize groups of people we don't *personally* interact with. We dehumanize by race, creed, culture, religion, social-economic-class and so on. We dehumanize politicians (as they do us), the police, any enemy real or perceived, and we have a long LONG history of dehumanizing groups that disagree with *our* group, which translates precisely to how people interact online.... DIR/ANTI-DIR comes to mind. Everyone dehumanizing each other... In fact, the inventiveness we show in this darkest of human failings is, frankly, amazing.
IN other words, dehumanizing users on the other end of a computer screen is almost *bound* to happen because I think people simply don't well and truly see them as any different then figures in a computer game.
2) Written language is an exceedingly difficult medium with which to communicate clearly and unambiguously. I would say that the VAST majority of people simply don't have the writing skills to express themselves with much precision and it leads to as much misunderstanding as understanding. As much miscommunication as communication....
3) People on the whole are lousy listeners. We tend, on the whole, to do two things when listening. (a) we look for anything we don't agree with and (b) we wait for a break in the talking to jump in with our own opinion. In other words, we don't actually listen at all. We just wait to talk. Bring that to the internet and everyone is talking, nobody is listening and opinions get repeated again and again LOUDER AND
LOUDER and with more and more pent up frustration because whatever you do or say isn't enough to actually get people to listen to you. For example, people who think PADI suck will never change their minds and neither with the ones who like them. The same opinions get recycled over and over and the same arguments get made with more and more volume until there is nothing really left of the discussion except the contempt from two groups of people who have learned to communicate this way.... I don't know if there are any solutions to this.
4) We, as a human race, with the possible exception of practicing Buddhists and a (very) few people with highly exceptional social skills, totally lack the ability to see something for it's true nature without judging it. Every time someone says something, you're weighing it in your mind, balancing the pro's and con's, deciding if you agree with it or not, thinking of your rebuttal.... This sort of ties my first and third points together. If we could develop the ability to read what someone says and instead of responding with more volume, to simply ask ourselves the question "WHY ARE THEY SAYING THIS" and to question that (or their assumptions) instead of railing against them like it's some kind of political debate that needs to be won or lost then a LOT more communication and a lot less screaming would happen. I'm sure the next response you see in this thread will confirm this point.
5) I think some people use this medium to "test" their own thinking. Like a debate. They put their opinion out there and then defend it to see if it stands up to scrutiny. In itself it's a wholly acceptable thing to do, but not always conducive to a relaxed conversational discourse, especially combined with a few of the factors I already mentioned.
6) Ego, narcissism, cynicism etc. but I think it makes up a small part of the whole.
I think I could go on and make a baker's-dozen from this (with a wink to JJ) but I hope just hitting the high points gives some food for thought.
Let my close by asking you, if you recognize yourself in anything I said to challenge yourself to make a change. Nobody likes "flaming" as we said, so if nobody likes it then we ALL have a personal responsibility to fight it. We should all start by picking up a mirror....
R..
