An interesting enough observation to steal

[chipotle]

Specifically, to steal from Seth Godin, in an entry he titled “Who you are and what you do”:

The neat thing about the online world is that you are judged almost entirely by your actions.

If you do generous things, people think you are a generous person. If you bully people, people assume you are a bully. If you ask dumb questions, people figure you’re dumb. Answer questions well and people assume you’re smart and generous. You get the idea.

This leads to a few interesting insights.

1. If people criticize you, they are actually criticizing your behavior, not you.
2. If you’re not happy with the perception you generate, change the words you type and the messages you send.
3. When you hear from someone, consider the source. Trolls are almost trolls through and through, which means you have no obligation to listen, to respond or to placate. On the other hand, if you can find a germ of truth, it can’t hurt to consider it.

The biggest takeaway for me is this: online interactions are largely expected to be intentional. On purpose. Planned. People assume you did stuff for a reason.

Be clear, be generous, be kind. Can’t hurt.

I think Godin’s pinging off the same thing I was thinking of on January 1st when I spent a paragraph describing why I wanted to “disconnect” from some people who were being bitter or easily offended or took pleasure in kicking over other people’s sandcastles. It’s just that Godin captured it in one six-word sentence. A positive, not a negative; not what you want less of, but what you want more of. Be clear, be generous, be kind.

Comments

[susandeer.livejournal.com]

Very sound advice indeed.

[varjohaltia.livejournal.com]

That is a remarkably concise and clear way of putting it. Thank you for sharing.

[kynn.livejournal.com]

I should probably add that it's a somewhat naïve and privileged notion to declare the internet to be a magically level playing ground. People are still judged much as they are offline, by their gender, their race, their social class, their education, their disabilities, their sexual preferences, their appearance, their nationality, and so on.

Anyone who has had exposure to the furry community knows how furries get judged by many non-furries based on the fact they're furries and not how they act. Many people are also judged by who they know or other associations, including political and religious views of all kinds.

I'm not entirely certain that Godin is arguing for a utopia, but really, this is one case in which it's not really that different online vs. offline.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Certainly "[online] you are judged almost entirely by your actions" is a generalization, but I give Godin a generous enough reading to presume he's aware of it.

[kynn.livejournal.com]

It just seems to me to (a) make a false claim (you're judged almost entirely by your actions) and (b) make a false contrast (between how you're judged "online" versus how you're judged in any other context).

So it's hard for me to give him credit with those two strikes already against him -- he would have to do a lot of clarification to make a cogent point, since even as an exaggeration for effect, his core premises are incorrect. (In other words, I am saying that there is no offline/online difference, and that people online are judged according to a number of factors unrelated to behavior.)

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Behavior is always a factor. I would suggest that online interaction is not the same as offline, in that our words may well be the first--and for quite some time the only--impression we give to those who "meet" us. There's no body language and no immediate cues to our nationality, gender, race, sexual orientation or other personally-identifying traits: we may choose to inform people of those traits, or they may be able to find them out through other means, but they're not immediately evident in the way that they generally are offline. I've read some blogs for months before learning what gender or race the blogger is--what's evident from the blogs is, simply, the way they write. That is their behavior, and it's the whole of the impression they make on me.

Having said that--and I'd like this to really be my last go-round on this--it would seem to me that this is all rather missing the forest for the trees. Godin's takeaway point was "be clear, be generous, be kind." I don't think that advice really stops being good even if you disagree with his earlier observation.

[footpad.livejournal.com]

After typing a few minor quibbles, then understanding how Godin had already addressed them:

Yes.

I do try, and it can't hurt to try more consciously.

[nerfcoyote.livejournal.com]

Speaking of stealing, I'm half tempted to begin a short bio blurb with While attending a local science fiction convention in Tampa, Florida in 1990, Jimmy Chin met a furry fan named Watts Martin and apparently never recovered. I don't know if the EuroFurence people would get the reference (http://www.eurofurence.org/EF14/cont-guests.html).