kevin_standlee (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kevin_standlee) wrote2007-03-12 06:54 pm
kevin_standlee) wrote2007-03-12 06:54 pm
Another Reason for Real Names on Badges?
At the risk of starting *ahem* a flame war, I would like to point to an article about what is formally being called "online disinhibition effect," which is how people are apt to say things with less restraint online than they would in person. (And my thanks to Cheryl for pointing me at it.) In short, people flame more often online than they do in person.
Now I personally think this is more common when the person doing the flaming is behind a pseudonym. (By which I mean that nobody reading what you write knows who you are in real life; this is not the same thing as someone who has an odd handle but puts his/her name in his profile -- the rough equivalent if printing someone's real name under their fan name on a membership badge.) I sign my own name to these posts, so just possibly I'm showing a bit more restraint.
I was particularly interested in this extract:
Now I personally think this is more common when the person doing the flaming is behind a pseudonym. (By which I mean that nobody reading what you write knows who you are in real life; this is not the same thing as someone who has an odd handle but puts his/her name in his profile -- the rough equivalent if printing someone's real name under their fan name on a membership badge.) I sign my own name to these posts, so just possibly I'm showing a bit more restraint.
I was particularly interested in this extract:
...In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.It occurs to me that there are a series of typically fannish behaviors that fall into this same description, characterized by an utter lack of ability to read emotional cues and emotional signs. Does this really mean that science fiction fans need to have their heads examined?
Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward.
Re: Hmmm
I don't exaggerate that much, really, given that I've encountered people with that attitude, most notoriously at one of ConJose's feedback sessions.
Nobody forces you to attend a convention. If the convention's policies aren't to your liking, then you probably shouldn't join it. Conversely, if I'm organizing a convention, I think I can refuse to admit someone who refuses to abide by what I consider reasonable rules of conduct. (Yes, there are certain classes of such discrimination that are wrong and/or illegal, and I'm not talking about any of them here.)
Mind you, I'm probably a hopeless old fossil here, since the conventions drawing the most number of people are things like anime cons, which, even when fan-run, seem to take the "show" and "ticket" approach, and most of their attendees do seem to be me to be ticket-buyers who expect entertainment for their admission ticket than convention members joining a community. (The latter was why I started attending SF conventions.)
And so am I, as I said in that article. What I'm saying is that you can't really make a bright-line distinction here. I've worked on too many conventions to think that one-size-fits-all, no exceptions, is likely to work in this area. But fans detest shades of gray, I'm afraid.
Re: Hmmm