Vitale responds

Here is HIS RESPONSE AT NETWORKOLOGIES. I can understand why Levi took umbrage at those words, though I don’t think Vitale meant it that way.

One of the huge problems with internet communication is that tone and body language are absent, and both of those obviously contain subverbal cues that make up a huge part of meaning in communication. This is another of the several reasons that I generally don’t like ongoing debates in this medium. A couple of exchanges is fine, then shift the scene elsewhere, using the blog exchanges as a sort of teaser or film preview for an actual debate elsewhere, ideally in print. (At least until we figure out how to move the real action into an electronic space; we’re not quite there yet, in my opinion.)

It would be interesting to do a survey on this, but I’ll bet for most people of my generation and the younger one(s), probably around 80% of our worst fights with people are internet-related.

In person, people generally don’t want to provoke each other too much. On the phone, you can sense when someone is starting to get ticked off, and adjust your approach accordingly. Angry postal letters (if anyone writes postal letters anymore) can be carefully crafted and carefully responded to, and there is enough delivery delay that cooler heads can prevail even if there are one or two nasty postal letters sent.

But electronic communication combines the worst of both world: the tone-free environment of the letter with the potentially inflammatory rapidity of speech and telephone.

Also, it’s sometimes just too tough to let nasty-sounding electronic remarks go without a response. All in all, it’s an incendiary medium, one in which intellectual debate easily turns into something less pleasant, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve been trying more and more to shift my debates into cooler media. (Not in 100% of cases, of course, but in many more cases than before.)