Re: what's up with all the attitude
On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 05:25:37PM -0500, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 07:17:00PM +0800, Tim Post wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-11-06 at 00:32 -0800, David A. wrote:
> >
> > > Oh - attitude... I read aptitude! :P
> > > I've been a debian-user 1.5 year now and my impression is that the
> > > comunity is big and lot's of competent and experienced people - mostly
> > > friendly too.
> >
> > Remember that you have thousands and thousands of people conversing over
> > a delayed medium without the benefit of tone of voice or facial
> > expression. That in and of itself could create a civil war in a buddhist
> > temple.
> >
> That reminds me of a study which I read about (maybe on Slashdot).
> Basically, they had people pair off with someone woh they personally
> knew. They had the pairs exchange email messages. They had the sender
> guess how the receipient would perceive the tone of the messages. The
> senders basically guessed a 90% correct rate, while the actual rate for
> the recipients was about 50% for guessing the tone of the message. That
> is, the senders only felt that 10% of the messages would be
> misperceived, but obviously it was more than that.
>
> So, while we may think that it is obvious that the tone of our messages
> are light, funny or joking, they may not come across that way.
Then factor in:
Two correspondants who have different first languages, possibly
neither english yet now emailing in english.
Different cultural ways of interpreting the same written phrase.
It takes great skill to communicate effectivly using written language,
especially across ethno/cultural/linguistic barriers. No one has this
skill to perfection yet everyone has something to offer.
Doug.
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