INFO to NOISE ratio on boards

ToddyDoody wrote: »

I'm dominating this thread a bit but at this level you get the madness of the human psyche on display a little bit. It gives an indication of where the culture is at.

I find that the biggest thing driving a lot of the die hard threads is a kindof narcisstic wounding, where to admit to imperfections or wrongness is too shameful to allow so its all out war to the bitter end.

Where the narcisstic wounding is coming from in the culture might be a question to ask. Is it fear of being dominated by another like a person was naturally dominated by adults as children?

Everyone hates psychobabble but...

Maybe. I don't really get the lengths people go to on here sometimes to just browbeat who ever they happen to be "discussing" an issue with.

I read through threads here sometimes and I can see where posters - who are painstakingly going through each others previous points in order to refute sentence by sentence - actually can be in agreement with each other about some of the things they're arguing about, but that gets lost in the noise. The object of the game seems to be to just hammer the other poster and focus solely on the points of difference.

Real-life conversations don't operate like that - at least most of them don't - life would be very exhausting. There's a lot more space for nuance when talking face to face. People are inclined to be more agreeable when talking to someone in the flesh and there's other cues to take on board - tone of voice, demeanor etc, etc - so it isn't just always a knuckle dragging fight to the death.

Because all of that gets flattened or removed altogether on the net, people often double down on their decisiveness and conversations are often conducted like brinkmanship: nothing can ever be conceded and no ground is ever given up.