6 things on the Internet that people misunderstand
Now it’s fashionable to talk about cheating on the Internet. We constantly read and hear about misinformation, fakes and all kinds of manipulations. Yes, it is very useful to know what methods of deception and manipulation are. Know and confront them. Well, or to know and use.
But I want to talk not about cheating from the outside, but about cheating from the inside. That is, about self-deception.
Specifically, about the self-deception that occurs when a misunderstanding of what, how and why happens on the Internet.
1) You do not control the situation
A stream of fragmentary information sweeps past us on the Internet. You can say a lot of fair words to people who do not want to delve into the details, but every day their guilt in this is less and less.
Technological reality in which a modern user communicates with various types of “smart tapes” and non-obvious sorts. I have repeatedly encountered a situation where Facebook sent me a notification of an answer in some discussion, but the link sent did not lead to a specific comment.
If you add mail antispam to these “smart” sorting and notification mechanisms, you will have to admit the complete impossibility to interpret the absence of an answer as a property of a person.
No, do not celebrate the victory in the dispute. It is possible that you did not nail your interlocutor with an iron argument, after which he merged from the discussion.
It is possible that he simply did not receive notification of your remark. Or vice versa - he answered, but you did not receive a notification.
2) You do not hear the interlocutor.
I’m not talking about the case when “he listens, but doesn’t hear”, but about verbal communication. Emoticons are nothing but a substitute for intonation, and coding on smartphones is not so simple.
The well-known “Yeah, of course” is a denial only being reinforced intonationally, and this is a common statement and pleonasm (well, or what it is called correctly).
Therefore, when first encountering a person on the Internet, it is impossible to determine whether he is speaking his mind or mimicking a person with whom he disagrees.
What do we read: real opinion or irony, sarcasm, quote? During sound communication, we would hear a change in the style of speech to the pathos, mockery, or imitating a movie character, when communicating with letters through the Internet, we do not have such luxury.
You are left alone with your own prejudices about the interlocutor and the desire to see what you need in his words.
3) You see only part of the communication
Now I'm not talking about the purely social aspect, when people can conduct a cross-cutting discussion of the same issue in different places.
No, we are talking about the technical fact of parallel communication. The user can conduct a discussion on the forum or on the social network, while privately talking on the same topic in some sort of messenger. In such a situation, one of the leaders of private communication may ask his interlocutor to copy his remark in a public conversation. Just to ensure that everything important was in one place and did not have to look for the desired replica in different programs and services.
This is precisely the technical feature of Internet communication, because the author of the copied text does not need to pronounce it again with his voice, rewrite by hand or redraw - you can simply copy it in one place and paste it into another.
From the perspective of an outside observer, this looks like a sudden appearance of a message going beyond the general flow of discussion.
In such situations, try to make an effort on yourself and not rush to immediately smash this idiot. Perhaps you see only part of someone else's communication.
(Another option for this self-deception is a request for a purely technical action - checking the patency of the message or something else. Such technical messages can be familiar, prickly, or vice versa primitive. An outside observer who is not aware of the request for technical comment transmitted through other channels, may misunderstand the appearance of obscene comment. :))
4) You overestimate your own significance
Once I watched an extremely funny situation. Several LJ users drew attention to the clearly coordinated activity of bots. They found that their “guest lists” contain the same set of guests. The joy of these users was great - the Russian government threw their selected forces against them from the boto farm against them. They encouraged each other, discussed the possible motives of the Insidious Enemy, and were very proud of their own importance.
No, not morons, but people who don’t know the concept of referral spam. This phenomenon is familiar to website owners, but is not obvious to ordinary users.
No, these “guests” in LJ were not interested in what you wrote - these are robots that responded to the fact of your activity. Since you wrote something today, then tomorrow you’ll go to check who has read your text. Seeing an unfamiliar user there, you may go, maybe subscribe.
Therefore, do not flatter yourself with the appearance of “guests” of the opposite sex in Odnoklassniki, do not be puffed up with importance when “guests” appear after you write a post on a political topic, and do not be proud that two Veliky Ustyug shops and a beauty salon have posted your photo on the Instagram hashtag . This is just spam - nothing personal.
5) You are looking for meaning where it does not exist
This paragraph is somewhat reminiscent of the previous one, but nevertheless it is not identical to it.
A year ago, a text appeared in RuNet denouncing the “scientific” groups on Vkontakte, which were not very scientific. These groups had funny pictures, jokes, an astral canoe and all sorts of fashion stuff. How is it that the authors of the denunciations lamented, the theme of science was declared, but this topic is not followed.
Clever, it seems, seriously took thematic content projects, whose main and only task is to show advertisements and bring owners income. The creators of such projects do not really care about the declared theme, their creation and management is just a technology. Today it is “science”, tomorrow - “technology”, then some sort of positive outlook on the world, personal effectiveness, etc. Inside there will be the same cats, pies, jokes and other garbage, and only sometimes - anything containing keywords from the stated topic.
Do you have any signs of a site or group that should be publicly shamed for bad materials and deviations from the topic?
Before spending time and nerves, take a closer look at them, maybe it's just a thematic content project, and its authors will not be ashamed - they will be happy with additional PR.
6) You look into the void
Closing the list of self-deceptions is a paragraph that is an ideal example of demonstrating what the misunderstanding of the realities of the Internet leads to.
There is a group on Facebook in which people have fun over the mistakes of other people - typos, wordings, etc. They have fun and discuss how this or that mistake arose. They are very literate and proud of it.
Not so long ago, they very actively discussed the inconsistency of the proposals they found on a site consisting of synonymous texts. Yes, they took seriously the texts on the auto-generated garbage dump. Google robots no longer take such texts seriously, but they are not robots, and people who want to find meaning where it is simply not supposed to. And they found him.
It was a strange sight - a discussion of grammatical errors in a synonymous text. Funny but weird.
And instructive, because I myself am the same.
I can rush into battle without seeing the whole situation, I can take the joke seriously, I can enjoy the bot from the bot and get angry at the content project on a topic that interests me.
But you absolutely do not have to be like that.