I mentioned it in my first post that my recent motivation to have more of an online presence as a sociologist was both brought about my organizational failures and the subsequent realization that sociology functions just as well inside the academy as it does outside.
I still believe this, but it's nevertheless becoming readily apparent that there is a difference.
The internet is wonderfully vast, if not stifling textual. Debating through text is incredibly hard on the intuitions and institutions established within our lines of communication. It's so hard to have an opinion and present it as such and not as something one steadfastly and wholly believes in. This shortfall is comparative to the way we present opinions in person through our voice. Speaking for myself as a English-Canadian, and having been in several conversations regarding contentious subjects in sociology, you develop the ability to tell when there are openings for mutually enjoyable prying, and when you should just fuck off, mostly through body language and intonation. This, as it stands, is not so much present in the contemporary, online, highly-textual environment.
The level of sophistication, though, of passive-aggression in online forums, is hopeful. Though incredibly annoying to me, it certainly shows that what is typically highly dependent on the person-to-person has found its place, and convincingly so, through the strictly textual. This is a good sign that other things we take for granted in our day-to-day interactions can evolve into our online interactions.
As a society, we really are still trying to find our way through this new online space that is so fucking text-based. It can be exhausting for someone like me who can, if only slightly, recall a time where text was only found in books, a medium that has developed its own tools and forms centuries before me. Now, along with many others, the interacting through text is a little destabalizing and kinda anxious. We're asking of text something very new and that is for it to maintain what we've found so useful and precise over the past several decades, but to also give us that immediacy of in-person discussion.
I look forward to seeing how it develops itself.
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