From: tmaddox@netcom.com (Tom Maddox)
Subject: Re: *Any* kind of r.a.b split, or at least a *serious* discussion
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 1992 09:15:36 GMT

In article <1992Dec23.225439.22265@netcom.com> dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) writes:
>tmaddox@netcom.com (Tom Maddox):
>>A *joking* attitude, it's called, and is easily recognized as such
>>by anyone with either a clue or a sense of humor.
>
>Unfortunately, this is counter to fact.  Too many of the cues that
>tell someone you're joking are missing.  Body language and tone, the
>first lines of defense, are absent.  

	No, they aren't.  When writing, I never use body language or tone of
voice (which is what you mean by "tone," I take it).  HAHA!  THAT WAS A 
LITTLE JOKE (whoops, BIFF just wandered by and started hammering on the
keyboard).

	Which is only to say:  some of us are used to written communication
as well as oral communication and actually find a certain joy in the former. 

>(I occasionally neglect to substitute
>a smiley, when I'm being sufficiently obvious that nobody could *possibly*
>mistake my intent.  It generally turns out to be a mistake.)  

	Why?  Should Robin Williams reduce his hyperkinetic real-time semiotic
processing to the lowest common denominator so that no one will misunderstand
him?  Also, so far as I'm concerned, leaving out a smiley--ack gack ptui--is
*never* a mistake.

>The second
>line of defense is that in person, you're generally talking to people who
>know you well enough to say "he couldn't possibly mean that seriously."

	No, it isn't.  I generally count on no more than a competent reader's 
willingness to read what I'm saying in context.  Only in very special 
cases, such as when I'm making a private allusion, do I count on the reader's
special knowledge--but it's not of *me* but of what I (or he or she) have
said.

>The third defense, in person-to-person communication,
>is immediate feedback:  You see that the listener is misinterpreting and
>you modify your delivery or, in emergencies, go directly to "just kidding."

	Again, if you understand the difference between speaking and
writing, you won't invoke this "defense."

>To all this, add the sheer *number* of people who read each posting.  
>*Most* will understand.  Perhaps it's true that most of those who don't
>are humorless or clueless:  Does that justify offending them?  

	Frankly, my dear . . .

	I don't make it my practice to worry about whether I'm offending 
others unless the social situation is so highly fraught that I can't avoid
that worry.  I also don't expect others to worry about my taking offense.
I'm much more concerned with whether people are being interesting, witty,
enlightening, provocative.  In short, when it comes to public exchanges of
the written word, I would hold up Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker as exemplars
rather than Miss Manners.  

>Finally,
>aside from these two groups, there will be a few hundred readers who
>take what you said seriously through no deficiency of character or
>native intelligence.  

>It's a commonplace that behavior that is acceptable in one culture
>may be rude in another, that language that's appropriate in one medium
>may be inappropriate in another (eg, written English should *not*
>generally be identical to spoken English), that communications with
>strangers should be more cautious and formal than communications with
>friends and acquaintances.  It's easy, sitting alone at one's own
>terminal, to forget that those commonplaces apply here as well.  Posting
>to tens of thousands of newsgroup readers in the same terms you'd use
>to speak to one of them is...provincial.

	Teach your grandmother to suck eggs.  

	In fact, if the majority were lunatic enough to conform to your 
restrictions, r.a.b. would become a very dull place indeed.  The implied
maxim of "do not offend, whatever the cost" (which would be inaccurately 
characterized by some as "p.c.") would turn us all into timorous and
mincing creatures, all calculation and no spontaneity, all homily and
no wit, all deadly deadly dull.

	But a world of such people exists only in Dreams of Order.  In this
one there are Infidel, Zeleny, Fido, Cramer, McCarthy, Heather (who thinks
herself one of the angels but is in fact of the devil's party--face it, she's
fighting for peace, fucking for chastity), et alia (I am sorry if I have 
offended anyone by exclusion from this list)--coarse, rambling, obsessive, 
irrelevant, insulting, exultant . . . compile your own adjectives.

	The point is that those who want order and propriety here are doomed,
fucked--

	They should really read only moderated newsgroups or GEnie or 
Prodigy or Fido. Also, they should probably live in small towns and suburbs
and stay away from the big cities, where people have been known to spit on
your windshield and call you a cocksucker.

	And of course, those who think they are talking when they are in 
fact writing, or listening when they are reading, are simply wrong, and
they'll either learn better or they're too thick to reckon with.

	
-- 
				Tom Maddox
		    	    tmaddox@netcom.com
	"That's a bird bone, chair, Bob.  I don't know if I should sit there."
				Tom Waits