[Sigia-l] IAtiquette: how much do you challenge your client?

[Donna Timara]

Lada, probably it is misnomer to draw comparison between Netiquette's
with standards of the real world. Internet to many is a means to
present their personality differently than they would in the real
world with actual things at risk... And this is not necessarily bad,
if we keep our focus on issues than on personalities. On internet you
don't get your face in front of others, so at time matters of personal
style appears as low on etiquettes. Web for many people are purer form
of free world, where you can express yourself without putting yourself
to any scrutiny... It should be left that way. We should create an
outer boundaries, such as no abuse, no physical intimidation, no
threat etc. and leave disagreements to be resolved on individual
levels. This system (forum) needs much more tolerance than the real
world. This may be counter-intuitive for those who volunteer harsher
regulation, but there's no other way to keep it going.

Another way to look at the two are through incentives. On the web,
there are less incentives for people to be accountable for their
behavior, as compared to the real world which works too much like a
mirror. These are two different worlds -- virtual and real, and we
should be ready to accept different behaviors from same people, and
start molding our perception differently. In my opinion, these two
distinctive behaviors are not going to be merged in one, ever, and it
is waste of time to bridge these gaps.

Contrary to some of the opinion expressed earlier, this forum IMHO can
only survive,

- If different standards of etiquettes are acceptable
- If freedom of speech and open discussion is used as an incentive for
people to volunteer to express
- If majority rule (and so called Democracy) is not enforced upon who
thinks much more passionately about their ideas
- If folks are willing to change some fundamental mind-sets with new
mantras, such as, "conflict" is really good for why we are here, "open
discussion" is not abuse of others right, etc.

These are important for long term success of this forum. In the short
run, people may come and go. That is not necessarily failure of this
system. People do get fed up with any system and need change. The real
success should be measured differently -- how much passion/conviction
we have in our discussions (not lack of those), what is new in our
discussions, how many people we engage (not how many are those
bystandars), how many people come back who left this forum in utter
frustration, etc….



On 8/18/05, Lada Gorlenko <lada at acm.org> wrote:
> The Netiquette discussion of the last two days boils down for me to
> the following questions:
> 
> 1. How much do I allow others to challenge my professional opinion
> before it becomes perceived as a personal attack?
> 2. How much of my-personality makeup can I apply to *my* professional
> opinion before is becomes perceived as vulgar and inappropriate?
> 3. How much of assertiveness in expressing my POV is a blessing and
> how much of it is a hindrance in getting the point across?