Leaving Usnet Groups, Bye

Dudley Henriques wrote:

"Rich Lemert" wrote in message
...

Dudley Henriques wrote:

.......or what has come to be for me at least; the ultimate mystery of
Usenet......that being the existence of people out here who actually will
wait patiently for a particular poster they don't like to post
something....ANYTHING......and then check every word...every
statement......every meaning....in the twisted hope that the poster they
don't particularly like very well will make a mistake.....no matter how
tiny a mistake or error...that THEY can jump on immediately to use as
"absolute proof" that the object of their "exposure" is flawed!

Consider yourself lucky if they're actually waiting for you to post
something so they can try to embarass you with it. I've been a regular
in sci.research.careers, and they've got a guy over there who doesn't
even bother waiting for me to post something in order to mis-represent
my views.

Rich Lemert


It's become more or less expected on these groups by many who post on them.
It's no big deal really, but it takes a lot of the fun out of posting and
eventually runs a lot of fairly well qualified and experienced people off
the groups, or as it has done in my case, turns them into totally hostile
posters.
My Usenet persona has come 180 degrees from when I first arrived on Usenet 6
years ago, especially on this group right here. I used to assume a neutral
or even friendly atmosphere from posters until shown otherwise. I now assume
a totally hostile environment unless I know the poster I'm dealing with (and
there are indeed some very fine people here) or the people posting with me
demonstrate to me that they are not hostile.
Dudley Henriques

I've been using usenet for 10+ years and have found that people tend to
come across as more hostile in writing than they really are in person.
This happens in email as well. You don't have the inflection and other
nonverbal cues that you get in mano-y-mano conversation and it is easy
for things to escalate well beyond what anyone intended.

Sure, some folks are that way naturally, but I think fairly few in
reality. I think much more is inadvertant than intentional.

MAtt

Matt Whiting wrote:

I've been using usenet for 10+ years and have found that people tend to
come across as more hostile in writing than they really are in person.
This happens in email as well.Â*Â*YouÂ*don'tÂ*haveÂ*theÂ*inflectionÂ*andÂ*o ther
nonverbal cues that you get in mano-y-mano conversation and it is easy
for things to escalate well beyond what anyone intended.

I've been USENETing since at least 84 (according to DejaGoogle), and I
agree. For a while, I resisted using those "emotocon" glyphs reasoning
that words should be sufficient in a written medium.

Eventually, I gave that up. Too many read perhaps every other, or every
third, word. Any possible subtlety is lost when reading is so sparse.
Spoonfeeding is required.

- Andrew

"Andrew Gideon" wrote in message
gonline.com...
Matt Whiting wrote:

I've been using usenet for 10+ years and have found that people tend to
come across as more hostile in writing than they really are in person.
This happens in email as well. You don't have the inflection and other
nonverbal cues that you get in mano-y-mano conversation and it is easy
for things to escalate well beyond what anyone intended.

I've been USENETing since at least 84 (according to DejaGoogle), and I
agree. For a while, I resisted using those "emotocon" glyphs reasoning
that words should be sufficient in a written medium.

Eventually, I gave that up. Too many read perhaps every other, or every
third, word. Any possible subtlety is lost when reading is so sparse.
Spoonfeeding is required.

- Andrew

Your choice of the word "spoonfeeding" here is indicative of the problems
found in email and posting communication. Taken in context, the word
"spoonfeeding" as you have used it can indicate a deficiency on the part of
the receiver of the communication. To focus in any way on the receiver of a
communication is to mask the responsibility of the writer of the
communication to make EVERY effort to convey the "mood" and "tone" of the
communication.
This is why we use emoticons for electronic visual communication.
The problem is that many people are intimidated by the use of an emoticon;
feeling that their use implies a lesser level of intelligence.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
There are few people in this world with the natural writing skill to
completely convey with a zero error margin, the tone and mood of a written
thought.
Your use of the word "spoonfeeding" is a perfect example of what I'm talking
about. Your thought was correct. Your statement was correct. The writer does
indeed have to be extremely careful when trying to convey the mood and tone
of a letter.
But the use of the word "spoonfeeding" would not be my first choice to
describe what is required.
:-))))) This is much less "threatening" than the word "spoonfeeding". Do
YOU like the thought that someone thinks in order for you to understand what
has been written to you, that you have to be "spoon-fed" the information?
Think about it! :-)
Dudley Henriques

Dudley Henriques wrote:

Taken in context, the word
"spoonfeeding" as you have used it can indicate a deficiency on the part
of the receiver of the communication.

Or the medium. Try eating soup with a fork, for example.

- Andrew

"Andrew Gideon" wrote in message
online.com...
Dudley Henriques wrote:

Taken in context, the word
"spoonfeeding" as you have used it can indicate a deficiency on the part
of the receiver of the communication.

Or the medium. Try eating soup with a fork, for example.

- Andrew

True.

All the more the need for the simple approach like that ridiculous looking
little emoticon :-). So simple....so effective. No mistakes. Says it all
mood and tone wise all in a simple key hit! Occam's Razor at it's finest!
:-))
Dudley

Andrew, check your settings. I believe that you are posting in HTML,
instead of the preferred plan text.
--
Jim in NC

Morgans wrote:

Andrew, check your settings. I believe that you are posting in HTML,
instead of the preferred plan text.

I'm not (or at least not in the message to which you replied). The content
type of the message to which you replied was:

text/plain; charset=utf-8

I suspect instead that you're experiencing some difficulty with the
character set, but that's pretty much a guess.

My default character set is standard ascii. However, when I quote someone
I'm occasionally forced to use utf-8. I've not figured out why.

If there was some different message you think I posted in HTML, please give
me a message ID or something else I can use to identify it. I'd be happy
to check, just in case I am. But I've certainly told my newsreader to not
do so.

Thanks...

- Andrew

"Andrew Gideon" wrote in message
agonline.com...
[...]
My default character set is standard ascii. However, when I quote someone
I'm occasionally forced to use utf-8. I've not figured out why.

If there was some different message you think I posted in HTML, please
give
me a message ID or something else I can use to identify it. I'd be happy
to check, just in case I am. But I've certainly told my newsreader to not
do so.

He probably is under the mistaken impression that you used HTML because your
post showed up in his newsreader with a different font that what he's used
to. Outlook Express, for example, uses a proportional-spaced font for plain
text 8-bit posts, even when you've set it to use a fixed-spaced font for
plain text posts.

Since HTML posts are usually in a proportional-spaced font, a person might
(incorrectly) assume that any post shown in a proportional-spaced font is
HTML.

As for why YOUR news reader insists on using 8-bit when 7-bit would do, I
don't know. You'd have to ask the KNode folks about that. I didn't see
anything in the post you made in 8-bit, nor the post to which you replied
(which was itself 7-bit) that would have suggested 8-bit encoding needed to
be used.

Pete

Peter Duniho wrote:


He probably is under the mistaken impression that you used HTML because
your post showed up in his newsreader with a different font that what he's
used
to. Outlook Express, for example, uses a proportional-spaced font for
plain text 8-bit posts, even when you've set it to use a fixed-spaced font
for plain text posts.

Ah. Thanks. I'd thought that it might have been the font, but I didn't
have the background to explain how it could be the case; I know
little-to-nothing about MSFT products. More, I'm sufficiently stuck in my
ways that I've tried very few NNTP readers even on my platform of choice.

[...]

As for why YOUR news reader insists on using 8-bit when 7-bit would do, I
don't know. You'd have to ask the KNode folks about that. I didn't see
anything in the post you made in 8-bit, nor the post to which you replied
(which was itself 7-bit) that would have suggested 8-bit encoding needed
to be used.

I'd always assumed that it was because I was quoting from an 8-bit message.
However, this incident caused me to check and that is not the case.

Puzzling.

- Andrew

On Thu, 05 May 2005 14:51:27 -0400, Andrew Gideon
wrote:

Matt Whiting wrote:

I've been using usenet for 10+ years and have found that people tend to
come across as more hostile in writing than they really are in person.
This happens in email as well.**You*don't*have*the*inflection*and*other
nonverbal cues that you get in mano-y-mano conversation and it is easy
for things to escalate well beyond what anyone intended.

I've been USENETing since at least 84 (according to DejaGoogle), and I
agree. For a while, I resisted using those "emotocon" glyphs reasoning
that words should be sufficient in a written medium.


70% of face-to-face communication is non-verbal. We take that for
granted when we are on the internet. It tends to be hard to convery
the true spirit of a thought via text to a person that you have never
met before.



Jim

http://www.unconventional-wisdom.org