Eh I don’t really like the idea of banning people. It happens to me a lot too.

Just had a big argument with him in another thread, said “fuck this” and went to find new content, landed here, there’s some dude being a total dick and it’s him!

It’s like saying “fuck Cleveland I’m outta here!” then hauling ass on the interstate for hours just to roll right back into Cleveland again. Damn.

What I’d like to do is help him, but I’m not sure if it’s possible online. In person I’d just go nonverbal and express peaceful vibes until we could talk, but online all we have is words. There’s no nonverbal interaction. To way to cooperate on anything that isn’t conversational.

That’s my thinking on it, but I just smoked and I’m getting rambly.

Basically I think respect is established nomverbally and then that enables conversations where people respectfully disagree with one another. Like I don’t care if you don’t agree with my ethical ideas as long as your muscles are relaxed and your tone of voice isn’t threatening violence on me. I like to have long detailed debates with my friends.

But if you’ve got no tone of voice or body language to establish that the frame is peaceful, the only thing you have is the content of the words.

Honestly, and I’m just thinking this now, I bet that’s the root of the intergenerational difference in … uh … assumed state of conflict inherent to a conversation.

So me and the other middle aged people grew up in a world where aside from the super slow and far removed from normal “pen pal” thing, you communicated with people in physical spaces: either directly there or at least with a broad spectrum sound signal of a phone call. You get emotional data on a voice call.

But now we’ve got people who grew up with social media. In social media, you can have conversations that are only words. No time except what you can glean from word content. Not just essays and stories published, but conversations. Entirely word-based conversations, devoid of accompanying sensory experience of the conversational partner, are a new thing in human experience.

And in a text-only conversation, if you want to establish a framing relationship with the conversational partner, it needs to be done via the words.

And here’s where the generational gap comes in. It’s a difference in how we implicitly model a friendly debate:

Me and the other old fogies’ model of a friendly debate:

• Nonverbal signals saying: “Things are chill, we’re friends, I respect you”
• Word content saying: “I disagree with you and intend to argue against your claims”

The youngins’ model of a friendly debate is:

• Word content saying: “Things are chill, we’re friends, I respect you”
• Word content saying: “I disagree with you and intend to argue against your claims”

We old fogies don’t need that word content signal online because we had years of face to face interaction, so our default model of a verbal disagreement is that it’s friends respectfully disagreeing.

In our pre-internet world, all of the debates were friendly debates because non-friendly debates escalated to violence. So in all the cases where the debating continued, it happened in a peaceful manner. Therefore the old fogie, pre-internet implicit belief is “debate is friendly”.

But text-only debates can be nasty without escalating (transforming) into physical conflict, and therefore the fact of a continuing debate wasn’t a solid indicator of friendly context.

So these kids need, and provide each other with, explicit respect signals. For them it is not to be assumed.

For us, it is to be assumed that unless there’s an explicit indicator otherwise, debates are friendly.