Funny thing the internet does to the way people communicate. Back in '05 when I joined HLP I was going to middle school at a tiny private school with 70 something other eighth graders. Most of the people I knew went to a private high school while I went to a public high school and joined the time sink known as marching band, causing me to completely lose touch with everyone I knew. As a result, I've been active on HLP longer than I've known my closest friends.
So how has this affected my communication with people IRL?
1) I'm very antagonistic. I disagree with people just for the sake of disagreement, which I assume is a result of spending time on intarnet forums such as HLP, where posts stating simply "I agree" are unnecessary and critical discussion is encouraged.
2) Whenever I chat with IRL people online their messages are always short fragments usually like a stream of thought, while mine are typically arranged into large chunks. I assume that this is because on intarnet boards posting with several short, low-content, consecutive posts is the opposite of what is wanted.
These are the only differences I've noticed that I can actually attach to specific causes. I'm actually a decent public speaker, so I think that quality of IRL communication is largely independent of the ratio of online vs. offline communication.
As for Facebook, I honestly don't think it has any negative impact on face-to-face communication. Personally, I use Facebook first and foremost as a utility for scheduling meetings with people/groups. E-mail is not centralized and just not as effective as Facebook for this. Secondarily, I use Facebook to talk to people without having to go see them. It's far cheaper to open a chat window than to walk a half mile to a bus stop, pay 3 dollars, ride 20 minutes to the next town to hang out with someone and then come back. Frankly, I'm not convinced that I would even do that if facebook didn't exist.
But I don't use Facebook my definite means of socialization, per se. Have I stopped talking to people IRL after I got a facebook account? No. If anything, I talk to people IRL more (though I doubt there's a strong causal relationship between the two).
tl;dr If internet makes you a bad IRL communicator, you're doing it wrong.
I must have used the wrong words to describe my short experience. It's not as tragic as it sounds from that one post, as I still tend to talk more IRL than I do via the internet.
What I said is that the way to talk to people has changed somehow. It's no longer "pure", though I'm working on it, and it's hard to notice how much we've changed until we talk to people who don't use the internet very often. Just like you, thesizzler, I experience both 1) and 2) and that has to mean something.
What about a telephone? I can hear the voice then. What about Skype or videochatting stuff? What if I text somebody in a situation (football game, etc) where I can't hear to talk to them?
The point I'm trying to make here is that it's not so simple as drawing "lines" between different kinds of communication. Personal anecdotes are hardly evidence, but I've had plenty of good times in chatrooms with people I know IRL. How is this socializing different than us going and meeting up somewhere? You can't say that it's just the "seeing of gestures", because there are plenty of ways (in a car, on the phone) you can have socializing without them. If you can't use that as the determiner, then what's the difference?
Online socializing isn't a full replacement for real socializing, but neither is it something completely different. Whether or not web socializing is "just as good" as real socializing depends entirely on who's involved.
EDIT: BTW Mobius, like you I'm disregarding e-mail and forum as a bit "different".
My opinion is not as extremist as you think, Solatar. Of course telephone calls and Skype are all another matter, and have somehow improved social interactions but we can't deny the fact that calls and Skype are severely underused compared to forums, chatrooms and Facebook.
Gestures are probably a cultural matter. I tend to give a lot of importance to them because of their wide usage here. Nothing of critical importance, though.
Actually the monkeying was for the same stuff. You were monkeyed due to your inability to interact with the rest of the forums in a non-disruptive manner. It doesn't matter whether you call it real social interaction or not. The simple fact is that you did a very bad job of fitting in with it. Which means there's a good chance that you'd do a very bad job on Facebook or other electronic mediums too and maybe even in real life.
You failed to interact with the forum in the normal manner to such a degree that out of the thousands of people on HLP you're one of the few who required special measures. So you can't use your anecdotal evidence as proof of why Facebook is bad for real social interaction. Your an anomaly, an outlier. There's no reason to believe that whatever effect Facebook had on you will happen to other people.
There are causes and there are reasons. The
causes are those you mentioned (though you're pretty wrong on a couple of things), the
reasons are that I found certain interactions between me and other community members disturbing, those bad interactions triggered a chain reaction and I had to face the consequences. Remember when I said what I thought without caring about the rank of the person I was interacting with? It happened because I initally thought genuine RL-like interactions with other HLP members were actually possible and therefore talked roughly pretending the impossible. As obvious as it may seem, I've completely changed my mind after what happened. No one can pretend to handle forum interactions as RL ones due to the obvious differences in terms of ranking, culture, etc. etc.
Let's face it, IRL you don't use CPs to play Pontius Pilate and force someone to shut up, knowing that there will be no consequences for you. IRL, if you do something wrong to a person you meet every day, you're going to struggle with it every day. One way or another, you'll solve the problem and learn something new about social life. RL interactions are much better because you can experience the good and the bad of them much more evidently.
