ownedgirlie
Posts: 9184
Joined: 2/5/2006 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: mistoferin See, I guess that is what surprised me. That someone assumes that there is real emotion that goes beyond the opinions expressed. This is just a forum designed for expressing opinions. I can think that something that someone says is profound or assinine. Heck, I can be adamantly disagreeing with someone on one post and wholeheartedly agreeing with them on another at the same time. I can relate to their words on a personal level or I can be completely baffled by them. But I don't think that I form real opinions about who they are as people or whether I would like or not like them in a face to face social setting, in a friendship or in a relationship....I don't know them. I will agree that taking things personally on a message board is probably not the greatest way to go. But humans are emotional creatures - some more than others, some less. I said in my first post that it's all in the way it's presented. You could respond to a post of mine by saying "Wow, not only are you totally wrong, but any idiot who thinks that way takes up valuable oxygen from the rest of us!" Yep, I might think you meant that personally. But whether or not it is personal should not make the difference as to how it effects me. If I am strong and solid in who I am, you can think I'm the biggest piece of crap on CM and I wouldn't much care. If I did, maybe that just means that I've come to like you from the words you share here, and that I'm disappointed you don't see me in the same regard. I don't find that to be a bad thing, actually. It's when people are insecure to the point of needing everyone on a message board to like them where I'd think they need a healthier self esteem. Or heck, maybe they're just really sensitive, and that's ok to a certain degree. So if someone says, "I thought you didn't like me," perhaps something you said in a post reflected something that appeared of a personal nature to her (I'm talking figuratively now). Or perhaps she was disagreed with so many times, she thought you formed an opinion of her. We've seen post after post with people saying they tend to form opinions about others based on their posts. Don't tell me you (figuratively again) don't chat with your CM friends and comment on who you like and don't like on the forums, based on their views and the way those views are presented. It happens all the time. So as impersonal as we want to say the boards are, they're not. Otherwise, why do we have people laughing together, or touched by another's post to the point of tears, or emphatically disagreeing with a post that hit home for someone. If we all posted monotone to everything, unaffected by each other, how boring would that be? I think the issue is how much value we're placing on each others opinions... So while I agree that disagreeing with someone does not automatically make something personal, when someone posts an intimate detail about his/her life as many of us have done, yourself included, we run the risk of becoming somewhat vulnerable to those reading, thus affected by their responses. I think it's just human nature, and everyone's reality is subjective to some degree.
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