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stella41b -> RE: Is it ok to be cynical? (4/24/2010 9:34:05 AM)
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I can' help thinking that this wouldn't be so much of a problem if people generally paid more attention to and spent more time working to develop and maintain meaningful friendships. By friendships here I mean people who accept you for you and you accept them for them, who you can contact without needing a valid reason, or an agenda, or a hidden motive to do so. The sort of friend who will listen to you without judgment, share your thoughts, feelings, emotions, offer their opinion or advice, but not take it personally if you choose not to take it.
That saying I understand that there's a lot of people either without friends or who don't feel that they can confide so much in their friends. There's an awful lot of people who when using the Internet put out an image, and that image often becomes a mask behind which they hide and in some ways a facade, and this facade can often extend beyond the Internet out into real life. When this happens people can become isolated, and often do, and quite often it's little more than pride or fear which prevents them from revealing what lies behind that image and facade and ending their personal isolation.
There's a considerable number of people who, for a considerable number of reasons, don't have much real time contact (or even any) with people they can call friends, some of them are here too, and their contact with the Internet is almost or all their social contact with people, and they can go weeks or even months without experiencing any social face to face contact with anyone else outside of their immediate family, their work colleagues and maybe either current or former relationship partners. On sites such as this one they may even have a social circle of friends but in compartmentalizing their lives they still may not have someone to talk to regarding this aspect of their lives. This can often be the case with people who are older or lower down in the social hierarchy.
I generally take people at face value on the Internet and will generally accept them for who they present themselves to be and accept what they say until there's a valid reason to believe otherwise. People are individuals and I generally believe that you don't start to get to know anyone until you start interacting with them on a one to one basis.
People tend to act out of their own self-interest which forms the reason and motivation behind whatever it is they do or say here on the Internet and I tend to look at that and try to determine the payoff or objective. Quite a lot of the time people come here to the Internet for attention - both positive and negative or some sort of external validation and these two reasons in themselves generate many if not most of the threads and posts we read here. But some people are looking for information, knowledge, guidance, help and emotional support as well, as well as the potential for further contact with other people.
In threads such as referred to in the OP I may respond, or I may not. I pay attention to how much responsibility the OP takes for the situation or circumstances they find themselves in and how they respond to the development of the thread. This is often a reliable indicator as to whether my input or contribution is going to be worthwhile or beneficial to someone involved on that thread or not. In cases where it is a personal problem or issue affecting the OP and I have contributed to that thread I am also usually open to more private one to one contact with the OP or others to give them that opportunity to take whatever problem they're experiencing off the boards into some sort of interaction.
Personally I don't bring my personal problems to the boards because I don't see much difference between doing that and announcing it publicly to passers-by on the street and I have people who are close to me who I feel can turn to.
Nor do I make a difference between the Internet and the 'real world', because to me there is no difference, it's all communication between real, living human beings and words can offend, hurt and wound just as effectively on an Internet message board as they can spoken to someone's face. In any communication with other people I share responsibility for that communication and thus give due thought, consideration and attention to all that I am communicating.
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