In real life it is usually fairly easy to determine when you're addressing a single individual, a closely-held group, or a large gathering. And large gatherings themselves are still generally constrained: it's difficult to directly address more than about 50 people without some sort of public-address system in use.
Online the level of exposure and amplification are difficult to judge. Your direct environment may be entirely private --- alone in a room, with a screen and keyboard (of various descriptions). Or you might well be out in public, but the immediate public and the public you're reaching online are themselves almost completely independent of one another. One of the more common complaints or statements I see is to the effect that other, uninvited people are barging into a private or limited discussion. But at the same time, that discussion is occurring in a highly public space.
There are a few interpetations of that:
- It could be a "simple matter of training", of educating people to understand that what is online is inherently public. See xkcd's 10,000 for the scale that's involved, and multiply that by roughly a factor of 80 to reach global scale. That's a lot of painful confusion endured every single day.
- People holding this position could well be disingenuous, know full well that they're monopolising a public discourse, and are seeking simply to exclude conflicting voices and viewpoints. I'm told that such things happen....
- The principles might simply be wired too deeply into our psychology. We have an inherent sense of rooms and spaces and friends and groups, and think that we're having discussions amongst them even when the reality is that we are not, and much as optical illusions and legerdemain still work and fool us even when we know the trick, there's no engineering around this.
I'm divided among all three of these viewpoints, though I put strong weight on the third. And there may well be others I'm not considering.
But the point remains that attempting to have intimate discussions at scale really presents fundamental and insurmountable contradictions that can't easily be resolved.
Online the level of exposure and amplification are difficult to judge. Your direct environment may be entirely private --- alone in a room, with a screen and keyboard (of various descriptions). Or you might well be out in public, but the immediate public and the public you're reaching online are themselves almost completely independent of one another. One of the more common complaints or statements I see is to the effect that other, uninvited people are barging into a private or limited discussion. But at the same time, that discussion is occurring in a highly public space.
There are a few interpetations of that:
- It could be a "simple matter of training", of educating people to understand that what is online is inherently public. See xkcd's 10,000 for the scale that's involved, and multiply that by roughly a factor of 80 to reach global scale. That's a lot of painful confusion endured every single day.
- People holding this position could well be disingenuous, know full well that they're monopolising a public discourse, and are seeking simply to exclude conflicting voices and viewpoints. I'm told that such things happen....
- The principles might simply be wired too deeply into our psychology. We have an inherent sense of rooms and spaces and friends and groups, and think that we're having discussions amongst them even when the reality is that we are not, and much as optical illusions and legerdemain still work and fool us even when we know the trick, there's no engineering around this.
I'm divided among all three of these viewpoints, though I put strong weight on the third. And there may well be others I'm not considering.
But the point remains that attempting to have intimate discussions at scale really presents fundamental and insurmountable contradictions that can't easily be resolved.
(Original author / submitter.)