"Weight" isn't the right way to look at it, I think. It's not that there's a scale of importance where the virtual is automatically less than the actual.

While Reddit was busy tearing me to shreds, someone commented in one of the worstofs about me that "he takes things too seriously like someone who grew up before the Internet." That hit home - those of us who reached adolescence before Internet flame wars were more likely to be impacted by Internet flame wars. To me it seemed like an acknowledgement that those who grew up "after the Internet" took pride in diminished empathy. It saddened me, but it felt accurate. 'cuz the thing is, I give my online interactions the importance that the situation allows... and I generally start off with the assumption that the person I'm talking to is just like me. Backintheday you interacted with people online because eventually you'd meet them out in the world - and that is clearly no longer the case. So I guess I'm stuck in a "pen pal" mentality, whereby everybody I talk to is likely to be someone I run into at a party eventually. It probably gives me a thin skin because lots of people online these days act as if they'll never interact with anybody in person ever, so it gives them license.

That license offends me, which offends them, because it's only the Internet, right? Thus we end up having a disagreement because they don't have the empathy to treat me like a human and I don't have the dispassion to treat them like a machine.