What you say makes a certain amount of sense. Do you give your online interactions with others as much weight as you would to interactions with people in your real life?
"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.
Yes, I can see how attributions would contribute to potential online conflicts. I will admit, I have read through a few of the conflicts here on hubski and have been a bit puzzled about what went on. One problem I have with interacting with others online is that usually there's no introduction, no handshake or even a, "oh hey, this is so-and-so, who's a friend of a friend." I hear what you're saying about diminished empathy though, as it applies to people who grew up "after the internet." I think you're right that some certainly take pride in it, though for others including myself I think it's sometimes a default position when interacting with the faceless. One reason I signed up for the pen pal project was because the last and only pen pal I had was in grade school. Thinking back, I remember I thought my pen pal was a real dickbag until our teachers had us exchange pictures. Suddenly, he became a real person to me instead of some kid from some hick town in Montana I'd never heard of who really liked wolves. This time around, I'm excited by the prospect of interacting with another person through the medium of writing in a way that doesn't occur to me to get excited about when interacting with others on the internet, but after reading through your response it's something I will definitely think about. Anyway, it's interesting to get different perspectives on these extended human interactions.
Yep. "context and what to make of it." I think people who grew up without online communication know that they're lacking a lot of context and tend to temper their conversations accordingly. I think people who grew up with online communication don't recognize all the context they're missing and fill in from their own preconceptions.