Sunday, January 21, 2007
(2:17 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Psychologizing
In my experience, online discussions include far more "psychologizing" of people's opinions than face-to-face discussions. This is of course ironic, given that online discussions offer the least possible data for drawing conclusions as to a particular writer's mental state -- tone, facial expressions, nervous tics, etc., are all excluded, leaving only the bare words.Perhaps it is precisely this lack that incites people to impute sinister motives to their interlocutors, as though there were something inherently sinister about disembodied words.
