A saturday night talk with my friends brought up one interesting topic. When we were criticizing the clumsy social skills of a guy who just moved to our area and came to our party last week, a friend pointed out those were his "cyber-social" rather than real-life skills. The idea of interferring role of cyber-social skills in normal social life didn't come to my mind until the next day when I was reading articles on contextual influence on human mental development.
Internet, paricularly online community, seems to have become a main living space for many people nowadays. Because of the number of people and the interaction time they spend in various online communities, special culture, such as linguistic and pragmatic patterns, has been formed in each community. Some people, particularly those who are willingly or unvolunterily lack of face-to-face social interaction, have gradually been acculturated into these cyber cultures. Before they realize it, they start to use the lanugage patterns within the online community in normal social communication. Apparently, the online interaction is quite different from normal social interaction, which causes normal people think those cyber-citizens are insane... Interestingly, these cyber citizens may not realize the weird impression normal peole have on them until some day someone cannot stand their self-claimed jokes any more...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Not necessarily a bad thing: Internet has greatly increased the number of nerds, geeks and dorks. There are a lot of differences in them though: it's kind of cool to be nerdy or geeky to some degree, but being dorky is still widely percieved as a negative thing -- people still like to interact with people with better social skills.
Post a Comment