From: Richard Kettlewell <richardk+from=uk.misc@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Newsgroups: uk.misc
Subject: Re: Announcement of (temporary?) break from Usenet
Date: 24 Jan 2000 14:10:51 +0000
Mike Warren <me@here.com> writes:
> Do you interact with people here, as you would in real life?.
I would suggest that you can't, because the language is so different. In RL you get facial expressions, tone and volume of voice, timing in speech patterns, accents, body language, etc, all of which are missing in Usenet.
Emoticons can be a substitute for facial expressions in some situations, but they're hardly a complete replacement, and they don't seem very popular on uk.misc anyway.
Equally capital letters can be a substitute for shouting, and punctuation for timing, but they offer a rather blunter distinction than is available in speech.
Even if you could have all of these ... what would be the point? Part of the charm of news is precisely these differences. (It's also a curse; but with a level head and a good scorefile, you can work around this somewhat.)
Another good feature is the fact that you don't have to care if no-one is listening. Ramble on endlessly in RL and people may well start ignoring you, possibly pointedly, and unless you're a shameless bore that doesn't feel very nice; but people ignoring you in news can be indistinguishable from them agreeing with you, or being too busy to reply right now, or having a patchy newsfeed, or whatever.