User:Improv/Communication is Hard online

It's easy for people to have communication issues on the internet, from getting hurt feelings from nothing and rising tensions to becoming trolls. This, I believe, is partly because the medium robs some of our humanity from us. In real life, people don't have miscommunication as frequently as online because our species, barring those with certain brain disorders, has a lot of instinctual emotion tied into being in the physical presence of each other. In the flesh, when we see people suffer, we have an emotional response, and when we talk, we get a rich context of nonverbal communication in tone, facial expression, eye movements, and even scent. Online, we're almost flying blind, and so it's easy to run into problems. Wikipedia, like any other online community, suffers from this problem. There is no solution to this, one just needs to keep this in mind and take extra care to be civil, not to say things that can easily be misunderstood, and to be careful in interpreting what other people say, asking for clarification when necessary. --Improv 05:28, 29 December 2005 (UTC)