Date: Tue, 8 Dec 2009 15:21:30 -0600 From: Jorge Amodio <jmamodio@gmail.com>
Among the many wonderful things Internet has created in the past 2+ decades, it gave birth to a countless number of "Internet Experts" ...
for example, some of us got a chance to witness the following. i've removed all identifying marks. (i was NOT the author NOR the offender, but the author does read this mailing list, and several of you will no doubt recognize the flaming style once you consider the time/date stamp.) ------- Forwarded Message To: ... Subject: Re: verbal brickbats Date: Sun, 02 Jun 96 23:37:40 PDT From: ... My guess is that most people just ignore you. Which might be a shame, because your point of view is different enough from the average member of the list that you are valuable here just by being different. I think of you as a pompous egomaniac nut case, but that's just my opinion; I have no Greek or Latin quotations to back it up and no 5-point treatise about how some part of scripture says you're a bad person. It's just what I believe, based entirely on what you've said here. In your world you're a fancy professor with power and authority. You're probably the intellectual terror of [your] postal code. Here in my world of cyberspace you're just an arrogant twit who knows Greek. If you want to spend your time making impassioned arguments to the people who already agree with you, then just keep doing what you're doing. If your goal is to change somebody's mind about one of the topics that you address, then you need to learn both some manners and some rhetorical technique. If you want to teach somebody, to expand somebody's understanding, to increase the number of people in the world who agree with you, then please listen to me, because here in cyberspace I'm the guy with the power and experience and authority and you're just an insect. ... Let me give you a few pointers on being taken more seriously. * First, you have the habit of making arguments from authority, rather than as an individual. Sometimes it is important to establish your authority in some area, in much the same way that an expert witness in a courtroom establishes his credibility and authority on the topic for which he is to testify. You may think of yourself as an authority on the matters that you are expounding on, but we don't yet. Your academic pedigree and your quotations from ancient languages are just bluster here on the Internet. The general principle here in cyberspace is that we participate as individuals and not as representatives of authoritative bodies. You can earn the right to wield the authority of some body on whose behalf you speak, but you don't walk in our door holding that authority just because you are B.A., M.A., Ph.D. and have a white beard. [...] If your goal in writing to the Internet is to change somebody's mind about some topic that you care about, then you really must learn to communicate in a very different style. * Second, you are constantly trying to impress us with how much better educated you are than we are. This might be related to the first item, above, since if you're going to be arguing from authority then you probably need to keep establishing that you have some authority. I think you'll find that this is a pretty highly educated crowd, but you don't catch us relying on our academic pedigrees instead of on our ability to communicate. I am quite certain that I have absolutely as many degrees as you do, and I am completely certain that I know many more obscure languages than you do, but if I can't win an argument with you based on what I say and how I say it, then my degrees are all just puffery, aren't they? But in establishing a precedent of authority and pedigree as the basis for power, you are treading on dangerous ground. Here in cyberspace you aren't in your world, you're in mine. If you make the mistake of trying to establish some ground rules in which argument by authority is the norm, then you'd better make sure that you don't ruffle the feathers of somebody who has more of it than you do. I can make the Internet do anything I want it to do. I can perform the digital equivalent of heaving lightning bolts in front of your chariot, and rending the earth beneath your mail reader. I can turn your hard disk into a toad. I'm a technocrat. But I won't, because we professionals don't act that way. I don't have to brandish my power and authority and education and knowledge of arcana in order to get people to listen to me. I try to make a crisp argument and let my words carry that argument. If I fail, then I don't go running for some Greek derivation or invoke some long-dead philosopher. Heck, I don't even go running for analogies from Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven", which is every bit as fine a piece of literature as Aristophanes. * Third, you convey a complete disdain for your reader. Your writing style reeks of the belief that your time is so much more important than the time of your reader that you can't be bothered to write correctly or to edit what you write. If you'd like to have more readers, then it would be very worthwhile for you to be more respectful of them. Among other things, this means that you need to write in a way that makes it easier for your reader to read: use real sentences with real capital letters at the beginnings of them, and do try to spell as many words right as you can muster. So mind your manners, learn to communicate better, stop insulting your readers, and then come back and contribute your intellect to [this] mailing list. If you keep acting like a jerk I'm going to wake up some morning, yawn, make a cup of tea, and then vaporize your mailbox. Sometimes we supremely powerful technocrats just have a bad day. ------- End of Forwarded Message