Social capital

Nessie said:

OMG, I actually didn't know!

.....does this make you wonder what else you don't know about typical behaviour? It does make me wonder. And then you're into the problem of "I don't know what it is that I don't know" and you're unable to ask anyone about it because you don't know what it is. :-)

I'm done with Christmas Cards said:

I now know, from observing myself over the decades, that I've had a habit of orienting my knowledge and language towards the disciplines of the people I'm talking to. So for instance, if I meet a french teacher, I'll dig out my french knowledge. If I have to write to a solicitor, I write like a solicitor does. If I meet a psychology teacher, within minutes I'll be talking about the Johari window, projection, Jung, the shadow etc. Here's the thing; 'normal' people don't do this, apparently. Who knew?

OMG, I actually didn't know! I've always assumed that, to get the most out of people, you need to be fully-conversant in their specialist subject.

No wonder doctors used to find me so irritating talking on their level without a medical degree. They were always like, "Oh, did you study Biochemistry then?" Er, no. I have the ability to read and think. Duh.

Roswell said:

we're overachievers by habit

Touché. 

Thank you, Jez. Where's my invite to come on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

That rings true. When I was having appointments with a psychologist I kept researching psychology online and at the appointments was talking to them about on their level, and they were taken aback, they found it quite amusing, asking what I had been reading. Obviously most people don't do that. Perhaps as we Aspies have always struggled to fit in, we're overachievers by habit!

Roswell said:

Law of Jante

No, I hadn't come across that before; thanks for pointing the way. It's a fascinating, if somewhat frightening concept, and I think you're right, it is remarkably similar to the internet behaviour.

Roswell said:

I'd like to understand people's motives for why they communicate the way they do.

It's not unusual for me to be mulling over such things at 4am when I can't get to sleep - and not even unusual that it would be a recollection of a minute long conversation with someone I only ever met once a couple decades ago. All part and parcel of being autistic for a lot of us, I think.

I have the impression that, like the (alleged) NT innate sense of social reciprocation, most people couldn't even tell you themselves because the rules have percolated into their sub-conscious and aren't consciously selected for.

I wonder too, with the technology being so young, whether we're in a transitional period, where society is still working out how to use the technology to communicate effectively - possibly artificially arrested by software which is designed to encourage the behaviour, since click-throughs yielding exposure to the advertisements and data-mining are essentially the currency of the internet. I have no doubt that much psychology has contributed to the design of such software - and, of course, that would be the dominant psychology of NT behaviour.

In the style of Jeremy Clarkson on Millionaire, "Here's what I think".

I'm imagining that you, like me and many others reading this thread, get interested in and excited about stuff that others simply don't. An anecdote; in my final years at school, I remember reading on the back of a vinyl copy of some classical music the phrase "enharmonic modulations'. I didn't know what it meant, and Google was at least a decade in the future, so I was stuffed. Until I was talking to a school friend at some event or other and I remembered that said friend had recently passed Grade 5 piano. I asked him. He said he didn't know, but why didn't I ask the church choirmaster who was a few yards away. I did. Basically, he said "****ked if I know!" I couldn't believe that these comparatively experts in music theory didn't know. I now know, from observing myself over the decades, that I've had a habit of orienting my knowledge and language towards the disciplines of the people I'm talking to. So for instance, if I meet a french teacher, I'll dig out my french knowledge. If I have to write to a solicitor, I write like a solicitor does. If I meet a psychology teacher, within minutes I'll be talking about the Johari window, projection, Jung, the shadow etc. Here's the thing; 'normal' people don't do this, apparently. Who knew?

So, in the context of those anecdotes (which, if I'm wrong, I hope they are simply amusing), might it be that you've gone in deep and incisive and excited (and, in all probability, been 100% accurate and full of insight and a desire to praise etc) and the others on the thread have gone "OMG!" and not known how to react?

If I'm wide of the mark, please excuse & hopefully you'll just find this funny :-)

On your point of people not having opinions, I've wondered about that too. It amazes me how little so many people give away of whatever's going on in their head.

You're probably familiar with the Danish phenomenon called the Law of Jante, the unwritten laws that govern Denmark. Something like that could be going on with people giving fairly non-committal and unopinionated, clipped replies on social media.

On the other hand, I don't know if I'm missing something. I'd like to understand people's motives for why they communicate the way they do. 

I'm done with Christmas Cards said:

some of the forums associated with my Ham Radio hobby have some members who always seem to be on the lookout for someone asking an innocent question so that they can demonstrate their superior knowledge and experience (rather than actually answering the question asked in a kindly way)

Yes, that's something I'm familiar with too, mostly on coding forums in my case. As a moderator of one of the very small ones for the last decade or so, I have always been saddened whenever I've had to put my moderator hat on to deal with someone who has the expertise to be a huge asset to the site, yet insists on belittling people or even resorts to name calling when they've blinded a newcomer with science. I find it odd that they often seemed very concerned about their reputation, on a site with no voting or liking, so the only kind of reputation possible is one derived from one's friendliness and the usefulness of one's help (it has a generally very likeable membership in that sense, I'm pleased to say). Part of me is quite thankful that the site membership has shrunk over the years so that I very rarely have to don my moderator hat these days (I'm mostly a human spam-filter!)

[NB: Ranty, highly-cynical gross generalisations ahead - I didn't sleep last night so I'm feeling a bit stroppy today!]

Maybe it's because I'm old enough to remember writing and posting "snail mail", but I understand your frustration, and I feel much the same way about it. If all I had to say was "yeah, right on", I wouldn't be writing this post, because I feel it would be rude of me not to attempt to get across why your post interested me or why my opinion is the same as yours (or not, as the case may be). You invested some effort into your writing, so why wouldn't I? Brief one-liners have their place, I wouldn't dispute that; but I thought that being social required getting to know people! A sequence of "me too" posts after I've written something which is quite clearly inviting other opinions, maybe because I'm not even certain of my own, always makes me seethe a little bit.

Much as I hate to come across as an old fogey, or against new technology (I'm a coder after all), I do think that Facebook, Twitter, texting, etc. are at least partly to blame for encouraging a constant stream of quick-fire soundbites, and the desire to have more "friends"/"followers" than even the most social of minds can really cope with getting to know. Clipped platitudes that are too devoid of content to ever risk sparking a debate seem like they might be a logical "optimisation" if those are your goals - but in what way achieving such goals might be a proxy for "social capital" bewilders me, and if that's all it amounts to these days, I'd rather do without (as I do without those platforms - I'll stick with email and forums, thanks).

When a longer-form post has that tumbleweed blowing across the desert effect, I sometimes wonder whether it's not so much small-mindedness or inverted snobbery, but that many of the people posting simply don't have an opinion at all - if pro-forma mutual "liking" is all that's expected, why bother with one of those? Although there certainly can be cliques on even the largest forums, and maybe even something of a pecking order, I think our crime often seems to be that we demonstrate a form of communication that just a bit alien to a lot of people - not that I think they're all necessarily incapable or ignorant, just perplexed by the sheer novelty of it. 

Longer-forms also don't fit the technological norm of having a pocket device that you sneak a look at for a few seconds every ten minutes and which doesn't have a keyboard suited to long-form typing. It's not that I can't see the utility of such a thing as a supplement to longer-form communication, but their usage patterns seem to have supplanted it, even in on-line spaces where those limitations don't apply.

Am I being snobby? - I'm not sure; maybe. I realise that people's communication styles and abilities vary a lot, which I try to make allowances for, I don't go around nit-picking at people's grammar and spelling unless there's genuine ambiguity about what was intended, I'm always happy to explain if I ever baffle anybody, and posts that mean nothing to me aren't the end of the world; I have a fully functioning scroll-wheel! I would just like to have discussions like this one a bit more often, that's all - I don't see why it should spoil anyone else's fun.

Wow! I didn't realise I was feeling quite that stroppy! 

(and if anyone follows this with a one-liner just to be cheeky, I'll erm.... erm... I'll... erm... I'll use my scroll-wheel on you ... really spitefully!)

Thanks for the reply, it wasn't so much people were saying anything insulting to me, it's more they were ignoring things I'd posted.

I made a friend locally who was a musician and he posted on my Facebook wall a few times, so I gathered he wanted to have contact with me.

So I replied to one or two of his posts on his wall and when I would all his friends would go quiet, and sometimes even he ignored what I'd said, like I'd killed the mood.

I think it's because they wrote everything in short hand. They wrote like this:

Nice one lad!

Smashed it!

Awesome mate

I wrote a couple of sentences that went into detail which might have been perceived as "intellectual". I got the feeling that was where I'd gone wrong.

So my curiosity is was I being a ****head? A show off? Or was it just small minded-ness on their part? 

That's just one example. Sure I could think of a better one if I had a better memory. Sorry!

Interesting topic. I guess it depends on the forum and the platform. I know for example that some of the forums associated with my Ham Radio hobby have some members who always seem to be on the lookout for someone asking an innocent question so that they can demonstrate their superior knowledge and experience (rather than actually answering the question asked in a kindly way). Also Twitter seems to exist nowadays simply for people to throw insults at each other, or repeat entrenched and polarised views to show their prowess and allegiance with one side of the argument.

I must admit though that I've never seen the "Nice point but who are you?" insult. 

Maybe come back with more specific examples?