Frank Kogan

Regarding my "Kahneman" analogy, there's this from my reply to Jessica in the anti-antirockism thread:

Your constant anguish and self-doubt demonstrate why — at least in the short-run — the hallway tends to stymie and strangle the classroom online: one's first impulse in a conversation is to wonder where one's self is potentially under threat — how you come across personally and what social type you're perceived as. So the need to identify types and alliances and social markers and hairstyle is way more immediate than the need to understand someone else's actual ideas. We're likely programmed biologically to look out for risks first, before seeking opportunities. The mind tends to shut off once one arrives at a position appropriate to the sort of person one is. Examining ideas and rethinking one's typologies enough to be surprised — that comes later, if at all. (But again, if you don't shut off, this ought ultimately to help you do a better job of understanding people and types and alliances and threats etc. So there doesn't have to be a tradeoff between hallway and classroom.)

Dave, I'd say that in our dialogue in these comments both you and I are trying to come up with an understanding of what's systemically going on/going wrong, with me looking at what's been embedded long-term in the culture and you looking at what the constraints are when the cultural and psychological are run through a particular technology (Facebook's).

Obv. the line betw. what I'm calling "culture" and "technology" is very porous, since we're not just dealing with what Facebook's algorithms allow people to see but also the Facebook rule that people use real names, and the convention on Facebook that you befriend and make yourself potentially available to everybody who has a connection to you.

The Blackberry/iPhone era has helped limit conversation too: people began to feel they had the right to tell me to keep my emails short, partially because — I assume — of what fits comfortably on the little screens.

But to me this is just a lot of excuses. I don't want to belittle the role of technology in creating constraints, but I think basically what the Internet provides is opportunities. The constraints are coming from the long-term culture, in this case the hallway and the conventions of leisure time and of passing time clamping down on sustained discussion — because people don't value the discussion enough to put out for it.