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WHY Why do we converse? HOW. How should we converse?

G

Goat Rodeo Cowboy

Star Participant
In a broadcasting related thread, this little sub-thread broke out. I let it sit there and mellow-out for 24 hours or so, and decided the topic has some merit, but it didn't belong in the original thread on a continuing basis.

Here is how it started:

".....for years when I was ready to have conversation someone for the first time, I would look through the archives and read EVERYTHING ever posted by that someone. In the past I have read through 400 to 600 posts of a person before engaging them in conversation."

Quote Originally Posted by L Chanon Gade
My god...you actually DID that? Scary dude.

Chan
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Goat Rodeo Cowboy said:


It's what reasonable, courteous people do.... isn't it?

Have you worked as a salesman... such as in radio advertising? Commercial Real Estate?

You learn everything thing about a client and his/her business you can before you formulate your sales story.

Why would I not give the same courtesy to you or to SMG or to anyone else in this discussion group that I want to have conversation with?
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Avid Listener;5983254 said:
No, that's not "reasonable", that's downright creepy, in a stalker sort of way. In forums like this, people generally respond to posts, not the people who made the posts. After a while, one might start to recognize certain individuals, especially the ones you have to delete formatting codes in their posts if you quote them. But generally speaking, in forums like this, it's the post that gets the replies. In some forums where I've very active, I've been known to get into the verbal equivalent of a knock-down, drag-out with someone in one thread, and nothing but cheerful agreement with the same person in a different thread.

Some things I learned about forums like this a long time ago:

● Every post is written for everyone in the entire forum to read, not just the person whose post you're quoting in a reply.

● Everyone participating a thread is free to respond to any post, regardless of whose name is in the quoted portion of the reply.

● It really doesn't matter all that much who said something, what really matters is what was said.

I think those same principles should also apply to callers who manage to get through on a radio talk show.
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First, let me respond to the the "creepy, in a stalker sort of way" comment. I have given this one a full day and night to 'compost' in my brain. I don't consider the part about going back and reading what people posted here as creepy or stalking. I maintain it is a 'courtesty' to make sure I am understanding what the person said... maybe even what they meant to say but didn't know how to phrase it, or were too timid to reduce to words. If by reading the previous posts I find that the person has owned and now operates radio stations, is a broadcast engineer, and is a lawyer, (we have had a participant from Ohio that meets that description) then I will hear a different question or statement in his post. If by reading the previous posts I find that the person in 18 or 19 years old, lives in Brooklyn, and just wants to know how to plug a Radio Shack $25 mic into his laptop and do some make-believe broadcasts or podcast about hip-hop music, then I have a better idea where to start the conversation and be helpful.

Tell me how reading all the things you have ever posted, IN PUBLIC, in this discussion group is creepy. Or even gets close to bordering on stalking.

But, I will confess to you, that I sometimes will "Google" a person, or some so-called fact that they put in their post. I will see if they are in Facebook or Linked-In. There are times that I will send a Private Message to some one who participates in the forums and say: "This person seems to be from your market. Do you know him? What does he really want to know? What does he really want to do?"

Now, at this point I am moving into territory where you might say: "Got'cha! That's socially unacceptable!"

Depends on what I do with what I learn. If I come back and post something like: "I have a feeling the question about connecting your mic to the computer really should have been: How do I know which mic to buy?"

There are not enough hours in the day for any of us to do whole lot of hand-holding, snooping, mentoring, spying, stalking, big-brothering or what ever you want to call it.... but some small amount of it is what makes community, society, civilization. From the religious account knows as "The Parable of The Good Samaratin" we are told of a man who encountered another man laying on the side of the road. Others encountered 'the victim" and walked on by. The hero of our saga got involved, maybe in your mind he became a stalker... I don't know.... but we have held this fabled man up as a role model for a couple of thousand years now.

So, Avid Listener.... we are left with the question: Is it 'the exact wording of a post' that we always reply to, do we reply to what we KNOW the writer really wanted to say, or do we reply to THE PERSON?

Let's have a great discussion, boys and girls.
 
I'll go through certain people's posts at times, to see what direction they're coming from, and I even do it on my own at times to find something I had posted on before. It's easy to do with newer posts since the changeover to the new board last Fall, but it is still very difficult on older posts, which is something that has at best only partialaly been fixed. I've found out on older threads I can find posts that I started, but it's still difficult to find posts that I made in other threads. Sometinmes I've been able to do better on Google than on the search here.
 
On a couple other forums, I've looked at a poster's previous posts to get an idea where they are coming from generally, but haven't googled anyone on any forum.

Sometimes you read a post and it seems that the person is way out there (angry, etc.), then you find a few previous posts on a forum and you find out why.
 
GRC, you may mean well but what you describe usually leads to ad hominem attacks, to responses to the person and not the post. Respond to the post and only to that specific post. Respond to what they said and no where you think they are coming from (generally people are wrong about where anyone is coming from). This is not sales. This is interaction.

And there is no comparison between helping an injured crime victim and playing detective (or playing NSA) on people before responding to their posts. That's really a stretch.

"Background research" as practiced here is almost always for the purpose of invalidating someone. What I fail to understand is why so many people here would rather discredit the poster than argue against the post. But there's something about people drawn to radio, I guess.
 
Interesting observations, Fred, And yes, you have pointed out some of the shortcomings of how we tend to deal with one another in the discussion forums. But, some good things do come out of discussion forums in spite of what one could think of as a "broken, damaged, flawed form of communications." I came here a decade ago as a man who had been away from radio for a number of years. I came here as a person who saw that his current employment (at my age) opportunities were a mixed bag, and I wanted to learn: How has radio changed? Would I want to return to radio. (I had said years ago is that only way I would return is as an owner, or having a relationship with an owner I trusted and respected and I could "run the show".) And I went at it like a house a'fire for about 5 or 6 years.

Yeah, I made some dumb posts. I got crossways now and then with someone because we were maybe both two "blind" to understand that our conversation techniques were a bit flawed. All of that supports what you have observed in your post.

BUT!

In the process, some people recognized who and what I was and might be. And I recognized some top drawer folks that I could not have located and isolated in the next 20-25 years if I had not been willing to, as they say in baseball, commit an error now and then. And my sometimes clumsy debate techniques did not ruin my reputation with people I met through this forum.

When I read through your posts, I say to myself, If I knew where FredLeonard was based, and if I were going to be traveling through there, I would certainly love to meet him face-to-face at least one time. Let us both size each other up, at least one time. If we lived in the same community we likely would have different civic clubs and churches and political attachments from each other. We might agree to have lunch together maybe one time a year at most... maybe not.

As this board was brought back from the dead by the team now running it, I had to do what a lot of other people have done: Am I going to take the time to participate, or has this board become a "losing piece of crap". And one of the things that has been slow to return after the shutdown has been robust general discussion. By design, I sat up late at night at time, pondering topics that might make for lively discussion, and how would the "Original Post" be formulated to instigate good, lively debate and exchange.

This topic was a stretch. It came at a time when several people seemed to be having a playground type contest to see who would be "King of the Hill" and there was some very caustic and corrosive conversations going on. If you and I could take a trip and go back and interview all the people I have worked for and with through the years, one of the themes you would find is that I was a CATALYST. I didn't always introduce the winning policy that we would adopt. But in my bungling way of stirring the pot, I caused people to burst out in the middle of staff meeting shouting: No, no, no... you idiot. THIS is what we need to do. A winning solution was verbalized that would never have come out if I had not "stirred the pot".

This is a tough venue to play that role.

But your post... the one I am responding to, may have opened the door for a discussion that has been laying here, comatose, for a couple of weeks. Maybe we are ready to explore the tensions you have listed.
 
Why?

Because they do their job.

How?

High-tops, obviously. The low-top model is for hipsters/poseurs/other undesirables of society. (Hence why they're so "popular" [conformist] in Portland.)
 
I don't know what causes this to happen but I always submit anyway in case the other one didn't work.

Being able to search for someone else's posts might lead to some interesting topics.
 
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Darth_vader said:
Why?

Because they do their job.

How?

High-tops, obviously. The low-top model is for hipsters/poseurs/other undesirables of society. (Hence why they're so "popular" [conformist] in Portland.)
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I never wear high-tops but I have every color imaginable. Or would if they came in my size.
 
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