Online Discussions Can Be Bothersome. Word. - Lab Session 4 Post-Op

Well, we had a practice Discussion Forum thing at the tutorial yesterday. IT goes to show the power of a word used in context can have, and how even though things we post on the Net are always there for people to see, something like this discussion forum still allows for the following to happen:

We all logged into our groups and then into the rooms, I jumped around privateorpublic, blogging and lobby for a bit, then settled in the blogging room. (Ok, we have not been given the power to look back on logs, something that I am emailing the group on now and hopefully get changed so that not only our tutors can check the logs). Upon arriving, someone said something like 'blogging is really boring, lets all go home', and in response I quoted every mofo in existence by saying 'Word'. Now, this word isn't too funny on its own, but it obviously got a few people cracking up in the room, because soon enough other people were querying off of the discussion forum 'whats so funny back there?' or 'we must have missed it the joke, it must have been funny'. Which brings me to one of the points I'm trying to make; just because the discussion was on the net, doesn't mean you will never miss a joke, or a craftily put comment. True, in the forms that stay up on the net you are more likely to get it because you can go back and look at it multiple times. But for part of the time you still need to be there at the time of the joke, and know its context, to get it. Jean (tutor) seemed confused at what was so funny, although she could go back and see what was said. Whereas the few of us in the back of the room were cracking up over the whole situation. If we were all discussing things on the Net - the anti-location - how come we had suddenly become specifically locationed in our laughter? Ok, it was 6pm on a thursday afternoon right before a week off of uni, but its interesting that while doing this supposedly locationless discussion on the net we still ended up with a locational connection (other then being in the same room).

The Net and the WWW doesn't automatically make us smarter, or better at picking up on jokes, etc. It helps facilitate traditional forms of discussion and new types of discussion in a virtual location, it doesn't automatically make the user better at listening or paying attention. So its up to all of us Net users to make sure that we aren't just piggybacking on the Net's ability to streamline discussions, and that we are still developing rational and supported discussions as has been done throughout time, before the Internet was created.