That's interesting, because, in all vulnerability and honesty, you've made me look like an idiot for giving you the benefit of the doubt with respect to that interaction. I explained in great detail yesterday why I interpreted the one "from" you made that I saw as an understandable act not intended to cause any confusion at all. Let me quote myself:Binger wrote: ↑Fri Jan 28, 2022 3:58 pmPart 2 or 3, but who is counting?
Like other posts in any forum, what one intends to communicate is a part of a post. Another part of the post is the intent to participate. Another part may be the intent to create participation or reactions from others. If you look at what I listed in the above post, some items were related to the content of the communication, though they were at best tangential and ambiguous. This is something you pointed out, Res. Ambiguity or being tangentially on-topic may even be something that frustrates you or another forum participant.
Treading lightly and vulnerably here...... the point where the reaction we generate is the primary motivation of our participation (in whole or in part) is where we may enter passive aggression territory with communication, in my opinion.
Let's use something else I did as an example, since we have already gone into vulnerable spaces. I took the literal suggestion of the moderators and another poster to start new threads rather than go off topic. I started threads with "From: " in the subject. Hilarious. The opening was there, and I was going to shoot the gap, so I did. Was the intent to communicate something that I thought was important and worth extracting from a thread? Heck no. The intent was to lampoon the conversation, mock the process, highlight the limitations or conditions, and trigger the moderators. The intent was to GET A REACTION! I doubled down, and even reached out to the moderators and Dr. Shades (who brilliantly saw through it all and called out the entirety of the process with an invitation, which I am violating a rule by vulnerably sharing here.) Now, I did not intend to get banned (that was a reaction I did not choose, but got), but I darn sure intended to mock what I considered was nonsensical chopping of conversations with new threads beginning with "From: ". Reminder: this is SSP and we are talking about intentions, triggers, reactions, memes, process etc.
I do not share any of that as some sort of confession or admission. It was all rather obvious to anyone and everyone, right? The less obvious part is that this is something we all do, all the time. We do not always shoot the gap and exploit loopholes. But we do things that are meant to get reactions. And we react to things. We do this within environments and relationships, both real and virtual. The environment includes all the conditions, not just rules, not just new rules about using "From: ". What we do not all or always do, is willingly surrender to the facts. And by facts, I would include the conditions.
So, when I'm consciously trying to be the best version of Res Ipsa, I try to follow the general rule that goes something like: never presume malicious intent when stupidity is a sufficient explanation. Which is rude way of putting "never presume bad intent when good-faith mistake is a sufficient explanation." In my experience, it's been a very good heuristic.[About two weeks ago] I noticed a thread Binger had started using the From: format. It threw me off for a minute because I first thought it was a mod split. At the time, I didn’t think it was intended to confuse. If, as a user, I wanted to start a version of a thread in a different kingdom, I likely would have copied the mod’s titling convention because that’s how versions of threads in different kingdoms are customarily identified.
In this case, it was a bad one, as I completely misunderstood the purpose of what you posted. And, naturally, it pisses me off for being wrong after doing what I considered to be the right thing. But in this thread, I don't think that's important in this thread. I think what's important was that there was a complete failure of communication between you and me. As Res Ipsa, I think that's dysfunction that I generally like to avoid. And as Res Ipsa, it prevents me from doing a good job as a moderator.
So we've got two examples we could ground our discussion in. (by the way, don't worry about being disorganized -- I just have little slivers of thought on the general topic of communications, so I can't even pretend to have thought through the issues we're talking about systematically.) Let's start with the first. You and I have discussed the general topic of communication styles off board (which I am disclosing with your consent). I think one thing we have in common is that we view what and how we communicate as a choice. Let's start there.
I don't want to give the impression that I'm a mind reader, but one of the things we've discussed is a model of interpersonal communication that you use. I think our brains all have them, whether explicit or implicit. After all, the ambiguity I've pointed out in memes is just an extreme example of the ambiguity that exists in all communication. So, our brains all have a model of what people mean when they communicate in various ways. You've thought about yours in much more explicit terms than I've ever thought about mine. And, after discussing yours, my tentative hypothesis is that most of the confrontational aspects of the communication between us to date is an artifact of conflict in models of communication.
Now, you have a chart for your model. There are so many things packed into that chart that I found it hard to wrap my brain around. So, I'm going to suggest that you hold off of introducing the chart until later in the discussion. Instead, I'd like to apply the concepts in baby steps, which gives you the chance to ferret out misunderstandings that I am sure I still have. I also want to say that I believe in the saying: no models are accurate but some models are useful. My other hypothesis this point is that there is useful stuff in your model, but I want to road test it. I'm going to try to remember to boldface terms that appear in your model, so that we both recognize that I'm using them as terms of art.
OK, out of whatever level of meta I've drifted into. Let's start with the thread splitting example. If I understand correctly, you had an opinion about thread splitting that you wanted to express. You chose mockery. And you chose a style of mockery. I'd call it implicit as opposed to explicit. I'm on board with your notion that people intend to communicate more than one thing when they communicate. I can't recall the author, but in the book The Presentation of Self in Ordinary Life, the author distinguishes between what we could call the informative component of communication and the performative component (what the cool kids today call "virtue signaling"). If I recall correctly, his theory was that every piece of communication included both. The distinction is between "here's a fact" and "here's a fact about me." For simplicity's sake, I think we could lump some of the types of intent you listed in the Biden meme example (participation, etc.) into the "performative" category without doing violence to what you expressed.
So, given the description of your intent that you provided, was mockery your sole intent? It sounds like the informative content of your post was something like "splitting posts the way the moderators do is ridiculous." In other words, the information is the content of your opinion. But the method you chose leads me to think there was also some performative communication there. Do you think there was? If so, what was it that you intended to communicate about you, in contrast to the substance of your opinion?
If I understand what you are saying, if your primary intent was to get a reaction from the moderators, you would classify that as a passive-aggressive form of communication. Did you intend a specific reaction? If so, what was it?