Interesting that you would describe it as "competing" - To be clear, I'm not challenging that, nor do I wish to debate it in any way, I just find it an interesting word choice.
Thanks for another thoughtful thread contribution, Xeno.1) We are all peering through a narrow window when looking into each other's lives. We don't know any of the hardships, victories, challenges, cultural impacts, or any number of other thousand things that can alter who we are and how we post here. Our online personas are such a small piece of ourselves that we allow to be viewed here that making a totally solid judgement about someone is nearly impossible. You're also very correct that we are missing a lot of the nuance of in-person communication that can often cause misses. I'm not a particularly fine writer but I do hope that my posts here reflect that I think we all have many things to contribute and that open and meaningful discussion is possible among anyone. I tend to air on the side of kindness, which is nice and all but it actually doesn't make for a very lively board and isn't the only way to exist... which leads me to the other side.
2) At the end of the day this is the only window we have in which to interact (for the most part). Apart from granting one another a bit of benefit of the doubt and some common courtesy does it really make sense to respond to anything other than the very specific words that appear on our screens. At the end of the day we choose how we represent ourselves here and all we can expect is that people respond in the way that they choose. I don't fault people for using this, or other online arenas, as a place for venting and release or for not wanting to beat around the bush to make their points. Sometimes that can be ugly but it can often be cathartic for people and we've had more than a few very excellent discussions here that probably wouldn't be classified as fine or respectful.
I'm going to have to think some more on the entire concept of an "online persona" and what that actually means or really is - and/or how an online persona can potentially land on several potential landing zones across a very long runway - Anywhere from completely sincere all the way to phony as crap with a number of other landing spots in the middle of these two ends. In addition, I can't help but wonder what factors might be in play that can impact these online personas that we... earn? ...Create? ...Attach ourselves to?
Like I said, I need to do much more thinking about this.
Ha! I'm not quite as confident as you (yet?) but I certainly think that we probably don't have it exactly right. At least for most of us, most of the time.As to the thread title: absolutely not