I think most depends on the criteria and priorities an individual has about why they are engaging in communication with others in the first place. These criteria and priorities might be centered around meeting other people, being sociable and such. A person with such criteria and priorities might consider it a priority to convey their person.
But for someone else, these criteria and priorities about why they are engaging in communication with others, might be centered around exchanging ideas, solving philosophical problems etc.. For such a person, the aspect of being sociable is secondary, and they are little concerned about conveying their person.
There is likely going to be a clash between these two groups. The difference between them is sometimes hard to tell, because the words might be the same, yet the motivations for speaking them wholly different.
Well, I'm not seeing much distinction between both groups because both are already almost religiously set in their ways, hence your own expectations of
expecting them to act as expectant "individuals"—and the forums' expectations of them as a non-exceptional "member" class.
And most people, I suppose, are unwittingly set for life: their criteria and priorities, their outlook in life, their expectations, are more or less simple, direct, clear-cut, predictable—regardless of whether or not their reasoning behind visiting these forums is strictly for business or pleasure or a comfortable combination of both. —Deviation, for them, is practically a vacuous significance because these fine people are further locked in their ways by a sort of automatic stabilizer conditioning: a thick surrounding format of social familiarities that will
oblige them to reset their characters—or criteria and priorities—to the default setting should they begin to jaywalk.
But there's a third group: those others who are also very much set in their ways—in their dark, sometimes unfamiliar, manifold, and ever-expanding ways. People who can't help but to flow in or out, evolving or regressing year in, year out, sometimes by degrees, sometimes in leaps and bounds. Touching base with a set "Criteria and Priorities" is ludicrous for them because these shift and alter during transit.
Granted, in a social environment such as that of a forum where topics are discussed and social interplay is expected, they will mingle and pantomime their way around, but will adopt and experience or experiment; trying something new, something old, something borrowed. And for the most part no one will recognize them for what they
aren't—nor they them much—until someone comes along and... anticipates them. Then it gets sort of like draggy.
Perhaps I am more of a "rationalist" than you are, but I am sometimes most strongly affected precisely via ideas, the concepts and lines of reasoning people put forward.
And so do I, but the procedure involved is perhaps what makes the difference—and I'm saying
perhaps because it's still not
absolutely clear to me yet. But the procedure of "exchange" for me represents a singular opportunity, a platform, perhaps a runway, the unpredictable junction that
might unite inner, external, and different worlds together. A sense of becoming, being, dying—
not a data bank, a town hall, or a buddy list.
But access to this procedure is sadly narrowed down some now that Sciforums is so
stilted in "Criteria and Priorities". But that's what the new majority wants, isn't it? a place to feed on vanilla expectations? And isn't that how Sciforums now promotes... science?
Sciforums has become anti-bohemian.
