**CUT AND PASTE BIT**
Quite unlike face-to-face encounters, people can send private messages to another user in the room - a message that no one else in the room can see. There may be very few or no messages appearing on YOUR screen, but the room may not be quiet at all. There may be numerous private exchanges among the other people. In face-to-face encounters, the equivalent would be a silent room filled with telepaths!
If you are engaged in one of those private discussions, as well as conversing with people out loud, you are placed in the peculiar situation of carrying on dual social roles - an intimate you and a public you, simultaneously. Even more complex is when you attempt to conduct two (or more) private conversations, perhaps in addition to public ones. You may be joking privately with user A, conducting a serious personal discussion with user B, and engaging in simple chit-chat out loud with the rest of the room. This highly complex social maneuver requires a psychological mechanism called "dissociation" - the ability to separate out and direct the components of your mind in more than one direction at the same time (the same mechanism that becomes pathologically exaggerated in multiple personality disorders).
**MY BIT**
As I understand it, men have the ability to 'dissociate' their feelings when it comes to things like love and sex. But could this skill be used in a social setting as mentioned above? Traditionaly women are said to be able to do more than one thing at a time and have been known to hold more than one face to face conversation at the same time, but in a forum setting with a mans inbuilt ability to disacotiate would a man be able to overcome his natural 'one track mind' and hold more than one convo? Is this a type of evolotion?
Mar 14, 2006 @ 17:16:54
Moderator
