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 p.8 #17 · Will XT6 finally catch up to Sony, Canon and Nikon with AF. | |
Jack Flesher wrote:
Dan, some food for thought, and perhaps a different way to look at discussion forums. One, say option A, is to expect it to behave like a social gathering in your home; you expect everyone to be cordial and get along, ladidah, laugh and enjoy, don’t discuss politics, religion or sex, keep it all light and friendly. You have a great time, yet in the end you learn nothing truly significant since everyone avoided any dissenting opinions. And a lot of forums are just that, where folks regularly behaving like Scott would probably have been banned for snarky remarks. Option B is you expect it to be more like a business meeting where the success of your company is on the line. While nobody in the room likes the snarky remarks, frequently it’s the direct, to the point, not sugar-coated participant that is able to cut to the meat of the matter to get their point across. Here’s the interesting thing. Those forums that behaved more like option A instead of B? They’re mostly dead now…
What one likes in a person doesn’t change the veracity of their input. Yes, snarkism can turn some people away from accepting said input, but quite frankly it doesn’t change the veracity of that information shared.
You aren’t dating Scott here, you’re sharing opinions. You still have the freedom to accept or reject differing opinions, but it Heremains on each of us individually to separate the wheat from the chaff and takeaway the parts that are relevant to our own needs.
My .02 🤷🏼...Show more →
Jack, my point is that you CAN learn something from people who don’t engage in the snark. In fact, the snark interferes with the learning in multiple ways.
I have nothing at all against disagreeing. (Hey, you and I have had a long-standing and, I think, good-natured disagreement about Fujifilm camera interfaces. I like to think that we’ve both been able to learn from one another about how to look at both of them without having to call each other “inexperienced,” or insult one another.
On the other hand, what if I had written something about your preference for PSAM along the lines of “well, you sure are one lazy photographer” and left that hanging there? Of if you had just written, about my preference, “Grow up and learning to live in the 21st century?”
Over a long career as a college faculty member, one thing I learned (and I had to unlearn some academic background stuff to get there) was that you don’t help people learn by insulting them or putting them down. In fact, in the great majority of cases (literally 95% according to some studies) you cause them to shut you off and not learn.
Our forum colleague here does sometimes have insightful (albeit incite-ful) things to say, but I’m not the only person here who mostly just sees the (far, far too prevalent) insults and snark.
Of course, he’s not the only one. We can probably both think of a few others who likely have useful perspectives to share, but who simply piss people off, apparently for some kind of self-gratification, to the extent that we don’t hear them. (I block them, actually.)
I like gyoung143’s attempt to come up with better analogies than not offending Aunt Rita. The camera club analogy isn’t a bad one. I’ve got an even better one.
I have the good fortune to make friends with some pretty outstanding photographers in the landscape genre — these are folks with direct lineage to Ansel Adams, folks who lead international workshops, people who are regularly exhibited, and who are published.
We all use different gear (ranging from film to digital, every format and brand you can think of) but when we get together to photograph, to share work, or just to socialize, no one ever insults their friends in order to make some point. It just isn’t done. Yet we learn more from one another than any of us will ever learn in this forum.
The real world generally just doesn’t tolerate that kind of behavior.
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