[Artemisia] Email and Social Interaction

[ravenmacleod at comcast.net]

That's really interesting. 

I may try this myself. 

--
Raven MacLeod 
Esquire 

En fides abunde virtus, en virtus abunde fides. 

If people knew how hard I worked to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all. --Michelangelo 


-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: Bruce Padget <bapadget at pop.mail.yahoo.com> 

> Mistress Malkin got me thinking. (See, it's her fault!) A while back, 
> I proposed a little experiment regarding period social interaction. By 
> way of background: 
> 
> 1. I needed vision correction since I was about 10, but didn't get it 
> until I was 14. Going through those years without being being able to 
> make out fine details of facial expression made things awkward and 
> difficult, to say the least. I learned ways to compensate, which carry 
> through to this day. 
> 
> 2. We've all heard, "An armed society is a polite society." There are 
> places in "downtown" Caid that certainly qualify as "armed societies," 
> (e.g., Compton) but I have not found them to be particularly polite 
> places. 
> 
> 3. Seeing in period could have presented problems. Vision correction 
> existed, but it was costly, inconvenient, and imperfect. There is no 
> reason to believe that folks in period had better visual acuity than 
> modern people. Lighting was dim, and darkness would have been *really* 
> dark. 
> 
> Hypothesis: The politeness of period conversation was not because "An 
> armed society is a polite society," but because "A half-blind society is 
> a polite society." (I realize this is not a particularly well-formed 
> hypothesis. Sue me. Or give me a fat research grant. :D) 
> 
> I had thought about testing this by having conversations in which no one 
> would be allowed to use vision correction, and only period lighting 
> would be used. I have tried this on a small scale, and the results have 
> been interesting. 
> 
> Then I realized that, thanks to this mailing list and others like it, we 
> have an environment in which we constantly re-create conversation with 
> less-than-perfect vision. 
> 
> And we find: 
> 
> 1. A greater quickness to see offense than in face to-face interaction. 
> (Could something similar have contributed to the excesses of duelling 
> cultures?) 
> 
> 2. Speakers often expressing themselves more fully and cautiously than 
> they do face-to-face. 
> 
> Some of our best re-creations are those we do accidentally. 
> 
> Regards, 
> Niccolo 
> bapadget at yahoo.com 
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