[Artemisia] Email and Social Interaction

[Bruce Padget]

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