No B.O.
There’s not someone yapping away in the next cubicle. We aren’t obligated to buy cookies and candy for school fund raisers. No one invites us to Pampered Chef and Party Gals parties. There’s no one scarfing down burgers and fries. Nobody takes 20 smoke breaks a day. No one leaves the seat up. No one loses the pen caps. And no one has body odor.
That is why our online network works. It’s like a sitcom where everything is back to normal at the end of the show. We’re not forced to face our pet peeves every day, unless you’ve a huge problem with sentences ending in prepositions. I am only partially joking. It is fairly well documented that scent plays a significant role in attraction and bias. I believe it also has the opposite affect. I think sometimes teams are ineffective due to subconscious repulsion.
What I’m truly curious about is how hormones are affected by simply reading text. I’m curious as to how certain senses can be stimulated with only words. For example, most of us are now conditioned to cringe when we see writing in all caps. To us, it’s shouting. I wonder if words have the power to attract. If so, how can we use language to create more productive networks and teams?
January 18th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
I dunno about parietal stimulation, but website fonts that all run together (not to mention comment boxes that run underneath the photo panel on the right side of the page) make me wonder whose machine is messing with my ability to communicate. ;-^
January 18th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
You’ve changed your template :).
Interesting part of text only, is it is very easy to misinterpret what the other is saying. Which is why we will often add :), :(, LOL and ROFL to try and lighten the tone of what we are saying. When you are with someone f2f there are lots of visual cues in conversations which we lose in the online environment. Visual cues really shape our ability to interact well socially; experience with visually impaired over the years has shown me how lose of visual cues decreases their social skills.
January 19th, 2008 at 7:55 am
Corrie, do I have a problem with this?
“website fonts that all run together (not to mention comment boxes that run underneath the photo panel on the right side of the page)”
January 20th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
A great mind is always sexy!
January 31st, 2008 at 4:11 pm
[...] are always witty, informative and so erudite. None of them has any sort of normal human failings - no B.O. as one of my Twitter friends has pointed [...]