I had that opportunity to read an article online about “conversational terrorism.” To me, conversational terrorism can be defined as anything mentioned in conversation that has the potential to offend the person you are conversing with. It is used often in humorous instances but can also come about in serious situations.
http://www.vandruff.com/art_converse.html This is the link where I read about conversational terrorism and the creation of the site was to prevent people like you and I avoid these situations in future conversations. In most instances the examples used to describe this are blown out of proportion to get the point across.
After reading through these different tactics, both good and bad, I realized that many of the ones I recognized are things I encountered during conversations when you are not even trying to delay conversation or annoy the other person(s) you are talking to. I also noticed that many of these tactics familiar to me are all cases that have come up when I have been working with other people in groups. I think this might have something to do with the fact that everyone in a group situation has different opinions and ways of understanding and interpreting information. I was recently working with a group to write a paper on the qualitative information we received through conducting a focus group, and many of these tactics reminded me of the many hours we spent arguing over editing and word choice.
Even though I mentioned I have noticed most of these tactics working with other people in group situations, there are a number of incidents where I can tie an individual person to a tactic. For instance, the Studies Have Shown example says when you find yourself in a situation and you want to irritate other people around you, make up a statistic and experiment that was conducted to support whatever it is you are talking about. I have a friend that is famous for “knowing everything” and the more I get to know him the more I have to call B.S. on the information he rattles off. Its fun to recognize these tactics in the everyday conversations I have with others.
http://shanekrebs.com/jcom/linkbombing.pdfHonestly, do people not have anything better to do than to sit around and figure out ways to throw pranks into search engines? Politics, on the other hand, is a whole different world. I feel that nowadays it’s not what you know and the kind of person you are that gets you into office. No, instead, it is about all the bad things you can say or find out about the person you are campaigning against. I am sure that the people who are intelligent enough to create ways to add pranks into the search engines are messing with the polls and the people’s decision on which candidate they are going to vote for.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol1/issue2/marvin.htmlI read another article about Spoof, Spam, Lurk and Lag: the Aesthetics of Text-based Virtual Realities. In the article, four types of jargon, including, spam, spoof, lurk and lag were referred to as Multiple Object-Oriented environments (MOOs). The jargon was selected because they are regularly used by participants in MOOs to identify disruptions to ideal communications.
I found this information to be very interesting because not only are people using these types of jargon on the internet, many of them are also being used in text messaging through cell phones. It is fascinating to me, because of this jargon, we are able to read the person on the other end of the conversation, and understand exactly how they are feeling. I can’t tell you the number of times I have received emails or text messages from friends and knew just by the way the message was typed or spelled out that something was bothering them. I am not saying it is all because of the jargon language we use, I think knowing the person you are communicating with has a lot to do with it, I just the ways we are able to communicate are intriguing.
