About 12:00 she talked about some intresting stuff (I dont agree with her), that subsided, then by 18:00 she put on her tin foil hat and just went wild. The end was just nuts.

Actually, one of the best things about Inception, one of my favorite movies of all time, was its stunningly simple yet mindblowingly significant examination of this same topic. I'd disagree with you on it. An idea is precisely like a disease, in that it takes on a life of its own, even if it does require humans to survive, like a disease.

I still think it's not technically alive.....it may act alive but it isn't alive in the literal sense.

Yes, but now that I've told you ideas are alive you can never forget the idea that ideas are alive, which gives all your ideas including the idea that your ideas are alive your lifespan. You can even pass them on to your kids!

What kids? Just call me the 20 something yr old virgin and make a film about me already......we can get the guy from Get Smart to play me.

Don Adams is dead.

I meant the guy from the new Get Smart film.

I like to think of message board users as a crowd of people, since anyone can read a post and respond. S.K. had an interesting take when he wrote the phrase "the crowd is untruth."

So when you speak about online communications you only are referring to forums? Because I'm pretty sure there are dozens of both more immediate and less immediate methods of communication on the net: Youtube, forums, IRC, direct chat (MSN, AIM, etc.), MMO group communications, Facebook, Podcasts, blogs, blog discussions, etc.

When I said online chat is like real life speaking, what I meant was simply that conversation is organic. Listen to a group of people speaking sometime, really listen. You'll notice that each one is often not quiet responding to what the other said, they are each pushing and pulling the conversation in the direction of whatever it is that pops in their heads. It's not surprising, to me at least, when it takes and alt tab and a single click that someone can spit out an "organic" reply.

Sure, sometimes we think deeply about our replies, and proof read them, etc., but sometimes we just regurgitate whatever we are thinking, because dinner is burning, the boss is coming in, or the kid is just not going to take "just a minute" for an answer any longer. It doesn't even have to be because we are distracted by life, per se, perhaps we are distracted by our thoughts, or we just communicate that way sometimes.

I'll also note, if online wasn't at all like real life, I'm not sure we'd have taken to it so easily. We molded the online experience to fit us (homo sapiens) not the other way around. There was no external environmental pressure on this one, in some ways it's a true reflection of what we are inside (which explains the extreme amount of sex and violence online, doesn't it?:) ).

Truer words were never spoken.....yes, online interactions can often be a window into our true motivations and beliefs when unhindered by the pressures present in real life interactions & also paints a portrait of the baser human condition in some ways.

I don't agree. I think people attempt to draw such parellels in order to understand the basic intention of the system, however there is so much more potential that is constrained by this belief that online communication must mimick real life communication. For example, online chat. We could equate an online chat to being in a big room where everyone is speaking at each other, except you have a magical pair of headphones that allow you only to hear the right people. Except there is no magical pair of headphones, there is no way to achieve the result of an online conversation through a real world interaction. Our ears just couldn't take it.

So if you are listening to a conversation in which each participant has their agenda that they push for, are the dynamics of that really the same? there is still the overall objective, however the means for achieving it are different. You have been provided with a different set of tools. Where people might choose not to use them, it does not mean that others won't, and so the conversation will be different. It is like suggesting that a fight between a swordsman and a spearman is about the same as a fight between a swordsman and a fully armed and trained modern soldier. The tools available are so much more powerful, and the interaction pattern is so different as a result that any implication that the two mechanisms are linked is not so much that the situations are the same, more that the people in the conversation are simply not aware of what they could do.

So with threads evolving naturally (where this all started) as opposed to separating out the conversation into a different thread. How often in a conversation can you say ("id refer you at this point to the conversation that I am going to have with this person over here, and also to the conversation that the other guy is having with that person over there). You simply can't be in both places at once. But with a disconnected mechanism such as forum posting (or even irc chat having 2 windows open at once) you can actually link information in a way that supersedes direct conversation (in some respects). So your tools are more capable, yet people do not use them. There is instead an insistence to equate the conversation to a phyiscal conversation, and limit it as such. Such limitations need not apply, and that is the core point I am trying to make. By suggesting that our use of the internet is a mirror of how we conduct our life - we limit ourselves.

To save others the reply

TL;DR.

The part you're missing is that people don't want online to work any differently, they're busy making stuff like Facebook instead (real life on steroids). If part of the net augments what people already want, then it's generally embraced, if it tries to force them into something they don't want, well, the denizens of the net are terribly fickle, and that's being kind.

Besides is clutter in a single thread really worse than a first 3 pages filled with new posts to continue someone's conversation? The forums don't support getting someone's attention with a reply between threads. No, I see what you're driving at, but this tool neither naturally fits it nor would most people actually prefer it if it did, I suspect.