December 24, 2006
To judge or not to judgeDoes making comments on someone’s blog enable another to figure you all out? One might think leaving traces of your thoughts and opinions in addition to else’s, helps random people on the internet gain an insight on ones personality. How many bloggers online are exactly the same as they are in their normal lives? I think not. (I’ve even come across people admitting the same, people I know personally and online)
As people, we have this common urge to make judgments about other people we come across. As soon as we come across a new person we want to label them immediately and model our conversations with them accordingly. I guess the same goes for interactions we have with people online. We don’t know them, but in a quest to categorize the person, we base our decision on how much ever we know of them. Obviously, there really isn’t a choice. How much more can you know anyway?
Everyone is guilty of making judgments. Never believe a person who denies it. Only the methods differ. Some like to place the individual almost on the first immediate point of contact/ interaction/ communication. Others like to give the person some time. Some like not to judge at all or try to stray away from bias as much as they can, but at the back of their heads, they DO have an opinion.
My personal method can be explained by a combination of 2. Immediately making a lil note of my decision in the first instance. Setting it aside to provide some buffer time, getting to know better or learn better. Ultimately weighing out all the possible communications I’ve had with the person during that time and then comparing it to my first impression. 90% of the time absolutely right. 10% still wrong. Not bad me thinks.
As far as people I meet online esp. via blogging. Mostly right. It’s the people I meet in reality for the first time is when I make the mistakes. Its okay. I don’t HAVE to judge. Its something that helps you get around – socially. Cater to the different kinds of people and gel in. Helps me grow. Probably cuz, online – it’s just the persons raw opinions we deal with. Face to face or working life/ educational life/ etc, theres more to thoughts. In fact the persons actual thoughts is the last thing you know. We’re dealing with expressions, body language, etc and everything needs to be evaluated.
So, how do you know a person in his/her true self? Which one do you think is a better way to evaluate a person – out of the two: Online or in the flesh?
Sometimes we are disappointed by our own judgments. Other times they come as positive surprises and we are glad we were wrong. Story time:
I recently judged a person incorrectly. Well partly at least. There is this girl in one or two of my classes. From the very beginning I even saw her around college, I hated her. I thought very little of her. I despised the way she spoke, carried about her studies – this lead to detesting many other things about her. All in all, I dint want anything to do with her. But recently, on an outing with friends, she had come along. I tried my best to avoid her and made sure we dint get into each others way. But the weather had other plans. Finally, I did interact with her, kinda spoke to her, hung around and even had fun! I figured she’s a really nice, sporty and kind person. I was disappointed by my opinion I held against her, but trust me, when she’s in class, Uff I hate her, she makes the class miserable. hehe. When she talks in class, I want to strangle her. Conclusion – stay away from her in college – have fun outside!
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