Need to think about this
@Hazem, I am from Italy – not exactly a northern country. But you may be right about certain rituals that are culture-specific and difficult to move over to written interaction.
I have not read that particular Mozorov, though I have read other things by him and know a bit about his work. Writing gives a sense of false accomplishment? Could be. Maybe you see your own writing on the screen and something in you is nudged into believing this must be true. But writing has two advantages that, in my experience, compensate for any such disadvantage, with room to spare.
- Written words are a track record. What I write today, and to you, @2mavin, and you, @Hazem, might be read in a year by a very different person. This incentivizes me to only state things that I think I would stand for in a broad range of situations. The result is self-restraint, or – more accurately – no less self-restraint than you would have in a face-to-face conversation.
- Writing is hard. In order to overcome our natural lazyness, many of us only make the effort of writing down what they are passionate about. A lot of rants ad irrelevant stuff that I would say in a face-to-face conversation does not make it into the page, because I am not interested enough in my own ranting to want to make the effort to type it down.
