Earlier in the week, a thoughtful and sentient M'Catter posted a thought for the day alluding to his very recent 21st birthday. Based on previous postings, I had just assumed that he was "older" and was, admittedly, somewhat surprised when he claimed to be barely 21. That has caused me to reflect on the nature of communication within this community (and most any other cyber community as well).

It's no great discovery, but I realized that communication here is devoid of the visual and auditory clues that we "normally" use to categorize people we communicate with, and, inevitably, form prior judgments about what they might have to say. We subconsciously marginalize people's thoughts for a host of different reasons, which seem mostly to relate to ways in which we perceive them as being different from ourselves or their value/significance to us.

The result of not being able to use those subconscious sorting mechanisms is that we're more or less forced to evaluate cyber-communication on the merits of the ideas expressed, but filtered through our individual experiential "BS detectors". The result, I think, is that those of us truly desireous of communicating with other sentient souls strive to improve the way in which we use the language in our postings. Perhaps more importantly, it has served (at least for me) to make me a better listener in real-world communications. Yes, it is an imperfect world and there are some here with no apparent interest in communicating who seem content with the cyber-version of "shooting a bird", but they seem to be largely ignored, as just so much clutter or background noise.

All in all, I think that cyber-communication is tantamount to ressurection of what many consider to be the lost art of effective writing. I thank you all for your contributions.