I'm virtually asocial!

I was thinking the other day about the irony of being a social/talkative person who spends a LOT of time on the internet but seems almost incapable of participating in any sort of digital correspondence (email, forums [fora], this blog, etc).

I also have the similar irony of being a highly enthusiastic gamer (meaning primarily board and card games) who enjoys computers but doesn't really do any computer gaming, including computer versions of board and card games I like.

One thing that works to both of these is that I truly prefer dealing with people in person. Feedback is more immediate and it's much easier to determine what someone is communicating when you can hear the tone of their voice, see their body language and look into their eyes.

Talking on the phone doesn't give me everything I appreciate about direct contact, but it gives enough that I can do it pretty well. Of course, the time difference between Australia and the USA works against the spontaneity of the communication (for my American friends and family).

But the real crux of the matter for me is talking vs. writing. I'm pretty comfortable with talking. (Some - many? - of my friends would say I'm too comfortable...) As an instructor/trainer, I've made my living off of it for a number of years. I like that I can get paid for using my mind and my mouth (because it's quite obvious to me that my body and my physical skills are not going to bring in much!).

Writing, though, I'm not quite so comfortable with. In fact, I have a near-phobic response to it. This has caused significant stress in my life over the years and cost me a number of opportunities that I would have liked to have been able to actualise.

It's not necessarily the composition part. I tell my highly prolific friend, John Farrell, that I have a *great* blog that I work on all the time; however, it's all in my head! I'm almost always translating my experience into blog entries. After all, that's just "talking" (in my mind).

It's the process of converting the imagined to the actual. That process is very slow for me and involves a LOT of re-reading what I have written so far. It's like: 1-1-2-1-2-3-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-5... Slow and painful. And it never "sings" like it does in my head.

And the written word is king when it comes to communicating on this glorious thing called the internet. So I sit on the sidelines, reading a ton but writing almost nothing - virtually asocial.

asocial [ey-soh-shuhl]
–adjective
1. not sociable or gregarious; withdrawn from society.
2. indifferent to or averse to conforming to conventional standards of behaviour.
3. inconsiderate of others; selfish; egocentric.

Yep, that's me on the internet - though #3 could be interpreted a little more harshly than I think is true. I prefer this term to "antisocial" because I'm not opposed to communicating; it's just difficult for me.

But I can be fun in person!