Flame Wars and Time Well Spent - Commentary

In the good old days, researchers, scientists and engineers communicated on-line through the use of News Groups or forums. These were primarily text based interfaces on terminals, not the flashy user interfaces we have today. With the entry of the Personal Computer (PC) where more people gained access including a new generation of software developers, a phenomena began to happen called "Flame Wars". This is where 2 or more people start an on-line arguement and it often times gets heated. It might be over a technical issue or a moat point and then the first thing you know it gets personal.

T he trouble with this is it side lines everyone else who monitors the forum and as soon as people start to hang the dirty laundry out, the community starts to dissipate or the professionals using the media to advance their own work, which often times is a collaborative effort, found it to be an impossible situation. And what finally "did in" these early news groups, was the fact they were eventual targets for spam becoming totally useless.

Time Well Spent including time working within this community means that I have either garnered useful information or contributed something useful to other members on the network. And perhaps it is irresistible to join in and take sides in a debate especially when the platform is present before you. Blogs can also be flame throwers although perhaps easier for the reader to avoid since the comments are segregated by topic. Using the network though one can find other hidden factors that can cause wasted time. Sometimes you can be reading something that seems interesting but turns out to be FUD. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, a marketing strategy. Another hidden factor is a post that generates 50 equivalent comments that all say pretty much the same thing. I can remember on one of my technical forums some years ago I posted a comment looking for an answer to a hardware problem with a video card and instead of getting a decent reply from an engineer in the know I found 50 other people suffering the same problem! Comical!

Thus, when I am blogging along, I like the social light heartedness but I am always on the look out for the novel idea, combining different approaches to problem solving and notating or bookmarking in case I want to come back to it. Consequently, if I can add a tweak to the recipe, a contributory comment that adds value, this is where I feel my time is well spent in a collaborative way for the community. After all, everything I have learned on Active Rain is because someone else spent their time well also.