Why Do You Join Forums, Whether This One Or Others?

I like forums for a lot of reasons. For one thing, I like to be able to talk to people who I would never be in a room with otherwise, either because of geography or simply because people tend to come together over common interests, and I am often left wishing that the conversation could expand into other areas that I'm interested in.

Church groups will often discuss other topics. I don't know what women talk about when they are together in a group at church, but men talk about hunting, fishing and sports, neither of which I am interested in. They might also talk about old times but since most of them grew up here and I didn't, there isn't much for me to contribute.

Although I don't hunt or fish, I am a member of a local fishing and hunting club, largely because they are involved in land issues that I have an interest in, and because I like the fact that people can hunt, although I choose not to do so myself.

Many people who just want to get together with other people do so in bars or in service organizations whose get-togethers largely revolve around drinking, and I don't drink.

When I moved here, I had more experience than anyone else working EMS through the volunteer fire department here, as well as experience as firefighter, since I could teach EMTs, EMT-Intermediates, EMT-Paramedics, and dispatch courses, as well as CPR and First Aid through three different organizations, ACLS, PALS, PHTLS, BTLS, and some others that I can't even think of right now. But they weren't interested in any new members, so I let it go since I was done with it professionally. So I don't even have that in common with anyone around here.

Politics is not only frustrating, but limited conversationally, since people get angry with one another in real life as they do in forums. In real life, a lot of people are unwilling to work together with someone on an area of common interest because there are other areas of disagreement.

Plus, I am not very good in large groups of people. Oh, I don't get all panicky or anything but I tend to spend most of my time talking with only one or two people, regardless of how many people might be in the room.

Then there is the most frustrating thing, which is that someone will get angry or jump to a conclusion before I have even finished what I was going to say. That happens in forums too, where someone will get angry, quit reading, and start responding to something that they misunderstood because they didn't read it to the end, but that doesn't happen as often in forums.

In a forum, while you may disagree with what I had to say, at least I was able to say it. Maybe I can express myself better in writing since there is time to think things through before clicking the "Post Reply" button.

 

Is there a lot of value in voicing an opinion that everyone agrees with? The important thing, I think, is how we deal with disagreement. Does it stir discussion or does it shut it up? I have opinions on a lot of things and, like most people, I'd like to be able to persuade others that my opinions are right and for them to adopt my opinions too, but that's not a realistic goal and it would probably scare me if it happened. I think there is value in offering your opinion even if you are the only person who holds it.

I use forums for that purpose, of course, but I also use them to help myself think things through. Many years ago, on other forums, I would take positions that I didn't hold sometimes, just for the educational and entertainment value of being in a position of having to defend something that I didn't believe in. For me, that was a developmental thing; it was fun and it helped to strengthen my verbal skills, I suppose. That was an exercise that I had to take in college a couple times, and I learned the value of it.

As I have grown older, I have placed greater value on who I am rather than on what I can pretend to be, and I no longer do that. Today, I use forums sometimes to help think things through. While I don't post opinions that I don't hold, I might state them more strongly sometimes, perhaps to see if they hold up under scrutiny.

In this forum, I enjoy writing about things that have meant something to me at any point in my life. By writing them, I am reliving them to some extent, although I am well aware that they may be of no interest to anyone else here. The alternative is telling my wife the same stories over and over again, although I do that too. One of my cats gets mad when I tell her stories; the other one is deaf, so she doesn't care anymore.

In another sense, it's a little bit like a journal or a diary. Although I have never been able to keep up a journal on a day-to-day basis, I can gain some of the benefits of doing so by posting about things that are going on in a forum.

 

Something I'd like to add about online forums, as opposed to other media like Facebook, is that I can come along days, weeks, or even years after a discussion has begun and still be able to join in. Of course, some forum administrators (not me) would get upset about posting to a thread that is years old, but it's not uncommon for people to do that here. While everything might remain on Facebook, things get pretty hard to find after only a day or two, and comments are pretty much in the moment. Often a discussion on someone's status update is pretty much over by the time I come across it a couple of hours later. That's why some people hang around on Facebook all day, I guess. You don't have to do that in an online forum.