morungos

One of things that really frustrates me about Internet communications is getting the level of communication right. I'm a member of a number of mailing lists, and occasionally post messages elsewhere. In these discussions, one of the following invariably seems to happen.

• People assume that I know so much that their explanation is incomprehensible unless I already know the answer to my own question
• People assume that I graduated very recently and need to have basic concepts explained to me in their gory detail

The first one is frustrating, but I can live with it. What I do find hard to deal with is the second. Obviously, this happens much less in real life as people can see you, so they can estimate your age, and time extent even your level of experience. As it is, I hold a PhD, and until fairly recently, taught Masters and PhD students in computing.

Now to some extent there is a legitimate point. Now I've worked in industry I realize that much of what is common practice in industry is not commonly known to a generation of academics. Patterns are a good example. Many of my former colleagues knew little about them, but us artificial intelligence people used patterns extensively; see Tansley and Hayball's book, for example, which dated back to 1993. I was using object-oriented programming with multiple inheritance in 1984. So yes, I have been doing true OOP (with "Flavors" on a Symbolics Lisp machine if you want to know) since before many people on internet mailing lists were born. I have built several implementations myself, and I do not need to have inheritance/OOP explained to me.

Harry Collins discusses these issues in his work on the sociology of science and knowledge - he stresses the importance of the 'repair work' in social interaction, the tacit knowledge and bridging inferences people use to understand one another. The brevity of many mailing-list type conversations limits the amount of repair, and the lack of a shared context (in some cases) makes it even harder to make the required repairs. These can easily result in the kinds of misunderstanding hinted at above. One example that cropped up recently was a posting on the use of shared memory in Perl threads running web server worker processes. A fair number responses went into explaining the basics of worker processes (which was not the question) and missed the subtlety of shared memory in Perl threads (which is both subtle and slightly strange, even for Perl).

My plea? When you are discussing something with someone, and you feel yourself making assumptions about them, maybe try to stop and think about those assumptions. You could always ask them for clarification. If you are in about the other person's level of knowledge, just ask.