You might find it useful to know about me:

[liv]

I'm just about the most extroverted person I know, certainly one of the most extroverted. I have an unlimited desire and nearly an unlimited capacity for human interaction, and I have the trait which is typical but not universal for extroverts, that I pretty much always want to be talking about anything and everything. I have a job that most days involves a lot of interacting with people, and I come home wanting more contact so I use the internet to facilitate more conversations.

Considering I am more extroverted than nearly everyone else, I am well used to the idea that not everybody feels the same as me! I have set up my life so that I hopefully don't get too clingy with any one person, and if someone needs a break from my company and incessant chattering, I can go and find someone else to talk to. But I'm not always very good at intuiting when a more introverted person would like me to shut up and go away. The internet is helpful because it doesn't enforce my company on people, everyone can choose to respond to my posts and comments or not. But it's unhelpful in that it doesn't always give me cues or hints that I need to be giving someone a bit more space. So I would very much appreciate it if you could tell me if I'm getting wearing or even annoying. I do try to work it out on my own, but I don't always succeed; I won't be offended if you remind me.

While I'm on the subject (and yes, I do talk about myself a lot; I talk about other stuff too, but me-me-me is an area where I don't run out of things to say!): I come from the intersection of several cultures where you show respect by arguing with people. As a result of these character traits, if I like someone or think they're nifty, I am likely to want to talk to them all the time, hang out with them as often as possible, find out lots of stuff about them and so on. And if they say something interesting, my immediate response is usually to pick holes, to look for edge cases and couterexamples.

I'm also very confident; I have quite a lot of the sense often described as "male privilege", that by default I expect people to find what I have to say interesting and relevant. (This is part of the reason I don't fit very well in women's spaces, particularly not feminist safe spaces or consciousness-raising type set-ups.) This can mean that I unintentionally bulldoze and overwhelm people. But on the positive side, I'm really really thick-skinned, so you can tell me I'm being irritating or confrontational or overly pushy and I won't take it as a blow to my self-esteem, just a helpful pointer that will allow me to modify my behaviour around you. 'Shut up and let me get a word in edgewise' is always acceptable, as is 'shut up and let me think' or 'leave me alone, I've run out of energy for interacting any further'.

I should also add that because I largely tend to seek out friends similar to myself, or at least people who have a degree of tolerance for a personality like mine, hanging around with my crowd either virtually or in person can be a bit overwhelming for introverts and shy people. And particularly on this blog, I encourage divergent opinions and debate, though I appreciate that not everybody finds that fun, especially when the topic has painful emotional significance.

So yes, I am aware of this, and I am aware that it can be a problem sometimes. My apologies if I ever do impose too much on your time and energy, or if I seem to be shooting you down through inappropriate expressions of enthusiasm.

Comments

[brainwane]

I come from the intersection of several cultures where you show respect by arguing with people.

What are those?

[liv]

My birth family; a very academically competitive education at both school and university (English girls' private school, then Oxford university); professional academia; geekdom, particularly the early days of blogging and pre-social network online cultures; Judaism, or at least some subcultures within that. Good question, thank you for asking!

[brainwane]

I'm trying to figure out how to communicate "no seriously that's disrespectful" to people who are ensconced in those cultures.

And of course part of the problem is that simply trying to communicate "I am worthy of respect" is itself a low-status move.

[liv]

I am not sure how best to reply to you, here. Given you've indicated that you would find it disrespectful if I were to say anything that could be interpreted as criticizing or opposing your comment, I want to avoid doing that. I hope I am open to people asking me to be less confrontational / argumentative / critical, but I acknowledge that even having to ask places a burden on the people I interact with. Is that helpful at all?

[brainwane]

I am asking for a description of how one could communicate to the people in the cultures that you've listed that they are being disrespectful in some way, especially when their argumentative styles are being disrespectful. This isn't just about you, it's about Oxbridge people, academics, etc. A related question: if you show respect by arguing with people, how do you show disrespect? Just checking out of the discussion entirely? Where does agreement factor into it? Like, what if you actually just agree with someone?

[liv]

OK, thanks for clarifying, now I think I see what you're asking. I think as well as being argumentative, I tend to be quite direct, so my personal preference would be for someone to tell me "look, I feel really hurt and disrespected when you shoot down everything I say, please could you stop doing that?" I think this may fail to answer your concern that asking for respect is, as you put it, a low-status move. I hope I would notice after a few rounds of the person, say, not responding to my arguments and criticisms, or changing the subject, but I am really quite bad at reading subtle social cues. I think that issue is more me than academics in general, though.

How do I show disrespect? On the whole I try not to, I try to treat everyone I meet with respect. Sometimes it's simply not bothering to interact with them. Sometimes it's saying something very bland that doesn't really engage with what they're saying. Yeah, I can see why you'd think that. That's cool. Yeah, ok. That's nice. Thanks for telling me. Occasionally I am sarcastic, I do admit, though I'm not proud of that tendency.

If I actually agree with someone, hm. My first instinct is to respond with something like, "hey, that's a really great idea, but what if...?" I try to express my enthusiasm and agreement directly, as well as the nitpicking, but I know that lots of people won't really hear that and will only focus on the criticism. I rarely "just" agree, I always want to explore the scope of what I'm agreeing with, or consider the implications of accepting the new idea.

[brainwane]

Your strategies sound counterproductive to useful discourse for me, so I'll be unfollowing you.

[liv]

Thank you for taking the time to explain your perspective to me. You didn't have to do that, considering that you find my style of communication unhelpful, so I do appreciate that you were willing to enter into the discussion.

Apologies

[brainwane]

I'm sorry -- I misworded my phrasing there badly. I meant to say that I would have a hard time listening & communicating productively when interacting with your strategies.

Re: Apologies

[brainwane]

I'm a bit better at dealing with this sort of thing now, by the way.

Re: Apologies

[liv]

Wow, it's really nice of you to come back and apologize for an awkwardly phrased comment a long time ago! Thank you, it means a lot that you made the effort. I admire you and your writing and your thoughtfulness, and have done for a long time.

[lilacsigil]

I am a super, super introvert who can happily go for long periods of time without talking to anyone. The internet is perfect for me because I can interact with more extroverted people and then, when it's too much, just turn it off! It's great because I can be friends with a much wider variety of people than I would be able to offline.

[liv]

Makes loads of sense! I've often heard of introverts using the internet as a way to get some contact without being as draining as in person socializing. I use it as a way to get more contact than would be practically possible to fit into my life, I can't go out or travel to visit friends every single evening, but having a couple of hours of online connection helps keep me stable.

[forestofglory]

I used to think I am introverted, but lately I've been wondering if the reason I often find social events tiring is that being in a crowd generally causes sensory overload. I came home form a movie night last week almost bouncing off the walls.

On the other hand I'm unreasonably afraid of contacting people -- calling, emailing, or even saying hi on IM is scary. So I guess I'm shy, but I'm not sure if I'm introverted or extroverted.

[highlyeccentric]

My ex came up with the best term: *ambivert* She's moderately mentally healthy but can be extroverted and introverted at various times. With me it depends on my mental health - the anxiety and depression amplify my introvert traits to the exclusion of extrovert ones at times.

[liv]

Ambivert is cool, I like that! I think part of the issue is that MBTI types are supposed to be stable over one's lifetime, but there are certainly experiences and situations that can alter the way an underlying trait is expressed. Also I think lots and lots of people are just not at the extremes, it's easily possible to be a little bit extrovert or a little bit introvert.

[liv]

Yeah, I've definitely come across people who are basically extroverts, but have other things going on which drain their energy when they're interacting with people. Social anxiety and sensory stuff seem like clear candidates for that sort of thing.

If you are scared of saying hi on IM, I'm glad that you sometimes make the effort so we can chat! I should take the initiative more, but since I'm basically always happy to chat I worry about being intrusive.

[elf]

I love extroverts. They do all the heavy-lifting parts of the social stuff.

I'm an extreme introvert. I have honestly considered getting a burqah to wear in public just to have more *privacy.* (Decided it'd probably be disrespectful to the women who wear them for religious reasons.) I love your posts; they're direct and thoughtful and encourage counterpoints, and there's no sense of "omg is this person going to freak out because I was watching this blog right now?"

I'll let you know if you ever get annoying or overbearing. So far, it hasn't remotely been a problem.

[highlyeccentric]

I love extroverts. They do all the heavy-lifting parts of the social stuff.

I'm an extrovert and I fuckin' LOVE introverts. They can leave me the fuck alone when I'm anxious or depressed! Socialising primarily with introverts seems to be the ideal compromise between extrovert nature and mental-health-amplified introvert traits. Sometimes you need company with a high tolerance for withdrawal, and introverts can usually provide!

Look at me, extrovertin' all over this post...

[liv]

Oh yay, this is a really heartening comment, thank you! I'm really really pleased to know you like my blog, and you're right, I am always happy (and not freaked out) when I get comments from people I'd not previously been connected to.

When you say you love that extroverts do social heavy-lifting, it reads to me as if you said "I love people with big appetites, they eat up all the tasty food so I don't have to eat as much". For me socializing is almost purely enjoyable, it's not heavy lifting at all! But it's good to have all kinds of different people around. Another extrovert trait is that I love meeting people who are very different from me, definitely including introverts.

I wonder if wearing a more sartorial and less religious veil would help you? Perhaps from a historical period when respectable women tended to cover or partially cover their faces? Though I suspect it might attract unwanted attention if your clothing were anachronistic, instead of getting people to leave you alone more.

[elf]

I love people with big appetites; they set a table full of lots of tasty dishes so I can eat a nibble of each one instead of a full plate of just one thing. Lots to go around!

I don't not-like social; I just hit burnout in crowds fairly quickly, and I get nervous talking about myself too much.

I don't quite not-want-attention; my waist-length hair is dyed teal-green. But that doesn't put the attention on *me* as a person; people comment on the hair, and the person wearing it is a nonentity. But I haven't been able to come up with a veil-ish thing that puts the attention on the clothing and not on me.

[highlyeccentric]

I'd say OMG ARE YOU ME, but I actually swing wildly between my 'extrovert' setting and a moderately-introverted state. But I feel you! Especially on the arguing (no good cultural reason here, just academia) and the 'male privilege'-like assumptions/behavioural traits, although in many cases the *privilege* part (the privilege of happily sailing along in the knowledge that you're entitled to that confidence and it's not your fault if no one else shares it) is fading.

[liv]

Mm, that's really interesting. Yay fellow extroverts! I definitely see that other stuff can get in the way of actually getting the expected energy buzz from company. I'm lucky that my bottomless appetite for social interaction is matched by having plenty of energy and ability to make it actually happen. And yeah, it's really easy to lose the confidence and entitlement that go along with privilege, I've seen it happen enough.

[antisoppist]

The thing about cultures and arguing is a really helpful point for me at the moment as it has taken me a long time to work out that the Finn I married thinks arguing loudly on any topic under the sun, saying anything you like in order to win the game, is a fun way of communicating with someone you love and that everyone knows you don't mean a word of it and it is all forgotten in the morning and you are closer because of it. This is a major problem when I (British, brought up to be polite and self-sacrificing) feel flattened, bullied and shaky whenever it happens. At least we are now finally talking about it and he (astonished) is saying he had no idea and of course he will stop doing it.

[rysmiel]

Hmmm. My various cultural backgrounds (Irish, academic, geeky, various bits of internet) come with arguing intensely as a positive thing and sign of respect - failing to engage with an idea being a sign of not taking it seriously - but very much not with a "saying anything you like in order to win the game" aspect; object of the exercise is greater clarity, and better elucidation of the truth if it's a subject where that applies, but bringing competition into it would be horrible.

[antisoppist]

He says his school system revolved around debate, with one person appointed to defend a topic and another to shoot it down. The aim is to win through rhetoric not to believe what you are saying. I can do that if someone waves a big flag at the start and says "this is a debate starting now" but I can't cope with sudden random attacks when I thought it was a *conversation*. He did have a Bosnian friend who did the same thing. They would shout all night and emerge back-slapping best of friends at the end.

[liv]

Huh, I really do hope that realization is helpful for your relationship. I've found it a really useful piece of information that some stuff about how one communicates can vary culturally as well as between individuals, everything about interrupting and directness and a whole bunch of other things.

[antisoppist]

Turn-taking is another Finnish-English one. Finnish turns are longer, which can come across as lecturing in English. Or the speaker feeling rudely interrupted before they have finished. But we worked that one out earlier.

[jack]

That's really interesting. I can really imagine it, but I can imagine I'd totally not noticed unless I lived very closely with someone from the other culture.

[ptc24]

It occurs to me that introversion/extraversion is a multifaceted thing; either that, or there are a lot of things that can be confused with it. Certainly the Big Five (a popular personality model in mainstream academic psychology) has six(?) facets for extraversion.

A list of relevant factors might include: Need for company, need for active engagement with company, need for solitude, capacity for social interaction before getting "people'd out", social anxiety, shyness, love of solitary activities, emotional expressiveness (vs stoicism/pokerfacedness), willingness to share enthusiasm, willingness to be affectionate, willingness to receive affection, etc. When I look at it like that, it makes me realise that in some senses I'm a lot less introverted than I sometimes think I am. Finding a happy medium between being peopled out and being lonely can be hard sometimes. Also between being overbearing and being timid/doormatish/wallflowerish.

Argumentativeness: I was reading a book by Clare Sainsbury, Martian In The Playground. When she was at school she had a habit of picking apart the things other people said, especially in English lessons (IIRC), and this did not make her popular. Eventually she got the feeling that there might be some sort of social rule against this sort of thing, and tried to adapt to that, but only really started to feel at home when went to Oxford to study philosophy, where shredding people's arguments at every opportunity was actively encouraged. In general, I have this view that it's good to have different spaces and different subcultures with different norms, so that people can gravitate towards those whose norms fit them best.

[liv]

Dividing things up in a more fine-grained way sounds like it could lead somewhere useful, yeah. When I consider the introvert versus extrovert axis, I am thinking of gaining "energy" (in the sense of being in an energetic, happy mood, not in the physics sense) from social interactions, versus needing to use up energy for social interactions. I think that's at least partly distinct from being socially confident versus shy.

I think part of the issue is that social interaction might take up energy or be draining for reasons other than being inherently an introvert; it might be physically painful to get to or spend time in the places where the other humans are, for example. Or you might be in an environment where you have to have your conversations in a second language, which is always going to be tiring even if in general you're extroverted.

Another aspect that can confuse the issue is that regardless of extroversion, everybody needs some degree of human interaction, and everybody eventually gets tired. Like, even the most intense introverts are not going to be happy living as complete isolated hermits. And even the most intense extroverts are sometimes capable of getting peopled out. I think when there's a mismatch between how much social interaction makes you happy, and how much social interaction you can actually cope with, that's most likely to lead to problems with finding a happy medium between being peopled out and being lonely, which is an excellently concise way of putting it.

I definitely agree that having different subcultures is helpful, as is having some degree of ability to adapt between them. There are always examples of people who are just misfits in the culture where they're brought up, and your argumentative philosopher sounds like one of them.

[purplecthulhu]

Thanks to your periodic LJ crosspost I only just caught up with all the latest stuff. Suspect I should be looking at DW more, but I seldom get around to it :-(

And to add to the confusion I've just started writing more on my wordpress blog: davecl at wordpress dot com, so you might see me there as well as on LJ.

[liv]

Oh, no problems, there's no "should" about it, you divide up your online time and attention however it suits you. I am aware that I caused people inconvenience by moving to DW, and I did so anyway because it was important to me to be a customer of my social networking site rather than a product. If you use LJ as an RSS reader at all, there's a feed of my DW at liv_dw.

And I am following your WP blog through the RSS reader on my smartphone. I'm really enjoying it actually, but because I read it on the phone rather than from my desktop I'm a lot less likely to comment. I'm enjoying it a lot, I think you've done a good job of making the transition from LJ to a real blog, whereas I've seen a lot of attempts that just peter out because of not having a ready-made community.

[purplecthulhu]

I'll have to see if I can get that feed working on LJ.

I feel your pain on the way LJ has gone, but the community I'm part of is largely still there, which is why I'm sticking with it. And as a permanent account holder I have, so far, been largely immune to their messing around.

Glad you like the WP blog! The readership there is still much smaller than on LJ, but I'm trying to do different things. The WP is fulling public, while the LJ is flocked, so the tone and content can be quite different. Just look at the posts about funding a few weeks ago :-)

My model for the WP blog is part Charlie Stross' blog, though I've yet to write too much about the fiction writing side of things (somewhat to my surprise). and partly Prof Peter Cole's wordpress blog In the Dark. Peter has built up a sizeable readership over the years, and I think the key is regular posts that are contentful, rather than the more personal things I've been posting to LJ of late. So don't expect to see cycling diary posts on WP :-)

I hopefully will be putting something up on WP about writing this evening.

[hairyears]

"Extroverts do the heavy lifting in social situations…"

I *like* that observation.