FROTHING – IT’S NOT JUST FOR LATTE ANYMORE

Are you debating or just foaming at the mouth?

The recent influx of discussions about testing schools resulted in all types of communication across the web – from intelligent discourse to frothing denunciations on both sides.

It occurred to me that some people genuinely don’t understand the difference between a debate or questioning someone’s beliefs, and attacking them on a personal level. The first option can be illuminating, interesting, and fun. The second provides no value whatsoever, except to the attacker, and only if they perceive themselves as “winning”.

First, there are several types of communications that can spark a debate, which is (according to Webster’s) “a contention by words or arguments”. The interesting thing about that definition is that it is followed by “a regulated discussion of a proposition between two matched sides.”.

The source of the debate can be a book, article, blog, forum post, or a “live” comment.

Let’s talk about blogs for minute, because blogs provide fodder for other blogs and because that medium is rapidly becoming one of our most common forms of communication.

Generally, when someone posts something in a blog (or writes an article, or posts a thought in a forum for that matter), they generally are not speaking directly to YOU. In other words, they are not attacking you. They don’t even know you. They don’t know you’re reading their blog. They don’t necessarily know what you believe or why you think that way. They are expressing their own thoughts and doing it in their own way. Some people write like PhDs. Some people write the same way they talk. Some have a sense of humor. Some don’t. And humor is an odd thing. I never use it when I’m presenting or discussing business information during the course of my work, unless I really know my audience. Inevitably there will be someone that doesn’t “get it” or is offended by it. But on a blog? Surely someone has the “right” to be themselves on a blog.

Well, within some level of decency and international law, I think we can assume they DO have the right to be themselves on their own blog. And you, as a reader, have the right to like or dislike, agree or disagree, accordingly. The ability or "right" to represent just your own thoughts is one of the biggest advantages AND disadvantages to choosing to participate in the blogosphere.

I have a folder called “Blog fodder”. These are things that sparked some kind of reaction in me – it doesn’t matter if it was good or bad. I don’t respond to every single thing that catches my attention. I don’t go out there, in WebWorld, and say everything I think. I don’t respond to every blog, post, or comment that catches my attention.

Why is that?

Well, first of all, I simply don’t have the time. I have to be selective about where I spend my time. I have a hard time even posting to my own blog once a month.

Another reason is that I filter and think about things before I decide whether I want to respond. So how do you choose what to respond to and how to respond?

Well, I can only tell you what I do, and I’m far from the least controversial poster on the web. There are others out there far more patient than I am.

First of all, I avoid commenting on the work of someone I truly believe is a worthless piece of excrement and that I totally despise. If just their name makes me break out in a rash, I am NOT going to be able to respond to them rationally. There are exactly two people in our field that I absolutely loathe. I am truly not capable of engaging them in a conversation where I would not appear to be a complete lunatic, because all I really want to do is call them names and do the hokey-pokey on the ashes of their careers. Now, I haven’t been 100% successful with showing restraint, but I do recognize my own prejudices and do my best not to inflict myself on the world at large because of what is really my own inability to cope like a grownup.

And it’s doubtful you’ll guess correctly, so stop trying….

So the first thing I assess is whether I have an overwhelming desire to crush an individual into their individual atoms in some slow and painful way, or if I merely think they’re wrong in this instance. If I find I want to annihilate my hapless victim while they weep openly and beg me for mercy, I pass. That’s right – I pass. And yes, that requires a measure of discipline over my baser instincts. It’s taken me over 20 years to develop any whatsoever and I keep working on it.

I think all of us have seen instances where others have not shown the same restraint. These are “frothers”. Frothers do not “engage” you. They attack you. There are even categories of frothers. I have my own favorites, of course. One is a group I refer to as “The Stepford Wives”. The Stepfords appears to have a hive mentality and cannot accept criticism, disagreement, or even humor regarding not only their icons, but every single thing their icons or anyone in their group has ever uttered, no matter how farfetched. There’s also a strong belief that the reason someone cannot agree with a given idea is that they are incapable of understanding it. Stepford Wives pretty much have a formula for their communications. Normally they’ll suggest you are (list disgusting traits and revolting attributes here) and in the wrap-up sentence advise you to share your wisdom with the world and be yourself. I LOVE their posts. I always post their comments. Why? Because they make me laugh. . Because the frother usually appears somewhat demented. Because it will probably prove one of my points. And finally it’s because I have to care about what someone thinks in order to be wounded by their opinion. And in order for me to care about what someone thinks, I have to know them well enough to respect them. That doesn’t happen when someone is behaving like an idiot. I’m most likely to crack a joke when frothed at and move on, writing the frother off permanently as someone who’s totally whacked. My own feeling is that Stepford Wives are not worth talking to – they’re fanatics. Someone who cannot think for themselves and analyze information fed to them, regardless of source, kind of freaks me out. No one is right all the time. No one. I can’t identify with or understand those types of people; it appears to be a cult mentality. And is it just me, or do fanatics have absolutely no sense of humor about themselves? Or anything else? Gads.

Other types of frothers are just crazed persons with no particular modus operandi; they just spew at you. Generally they just want you to know that they hate the fact that you remain breathing.

So you need to ask yourself if you want to be viewed as a lunatic. Perhaps you don’t care of the object of your misplaced affections (or lack thereof) thinks you’re a few bricks shy of a load. But what about others that might be reading that article or blog? Do you want THEM to write you off as a lunatic? No? Then you have to rein yourself in sometimes. If you really hate someone, it’s very difficult to come out on top if you engage that person. I once had a manager tell me “Lose your temper and you lose the war.”. Easy to say – REAL hard to practice! I'll probably still be working on that one in my Next Life.

Say you DO want to present a different viewpoint, either to get the original poster to converse with you and debate the issue, or to get the readers of the original poster to see that there is a different perspective on a given topic.

You really need more than “Have you ever noticed that proponents of oracles and heuristics are ugly and smell really bad?”. (I know only a few of you will get that joke, but the format is the same as a particularly bad piece of doggerel recently appearing in Blog World).

First of all, unless you’re going to blog on the topic on your own site, you can’t be so obnoxious that your comment won’t be posted.

Secondly, someone who really wants to challenge a statement or concept is going to focus on the statement or concept. Not on the individual. And a good way to start is to ask questions. Generally, even someone who shies away from debate is willing to answer questions.

So say you’re a member of the CP. You think waterfall methodology is heinous. You believe anyone who doesn’t believe in exploratory testing is too ignorant to understand the concept. You’ve just read a blog talking about the Joys of Best Practices and Keystroke-by-Keystroke Scripting in Federal Government shops. You can’t believe your EYES. What’s worse, the blog is by one of the most popular authors on the web and is read by thousands of people.

What do you do?

First, you take a few deep, cleansing breaths and check your blood pressure. Once you’re calm, you reread the blog. Then you consider the author. Have you ever talked to them before? Do you want them dead, or do you just disagree on this particular topic? Do you understand and have you worked in their type of environment? If the answer is “no”, how do you know your way is right? Are you working from book knowledge and hearsay, or do you actually have experience working in that type of environment? Remember that they’ve either LIVED or ARE LIVING in that environment and you may not know how to play in that sandbox successfully. First strive for understanding and THEN question the ideas.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you are wrong or that you don’t know a better way. It just means you might not have enough information to make any meaningful judgements. So why not start off by asking questions? “Mr. X”, I’d say, “what kind of environment do you work in? Is it highly regulated?”. Find out what that means, exactly. “What about “best practice Y”?” What makes you feel that is particularly successful in your environment – did it solve a particular problem? What was it? Did you try anything else first?”. Ask questions until you fully understand the context in which that person works. I believe this is one of the issues the original “schools” concept was trying to deal with. Cutting through all the initial “how we do things” conversations to set up a more “instant context”. I think I prefer to ask the questions; every shop is somewhat different and non-challenging, information-gathering types of discourse can set a base of trust from which more challenging debate can arise.

Then LISTEN and respond appropriately. If you are incapable of listening and digesting what the other person has to say, you are incapable of engaging in a good debate. You don’t have to agree. In fact, you can passionately disagree, as long as you keep your focus on the idea and not the individual. It may turn out that “Best Practice Y” only makes sense if you first have situations A, B, and C. It may turn out that even Mr. X says that there might be a better way. You might even find out (gulp) that you were wrong. That’s the cool part of a discussion/debate. You never know where you’re going to end up.

In addition, no one reading your comments is going to think you’re a jerk. You’ll probably move some people over to your way of thinking. And you can remain friends, or at least maintain a cordial professional relationship with Mr. X.

I absolutely love reading a really good debate between two people who, while they don’t quite despise each other, don’t want to move in with each other either. And the more erudite and intelligent they are, the more exquisite the wording. It’s normal to learn quite a bit that helps you formulate your own opinions, since such discussions are normally based on logic. But you can’t help smiling when you see an elegant turn of phrase that in essence says “go play in traffic”.

I am not really in that league, intellectually, but it’s very common in academic circles for more time to be spent ripping apart the theories of others than to focus on your own research. It has to do with professional competition for funding and grants.

And here is my final suggestion when making decisions as to whether you’re in the mood for a debate. I think it is a good idea to try to engage someone that is at your level intellectually. While it might be entertaining for you to rip someone a new orifice when they are totally incapable of responding in kind, it’s really not that fun for the rest of us. Mostly it’s just cruel. People will step in and say unkind things to you just to defend someone who is obviously incapable of defending themselves – even when they might have agreed with you in principle. Bullies are never especially attractive. So pick on people your own intellectual size.

I had somewhat of an epiphany a few weeks ago; it truly had never occurred to me that the James Bachs and Cem Kaners of this world had the same problems with frothing lunatics as some of the rest of us did. Most of the experiences I’ve had were with the Stepford Wives (all saying they were Contextual School devotees), so I thoughtlessly – well, maybe “conveniently” – forgot that in essence, an ass is an ass, regardless of persuasion. I stand corrected. I hate it when that happens…