I don't know if this is an original idea or not, but it finally clicked for me today: most internet arguments bear an extraordinary resemblance to faculty behavior at a seminar.

Or any presentation at a meeting. If you've been there, you know what I'm talking about. Some poor soul has been tagged to get up and give their talk. They've organized their slides, put their thoughts together. Maybe this is something they've been working on their whole lives, this is their baby.

Maybe they got handed the thing yesterday, their boss is out of town and guess what, tag you're it! Project stinks, they don't know anything about it, but this is the talk folks, here ya go.

Either way, here's the schmuck tasked with entertaining the crowd for an hour or so...

And the putz in the audience wants to argue. Endlessly. It's never about anything truly important. It might be "I discovered that years ago", the faculty favorite. Or it might be "I don't understand this, and I'm going to broadcast my lack thereof for all and sundry. At length."

Charitably, most of the time, there's a mismatch between the talk and the audience, assumptions maybe, domain of application almost always.

What bugs me, whether I've been the target or just in the audience watching someone get raked over the coals, is that these sorts of things should be taken to private conversations. Or, really, that old favorite, "I'll ignore this because it doesn't seem right."

I may be unusual though, I can get terribly embarrassed by public confrontations. I don't do social conflict, or at least I'm not comfortable with it in certain contexts. Especially when it's such a no-brainer to say "Look, we disagree, and I'm happy to figure out why. But a talk really isn't the best place to get there."

That's seminars and meetings, teleconferences, the kinds of things many of us have to deal with every day.

What I spotted this morning in a random comment thread, in between rolling my eyes at yet another endless argument, was how familiar it was, all of a sudden. And that's when I realized how close it all was to the seminars and meetings that I get so bored by.

Same kind of thing, argument that might be argument for the sake of argument, but is often just that simple path away from being more equitably relaxed: "Hey, it's cool, I get that we're not quite meeting on the same plane. No worries, agree to disagree and we'll get on to more productive uses of our space and time."

Work doesn't generally get done in a public forum. Even for public entertainers, comedians, actors, sports, the work is the stuff we don't see. The product is what we get in front of the cameras, on stage, under the lights on the field.

Not to say that I don't think confrontation has its place in the world of the mind, but the stage where it actually accomplishes something isn't likely to be the grandstanding speech. Rather this: Art speaks to Art. The best response to a paper is another paper. Or project, or patent, or program or novel or poem or song or or or...

If nothing else, a little more time to think and consider one's own assumptions, test them in private, work through them without the world looking over your shoulder, never hurts.