The subconscious effect of "Critical Thinking"

[the_arch0wl]

I have had to answer to this request.. about two or three times on my site. When I originally said no, I had a theory of why I didn't want to add it and I would like to bring this up right now.

The idea is that if you have one forum that is, fundamentally, a "serious" forum, the rest of it becomes "nonserious" or "less serious". I don't think the inverse applies because I have seen many a forum with your standard "be a jackass" board leak out its ethics onto the rest of the site.

Many individuals would respond to this with quotes like "the internet is serious business" but I think that just makes my points more legitimate. On the internet, you have significantly more time to craft a reply, unless it is in a chatroom. You should conform to a higher standard of intelligence and thought, as opposed to what you would use in a real-life conversation, not lower. A side note, most of the people who utter comments like "INTERNET = SERIOUS BUSINESS" in a manner implying that the internet is to be taken with utmost disregard are usually people who spend a significant amount of time on the internet themselves. If they are going to treat virtual socialization with such a condescending tone, shouldn't they be doing it less? Anyways, enough of that..

A "serious board".. is much like putting on a certain "behavior mask" like children are forced to do at a young age, when their parents are meeting with someone important. I think that the concept of this infringes on the intelligence of normal forum conversation because instead of thinking at a particular standard all the time, they are thinking at a higher standard sometimes and a lower standard the majority of the time. While a "serious board" may produce a more thought-out post than normal... let me try to exemplify this. Let's say the average critical thinking topic makes a user think, on a thinking scale of 1-10, a 9 of how hard they thought about it. Let's say the average Garbage Bin Topic is a 3 and the average Chit-Chat topic is a 6. This is hypothetical. Would it not be better to have mostly 7.5 or 8s by removing behavior masks completely?

I subsconsciously feel that there are holes in my post that I did not cover, but I cannot think of them right now as I am exceedingly sleepy and wrote this thread on the spur of the moment. I am apologizing in advance.