When did it become polite to just walk away when talking to someone?

For the most part this almost never happens to me...

My question to those who find this happens a lot, what is the RL age of the person who is being rude and walking away from the conversation?

yes I could say common day to day things are lacking

maybe something happened thou and they had to go afk all of a sudden

dont worry about it

speaks more of them not you, that is if they are intentionally being rude and or the situation it is in context with

Here is a theory: I have been increasingly finding that IM sentences, both mine and those being typed to me, are being swallowed by SL; I have been getting sentences sent to my email address as if I were offline, even when I am online.

If, as I tend to do, your conversations tend to be structured so that you tend to take it in turns to "speak" (particularly if you are asking each other questions) then if a sentence goes missing the person you are talking to just waits for a response that doesn't arrive, and thinks it might be rude to speak again "out of turn".

Which will give the impression that they have "walked away" from the conversation.

Pep (and will also give the other person the same impression!)

Hmmm. Funny you should say that. It's been happening to me a fair bit recently too.

Among my friends, it would be considered rude to go idle in the middle of an IM conversation without some warning. If someone has to leave the keyboard abruptly, it is common practice to apologize once the typist has returned.

If someone routinely walked away from an IM conversation with me, I would question that person's manners and the nature of our relationship. If multiple people routinely did this to me, I would also question what role I played in creating such relationships and what these people were indicating to me with their actions.

/me is typing.. no wait she's used up her right-click-per-session allotment and is crashing LOADING.......

I agree with Pep about the SL-ate-my-chat theory.

They were probably too busy or had too many IMs going to carry on a conversation very long to begin with.

I was referring to the way some people will seek out an intense interchange such as "please help me" or come at you (in IM too actually) with an urgent conversation of some type and then suddenly either walk away or log out. Not crash, log out.

Basically it's simple rudeness. It doesn't take long to say they need to go. Although, in my opinion it's a *little* bit rude to do that sometimes as well. Depends why and when and how.

There are so many reasons this can happen without impoliteness or ill intent, it's silly to take offense at it.

Many RL manners translate to LL, but some need amending. In RL, we're not carrying on nearly so many conversations at once, and manners need to be adjusted for that fact.

RL trumps LL, and something can come up in RL and it's just not practical to jump into every IM window and say "BRB". Certainly, it's good to try, but it's just not always possible.

Some of us get bombarded with IMs from people we don't even know, who have questions we can't answer, about products we didn't make. But we don't want to be rude to those people, and our friends in IMs with us understand when we get called away by a string of these.

We crash but don't realize it, so minutes go by where we *think* we're talking to someone but we're not. When we get back on, we might not remember every IM thread we had open.

We thought we pretty much capped the conversation, and moved on to other things -- and didn't notice when an IM tab that's off the screen went active. (I wish it were more visible, like it used to be!)

Politeness works both ways. Yes, we avoid leaving people hanging. But we also recognize that when people seem to be leaving us hanging, there are often good reasons for it, and we do polite and sensible things to handle that possibility.

Oh, another one. Some people just don't seem to take "no" or "I'm not interested in that project" or "Sorry, but I have a lot going on, and I won't have time for that for two weeks." They keep adding reasons ... if I don't respond to the last one, assume it means it's because my answer hasn't changed!

That is all true too, Lear.

Is there some internet convention for what to type when both parties in an IM are done talking? Typing out the sequence one would use on a phone, "why I'm hanging up -- well-wish -- ok, bye!" just seems tedious. I've grown fairly comfortable with folks just kinda stopping when it's pretty clear we're done.

I remember a seminar on awkwardnesses in cross-cultural communication, one example being ending phone conversations. IIRC, it is polite in the States to time phone conversations so that both people say "bye" at the same moment, and (I forget the other nationality, may even have been English) is more comfortable with an alternating sequence. Leads to discomfort when the two each try to do their own politenesses when hanging up.

In such a diverse society as SL, I try to cut everybody a LOT of slack when it comes to manners.

I understand those, Lear, but it's more often when somebody has started chatting to someone else in IM or in-world and either forgets or deliberately neglects the IM session.

Perhaps a client mod would help..

Nah not really.

As for IM, it depends how 'involved' the conversation is. If someone asks something and I answer, then there's a ten minute delay without a good reason, when they were the initiator it's a bit rude I think.

I agree its rude and it bugs me greatly. I also found something very rude that happened to me the other day was this. I was chatting to a guy for about 5 mins we had gone somewhere to sit when i had to go AFK for max 5 mins. I said sorry i have to go AFK wont be long, his reply OK then I come back to " well seems you dont want to talk to me so i wont bother you any more" I was only 3 mins and if he could not wait fine bu say had to go catch you later. I IMed him to say i was back when he started name calling them goingon how i must be old , not sure what my age had to do with it. I agree what what has been said before ppl log on and leave their manners at the log on page.

sounds to me like you got lucky in having this person expose their true self so early on. otherwise you may have grown to like them, perhaps believe them to be a friend, before finding how quickly they could turn on you. (can you imagine how manipulative this person is in RL, not to mention psychologically destructive?)

Yes that type of sandbagging is draining, WW. I mean, going afk a few should be perfectly acceptable.

Only time it would become rude would be if it lasted 20, 30 minutes, after the person made you swear you'd wait...and then no explanation, like it never happened, next time you 'spoke.' I mean, I think rudeness vs. unexpected delay or so on is usually obvious in how the person reacts once they reappear. I mainly would be put out about that if I had already told them I was busy, or exhausted, etc.

A lot just comes down to basic courtesy. Of course it's okay if people have to go afk or go offline or do something else. I think when it crosses the line into just dismissive treatment is obvious, though. Basically a one-sided attitude comes through loud and clear. To me that's totally different.

Well believing tem to be a friend is not likely it takes me time to get to that point but what was funny he found me in a different sim and tried to start a chat , i pointed out the name calling he did earlier wondering if he forgot. His reasoning he was bored and thought i would chat to him .... um no you only call me a Wh.... once and that is the end of it

Back in "write" in the '70s you typically ended a sentence with "-o-" (over) and ended a conversation with "-oo-" (over and out)... but waited for the other guy to come back with "-oo-" or "Wait, one last thing...".

I kept doing this for years after it was no longer common, until I realized I was just confusing people.

Yes. To wit:Really, it's not just SL, and it's not just rudeness. Pure text conversations are impoverished in many social cues. Voice is too, but it gets a lot more than text. So it's not surprising that there can be some ambiguity as a text conversation winds down, whether it's actually already done. When I'm not sure, I often just type a smiley, close the window, and if there's no beep indicating otherwise then that's that.

That all depends on how someone defines "talking" to someone. I know a few people that think nothing of IMing with a line or two of exchange, then not responding for 5+ long minutes. Then you reply to that and it's a bunch more long drawn out ho-hums till they finally reply.. over and over like that. I understand that it's their business what may be keeping them from engaging in a convo they initiated, but if there's some kind of issue then why the hell IM me in the first place? I WILL walk away, physically and/or in IM, from people who do that and I won't feel bad about it. Likewise, If I'm walking through someplace and someone stops me with a "hi", "hello", or whatever, and I reply and then they go awkwardly silent.. I usually take my leave. There's a zillion reasons why what they said could be the only words I'll ever get from them, but the only reason I would stay would be someone actually wanting to talk. I'm lenient about it because I understand how it can be, but there's a point where I'm not just going to stand around for nothing. Sure, I can carry the conversation, but what fun is that? I already talk to myself too much as it is lol.

The scenario where one stays idle (spotted the "idle" part much later) after a brief conversation opens up some possibilities:

- that person is plain rude,

- that person is easily distracted by other avatar(s) or other devices in-world - a debatable gesture, and this applies if the avatar "walks away".

- that person has nothing to contribute constructively and/ nothing nice to say. It is not exactly a rude gesture but a civil one, which (to me) is reasonable enough.

- that person is distracted by activity in real life. Or, he/ she is preventing his/ her family, friend(s) or relative(s) from looking over his/ her shoulders. Instead of turning to the other option which is to switch off the computer, he/ she chooses to "idle" and would rather be "seen" doing so in order to stifle comments of any kind.


Uhm, just parts of my imagination and experiences. ._o

We have a lot of power outages where I live, sometimes for hours or only minutes. My ISP also fluctuates all the time, knocking me off line. Occasionally the lag from a sim or avatar prevents me from answering back, or I just can't take it anymore so I leave unexpectedly.

When in any conversation in SL I do my best to use the same good manners and courtesy just as if I were talking face to face in RL. Yes I do get some unexpected RL interruptions like everyone else but whenever possible I always let the person I'm in IM or local chat with know that I have to go or will be back very soon and then set myself on 'Busy' or 'Away'. I had to do that quite often before getting a new computer recently which used to freeze or crash every hour or so in SL. Sometimes there were early warning signs the computer was about to die so I told them needed to sign out and reboot.
I have had a few go idle or walk away from me in mid conversation but have got used to it - that's SL!

Maybe its the attitude you project. But then who am I to talk I think everyone is an alt.....

The speed of light is the same as the speed of dark. Actually it's better named as "The speed of things that have no mass"