Online question-asking behavior

In today’s writing group meeting, I shared with my buddies my very preliminary observation of the online conversations so far. I complained to them that I asked a question and nobody answered. I was not happy about that so I asked again by starting another thread. My buddies immediately reacted to what I said

First, they said this is unusual behavior. They said in a f2f class, if you ask a question and nobody answers, you shut up. You don’t usually ask again. This gets me thinking. Okay, maybe I am a little over aggressive in seeking my answer online. In a f2f situation, I probably can pick up people’s body language and tell that they either are not interested in my question or maybe don’t have an answer to it.

In an online environment, I couldn’t know. I thought it might be because my question was buried in the mass threads.

Maybe it was just that nobody thinks my question was interesting enough to answer. Maybe that is the case. But my buddies pointed out something interesting – how we might behave differently f2f vs online