Have just discovered John Suler's blog "The Psychology of Cyberspace", and it's shaping up to be a corker. He's got a wonderful entry on what he calls Media Mental Sets.

Traditionally, in psychology, "mental set" refers to a fixed pattern of thinking that fails to take into consideration new information or perspectives. For example, the early astronomers tried to calculate the movement of planets based on their assumption that all heavenly bodies revolved around the earth. They were caught in a mental set that led to bizarre conclusions about the shape of planetary orbits because they failed to see a different perspective: all the planets revolve around the sun.

Extending that concept, I'm proposing the idea of Media Mental Set - i.e., how people's thinking and perspective can get stuck within a certain computer-generated environment (media). They approach issues and problems, including psychological and social ones, strictly in terms of that particular environment, while failing to see alternative solutions and experiences offered by other types of environments (media). Their thinking gets "stuck" within that media.

MMS might be determined by personality and attitudinal factors, and not simply intellectual and critical thinking abilities. It's interesting how even some intelligent people who are quite knowledgeable about online communication can still get locked into a mental set about the type of communication modality they prefer. They tend to idealize that modality. They harbor nostalgic feelings about it, and feel they need to protect those feelings. Their intellectual defense of that modality postures like territorial behavior.

It's a useful way of thinking about some of the hype about e.g. blogs that Euan and Lee noticed at Les Blogs. And it's also a good way of checking yourself rhetorically speaking. Just as tone matters, so does medium - locking yourself into one style presumably limits your message, and, probably more importantly, your relationships.