Hello again Brian!

I wish I could offer more "Gestalt' content. My probably unfortunate association to 'Gestalt Therapy' has to do with the evolution of T-Groups and Sensitivity training groups back in the 1970's when participation in these sorts of groups seemed all the rage!!

Getting back to the other subject----I think the temptation to blame the mode of communication here at BOL is probably misplaced, because as I've pointed out my experiences with various formats have not been any different.

I think there is a strong bias in these written types of communications to offer brief types of replies, and the 'post and reply' format brings that out. More spontaneous give and take does take place in an IM format, but then the typing skills of the participants becomes important. I have had one experience in organizing a group conference where 5 or 6 participants all joined for a conference type exchange (it was a discussion about psychological testing), but here the burden is trying to keep track of the sequences (who is responding to whom!) and keeping up with the exchanges (we tried the method of having anyone type- STOP-- if they fell behind or needed more time to read or reply--that worked pretty well). But my point here is, that this mode of communication can be challenging, even when its possible to have rapid responses in conversational speech. I've also noticed that when you do write a lot, people tend to respond to only the last three sentences or last question that's asked and don't reply at all to the earlier content in a message.

The old BOL format never gave us a chance to see how many people were actually reading posts, so at least it is interesting to see that people are curious and apparently keep coming back to read more. It's also kind of puzzling to see what's happening in the Control Mastery Forum where several particpants were writing quite long and complex replies. This forum was intended to extend what had been a study group in San Francisco. What started out looking quite promising now seems to be dying on the vine. It's difficult to tell exactly what happened there. That Forum had the requirement that all participants had to read a certain set of materials and comment about those articles.

I think that adding some structure like that might be helpful.

-Doug