687. Cultural Influences Or Overwhelming Animality?

687.  Cultural Influences Or Overwhelming Animality? 

In entry 686 I presented Camus and Sartre as two sad cases of men with the habit of irresponsibly and inconsiderately copulating like alley dogs, for whom women in spite of a few exceptions were principally as insignificant as toilets for their body waste. 

Interestingly enough, the attitude guiding these two abusers' behavior was the same, even though they grew up under very disparate cultural influences.  

Sartre grew up in France, in a culture, in which monogamy and fidelity were and still are the official social and legal norm for men as much as for women.   
Camus grew up in Algeria, where in spite of French occupation and colonization the culture was derived from the islamic depreciation of women.   Whatever a male muslim does, it is not defined as cheating or as a transgression, because according to the koran, a man is allowed and even encouraged to have up to four wives and an unlimited number of concubines.  But a cheating wife risks to be stoned to death.  

There were two men from two cultures, one of which forbidding the abuse of women, the other encouraging it, but nevertheless both men practiced the same abuse.   

There of course is the possibility of many other contributing factors and it is the example of only two men.  But it may notwithstanding be an indication for the disheartening assumption, that some men's instinctive urges to abuse are much stronger than any restricting cultural influences towards impeding harm to women.  

443. The Benefits And Hazards Of Humor

The Benefits And Hazards Of Humor

Sometimes I am suspected to be void of any humor.   Once again I was just asked, if I have any humor.   Therefore it is time to explain this impression.  

I reserve humor to the unambiguity of the interaction with persons, whom I know personally.    I already mentioned the joy of consent in entries 420 and 423.   Reacting to the same triggers for sharing laughter is certainly a good source for the joy of consent.  

But with strangers, the situation is completely different.   Humor can be a big hazard impeding constructive communication.  

There are different possible errors:

• Humour can be misunderstood as serious and the recipient feels offended.   This can either start unnecessary hostility or the avoidance of further contact.  
• A serious statement is mistaken as humour.  The message is not understood and can lead to many misunderstandings and misinterpretations.   
• A person, who needs the clarification of either of the two possible misunderstandings, feels embarrassed.   

Reasons for these errors are often:

1. Cultural differences cause special problems, when people of different cultures or different nations embark in written communications.  The line between what is considered funny or offensive is elusive and fuzzy.   
2. Humour can be associated with references commonly known by everybody in one culture, but incomprehensible to outsiders. 
3. Different use of the language between native speakers of different nations, regions, dialects or between people using a common second language can cause misunderstandings.
4. Apparently innocent expressions of humor can touch someone's sore spot and the person feels hurt and insulted.    Even if this person is aware of the problem and avoids to show any reaction, this can nevertheless lead to subtle feelings of resentment.  
5. In personal contact, the non-verbal reactions of a little known person help as clues to get aware of blunderous humor.   This enables to avoid frictions by an apology, while this is not possible in written contact. 

My strategy with strangers is to always take statements for serious, whenever in doubt.  I prefer to be accused of lacking humour as the price for avoiding misunderstandings and involuntary offences.   

408. Embarrassment And Conformity

Embarrassment And Conformity

In entry 151 I narrated my experience, when someone was making a fool of himself without feeling embarrassed at all.   

Today I read about an interesting research about embarrassment:

"Subjects who were more easily embarrassed reported higher levels of monogamy, according to the study.

"Moderate levels of embarrassment are signs of virtue," said Matthew Feinberg"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110928180418.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fscience_society+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Science+%26+Society+News%29

   
But embarrassment is too vague a concept.   Its real complexity needs to be analyzed further, especially concerning the difference between conformists' and non-conformists' embarrassment.    Conformists are guided by the expectations of the surrounding social environment, while non-conformists are guided by their own values, attitudes and standards.    As they compare the actual behavior with different ideals, they logically also experience very different behaviors as either appropriate or a transgression.  

1. Embarrassment can be triggered either explicitly by behavior like bad manners or implicitly by an attitude, value or trait, that is hidden but can be revealed by observable behavior.   Sometimes observed behavior leads to the wrong appearance of embarrassing attitudes or traits, that are not real.   
2. Embarrassment can be a consequence of either not complying with the expectations of others or of acting in contradiction to the own standards and attitudes.    Both can be either congruent or mutually exclusive.    Conformists and non-conformists feel embarrassed for very different reasons.   
3. Conformists feel embarrassed when they appear to fail conforming.   Non-conformists feel embarrassed, when they are not correctly represented and perceived according to their own standards, they feel more embarrassed when they wrongly appear to conform than when they are perceived as behaving according to their own true standards and personality.  
4. Embarrassment can be either direct or indirect, it can be triggered either by the own behavior or by being in some personal connection with the misbehaving person.  
5. Embarrassment depends on the importance of the person witnessing the behavior.

A few examples.  

For a minimally cultured and sane person in western societies, burping is considered bad manners and a person burping accidentally feels embarrassed.    Basic manners are not a question of conformity.   In this case the expectations of others and the own standard of behavior are congruent.    A person burping without feeling embarrassed is considered as at least weird if not deviant.   

In our western societies, it is normal to eat using both hands.
There are cultures, where burping is considered as neutral or even good manners expressing appreciation of a meal. 
There are cultures, where only the right hand is suitable for eating, touching food with the left hand is considered bad behavior.     
Most western people would still feel inhibitions to burp, even as guests in a burping society they would still perceive this as embarrassing behavior.   

Would they be informed guests in the country with the left hand eating taboo, and they would forget themselves and accidentally use their left hand eating, they would not feel embarrassed by the blunder of using the left hand.   But they would feel embarrassed for the implicit rudeness of being inconsiderate.    
But the embarrassment of accidentally eating with the left hand as rude is restricted to the situation of being a guest with estimated people.   If instead eating with the left hand on a bench in the park, the strangers passing by are not important enough to feel embarrassed.

With attitudes, that are incongruent with the expectations of the majority, the situation is different.   For a non-believer in a christian society, there are variations of what triggers embarrassment.  
- The non-conforming self-confident atheist considers religion as stupidity and mental illness and reading religious books like the bible as a foolish waste of time.    As far as he is concerned about another person's judgement, he would feel embarrassed if seen with the bible in his hand, because he does not like to appear so stupid according to his own judgement, no matter what the other thinks about reading the bible.  
- The non-believer, who wants to conform, who has been brainwashed enough by his christian upbringing to feel deficient and flawed for his inability to believe, feels embarrassed, if he gets caught reading atheistic books.

In the hypothetical situation, that an atheist walks into a library to look for some quote in the bible, obviously the opinion of complete strangers should be irrelevant, even if they would mistake him for a christian.   A well known acquaintance is also not such a problem, because it is easy to correct a wrong impression by declaring the own atheism and reason for consulting a book as weird as the bible.   

Most embarrassing is the situation with those people, on whom one wishes to make a good impression.    Wanting to be respected by the librarian, who may be a fellow atheist, but being probably despised as an alleged christian would cause a lot of embarrassment.  

In a relationship the partner's stupidity is an indirect reason to feel embarrassed, the stupidity of being religious is just an example.   Getting involved with a stupid person means not to have chosen a sufficiently suitable equal partner but having sunk beneath the own standards and that is an act of own stupidity and a reason for embarrassment.   

When an atheistic man gets involved with a woman in spite of her stupidity of believing in a deity, the man usually does this due to his using her body as his compensation.    But a woman has no reason to ever get involved with a man, whose stupidity would cause her embarrassment.       

327. Dopamine, Risk and Migration

Dopamine, Risk and Migration

In the entry 326 I attempted to explain, why I fill the gaps of my knowledge with speculations to complete my theory of mind.   

But once in a while, I find delayed justification for my speculations.   In entry 106 (on Migration, Evolution, Cultural Differences), I was wondering, if what I perceived as a cultural difference between the higher risk tolerance in the USA compared with Germany, could be explained by the self-selection being a consequence of migration.   

Today I watched course 16 of the lecture by UCLA Prof. Jay Phelan on Life, Concepts and Issues.   He mentions a genetic difference in the effect of dopamine receptors in the brain upon the personality influencing the risk taking tendencies.
http://www.cosmolearning.com/video-lectures/lecture-16-20/  

His mentioning a study on migration made me curious and I found the research paper connecting DRD4 (DR=dopamine receptor) polymorphism with migration:
http://www.cbd.ucla.edu/downloads/Chen_et_al-DRD4_&_migration.pdf
According to the authors, the genetic disposition was found in 22% of Europeans in the US, but only in 16% of Danes, 19% of Swedes, 10% of Finns and 18% of Spanish.

I have crudely distinguished between Hedonists and Epicureans as being more or less driven by instinct rather than guided by their cognition (entries 131, 157, 158, 222).   I called it instinct, but it seems also connected with the DRD4 polymorphism.   I have to ponder about this.  

244. Halo-Effect of Male Doctors as Saints

Halo-Effect of Male Doctors as Saints

There are huge cultural differences between Germany and the USA concerning the cross gender choice of doctors.

I wrote entry 241 after googling 'male doctor female patient' and finding a lot of discussion in favor of accepting the female right to choose female doctors and nurses.   I found like minded people, who agree that forcing a male doctor on a woman is a form of sexual assault and that the woman has a right to be protected from forced intrusion into her intimate space.  

There is no such sensitivity in Germany, absolutely none.   Whenever I have dared to mention to any person, male or female, that I consider a male doctor forced upon me in a hospital as an outrage, I am considered and treated as if I were in some way mentally ill.  
For Germans of both genders, a woman feeling uncomfortable with a male doctor is like someone feeling uncomfortable getting cold and wet in the rain.    Rain and male doctors are considered unavoidable events of life.    Even the German feminist movement, who ardently fights for the right of abortion, against pornography and many important issues, is oblivious to this issue.   The most prominent feminists seem to consult male doctors without thinking twice about it. 

I made the same google search as above in German:  männlich Arzt weiblich Patientin. 

I perused the first 100 findings.   Some major topics:

1. Statistics about the number and specialties of female and male doctors.  
2. Different communication styles of female and male doctors
3. Male doctors may lack understanding for the female way of experiencing sexuality
4  Female doctors may be the better qualified doctors for selected illnesses
5  Female gynecologists can be more knowledgeable by knowing, what they are examining and more rough for the same reason
6  General behavioral differences between male and female doctors
7  Male doctors' ignorance of the needs of female patients

But there was absolutely nothing about the suffering of women forced under male intrusion into their intimate space.  

Cases of doctors drugging and abusing women are reported once in a while in the media.   Only a few days ago, there was a case in the newspaper of a male nurse aged 27 having abused 7 women between 72 and 98 over a time of several years, some of them demented or in a coma.
http://www.mt-online.de/lokales/regionales/4222217_Pfleger_missbraucht_aeltere_Patientinnen.html
In this article, it is reported that some people expressed strong outrage and shock.   But it all focuses only on the misconduct of this one individual nurse.   

"Weder seine Zeugnisse oder die Bewerbungsgespräche noch seine Arbeit hätten Zweifel an seinem verantwortungsvollen Umgang mit den Bewohnern erkennen lassen"  
Translated:  Neither his references, nor the job interviews nor the performance of his work have led to any doubts concerning his responsible interactions with the inpatients.

That one bad guy is considered as personally guilty.   There is not even a hint of the question, if forcing helpless old women, who cannot even protest, into the power of a male nurse is a wrong decision and should be reconsidered.  

Whenever children are concerned, either when directly abused by adults or when indirectly abused by paying for child pornography, there is an outcry about what to do.   Child pornography is illegal, and when a child is abused, all those, who have not prevented it, bosses of institutions, child protection authorities and others are also hold responsible.  
But as soon as a victim is an adult woman, nobody bothers really, who enables the abuse, who could have prevented it.   There is no responsibility ascribed to anybody except by the direct felon. 

When the bishop moves a pedophile priest to another job, where he can continue the abuse, everybody holds the bishop responsible.    When the manager of a nursing home orders female patients to be nursed by male nurses, nobody here in Germany holds him responsible. 


I have only one explanation.   Even 66 years after the overthrow of the nazi dictatorship, some of their mentality is still ruling the German culture in a subtle but very detrimental way.  
It is the submission to both the authorities and to the authority of dominant and high status men.   It is not so much an external but even worse, an intellectual and emotional submission.    People are brainwashed, that authorities are right as are all men with the authority given to them along with high status and a high position on a hierarchy.

In nazi times, women were supposed to produce as many children as possible and raise them.   Doctors were men, they were supposed to help deliver the children.    

Doctors in Germany are considered as gods in white and by halo effect also as saints.   One reason is the German university system.   University is tuition free for all, who have passed the high-school end examination called Abitur.   So there are by far more people wishing to study medicine, than there are places available.   Accepted are only those with the best marks.   That means, those, who are both, the most intelligent and the most conforming to the requirement of school.   They were the most submissive to their teachers, later on they want to experience the submission of others. They choose to become doctors for the high status and the high income.  But there is neither a selection nor a self-selection for emotional intelligence, ethical fitness or altruism.  

Confronted with doctors with high status, considered as a sort of saints, women brainwashed to accept subtle male domination as something to be taken for granted are too much in awe to even doubt their obligation to be sheep to the doctor's treatment, whatever it is.     

There is also the islam problem.   When in the 60s Germany brought in lots of foreign workers, who then stayed and immigrated, all nationalities integrated, except the Turks, whose islamic culture kept apart.   I dislike any religion, that allows polygamy and male domination over women, so I also dislike the islam.  
Yet islamic women in Germany are the only women, who refuse and resent to be treated and nursed by men.    Unfortunately, the same people, who treat me as deranged and prude, also deny, that the islamic women want to protect their dignity the same way as I do.    These desensitized Germans have the prejudice, that it is a part of the islamic women's repression and that they want female doctors only in obedience to religion and husbands and not by their own personal sensitivity to their dignity.  
This is very flawed logic.   An islamic woman wants a female doctor.   The islam is bad for women, ergo wanting a female doctor cannot be good for women, even for German women. 

My only good luck is, that I only live 25km from the dutch border.   If ever I need to, I know, where to go to the hospital.  

"Female patients have the right to refuse treatment by a male doctor. Only in emergency situations can a woman be forced to accept a male doctor."

http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2007/12/women_can_refuse_to_see_a_male.php

203. China's Social Progress

China's Social Progress

China has become the world leader in social progress.   As far as I know, so far no other country has done this:
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/World/20110105/china-marriage-database-110105/

The information, who is married, should be published in every country, not only in China.   Such a database cannot protect the wives from being cheated on by jerkish husbands with women, who are aware of the truth.   But it would at least protect all decent people against being tricked by lies into getting involved with a cheater, who pretends to be single or separated.   

Such a database would be especially useful for decent people looking on the web for a partner.  People living in the same community have some chance to know, who is married and who is not.  But in the anonymity of the web, pretending to be single is just too easy.  Such a database would allow decent people to check, if the person is really single, before ever meeting someone.   

China has a bad image in the West for things like the censoring of the Internet.    But who suffers more:

• The Chinese woman, who can find out on the censored Internet, that the man, who wanted to lure her into bed, is married, before she falls into this fatal trap?
• The Western woman, who has the uncensored Internet, but has no way to avoid the emotional trauma to discover that she has started to feel commitment for another woman's husband, while he just used her body?   

183. Cultural Differences and Mate Selection

Cultural Differences and Mate Selection

What I said about my appreciating a man's shyness and reticence as an indication of his lack of routine in approaching women may well be more valid in Germany than in some other countries and cultures.  

One of the cultural differences, that I noticed between the USA and Germany, is the German reticence and the American lack of inhibition to talk to strangers anywhere without any obvious reason like asking for directions.  

When I grew up, it was considered as plebeian, uncultivated and rude, if a man would approach an unknown woman in the street, and a woman with self-respect would reject such behavior.   People got in contact mainly at school, university, courses, at social events or leisure activities. 

Some days ago, I watched a documentary about a pick up artist guru giving lessons to a wanna-be-jerk about how to approach unknown women in the street.   It was obvious, that this was just about improving the success in something, that has culturally in principle been already acceptable there.    I got the expression, that in the USA it is considered as normal behavior, that a man approaches a previously unknown woman, asks her for a date and she accepts.   If she does not, it is because she does not like the guy, not by considering it an insult to be approached like this.  

This leads to a very interesting question.  On http://www.divorcemag.com/statistics/statsWorld.shtml, there is a list of the 'Percentage of New Marriages which End in Divorce, in Selected Countries (2002)'.   
For the United States, the percentage of 45.8 is much higher than that of 39.4 for Germany.

Could this considerable difference be a consequence of the different method of mate-selection?   Could it be, that Americans get into contact based upon liking each other's look, by agreeing on dating as strangers in the street, while Germans get to know each other more as a result of the occasion of already sharing something, be it a hobby, a sport or a career?  
Does the attraction by mere looks lead to more infatuation, that cannot last, while people, who meet by having something in common, get less infatuated and more attracted by some similarity in their personality?

106. Migration, Evolution, Cultural Differences

Migration, Evolution, Cultural Differences

I am wondering, if migration is an event of natural selection of the fittest, precisely self selection.   People, who successfully migrate to another country, appear to be physically fit enough to survive the hardship of migrating and to be daring enough to go.  

There is an entire nation to look at as an example.   Except around 1% (source Wikipedia) of the population of Native Americans, every citizen of the USA is either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants.  

Due to my lack of more knowledge, I am restricting the following speculations on Americans with European and African decent.  

1.   European descendants:
They survived famines in Ireland and other countries in the mid 19th century, they survived being shipped and checked in Ellis Island and they were millions.    Many survived the trek out to the west under harsh conditions.   The weakest, the helpless, the destitute stayed back and perished in their misery.   And the rich and powerful stayed back too, but they were probably not fit enough to survive hardship either.  

2.  African descendants also are the fittest.   Their ancestors came as slaves, they survived atrocities and extreme hardship.    Their ancestors were also the tragic victims of betrayal by their own kind, because they were sold by other Africans as slaves.    Maybe the morally better were sold, and their worst kin stayed back, providing the world now with the worst crooks and scammers.   

Beyond differences between ethnic subgroups, from my distant view, there is a general American culture, that is in some ways noticeably different from all European cultures.   Since by now, one can walk through a German city center and see so many American fast-food, soda and shop chains, that one could nearly think to be in the USA, the differences are deeper than that.   I perceive the American culture as a culture of daring and risk-taking.  

Example 1.   In Germany, the last bears and wolves have been killed centuries ago.   A few wolves are allowed back now into national parks, but many people resent this as dangerous.    One stray bear having come from Slovenija killing sheep caused a big upheaval, until he was finally killed.  
If Germany were like the USA, there would be some huge national parks, where the bears would be, with huge fences around, and nobody would even have to keep people out, because most people would not even dare to enter.    They are just content to have a bearfree safe country outside that fence.
In the USA, the bears are everywhere, they come to people's gardens and enjoy their swimming pools.   Once in a while, a bear kills a camper or rips off the face of a hiker.   People read it in the newspaper, shrug their shoulders and go on hiking.   I was amazed about this unconcerned attitude towards the danger of ferocious animals.

Example 2.  There are infrequent slight earthquakes around here.   The worst under the geological conditions did slightly shake the house, and it was a big deal for everybody.   When in California the house shakes as much as that, some people seem not even to notice, for others it is such a minor thing.  
Scientist expect an earthquake of a magnitude of up to 8.1 with a high probability in the near future along the San-Andreas-Fault.   
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/10/san-andreas-capable-of-80-earthquake-over-340-mile-swath-of-california-researchers-say.html

If there were such a prediction in Germany, this would cause mass panic, any person able to do so would move away as far as possible.   Houses would loose their value down to a fraction, and most probably the administration would evacuate the area nearest to the fault.  
In California, people are not impressed by the danger of such an earthquake.   People continue to invest millions in expensive buildings, public and private houses, infrastructure is build as if there is eternal safety guarantied.   They build water supply lines, roads, power lines all crossing the fault, as if nobody had ever predicted that one side of the fault could easily shift 26 feet to the north all of a sudden.  
People fill their homes with expensive consumer goods, in complete oblivion that one big shake up will destroy hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of such stuff in any household at any moment. 
I have seen museums, where very precious ancient porcelain, glass and ceramic had been brought from far away by a collector.   It was standing there in showcases, in no way secured, and after the earthquake, all the millions worth of rarities will just be a heap of shards.   Even if an insurance pays money, the loss of cultural heritage from several cultures can never be replaced.   Why did that collector not leave the stuff in a safer part of the world?

But risk taking is also noticeable in financial matters.   People get risky mortgages and then loose their houses, people loose money in risky investments.   Even the entire invention of the credit card seems to be the product of a risk taking culture.   

If I would think enough, I might come up with more examples.   But I have made my point, why I am wondering, if this difference is just historical development, a consequence of living in a specific environment, socially and geographically, or if indeed the migration was such a strong selection of who migrated and who stayed behind?

Any comments welcome.

91. French and English Profiles

French and English Profiles

There is a dating site, that bases matching on some elaborate tests and allows to see the results on the profile.   One item in the test result is the attitude towards fidelity.   Since this is of paramount importance, I always look at it in every profile.  
This dating site has two interfaces, one in French for France and one in English for the UK.   But everything else seems identical.    I made a search on both interfaces, in my age group, for an atheist without children and with a university education.    In both sides, the result were several hundred profiles.   

But then it got interesting.   I did not bother to count, but the difference was really remarkable.   Of the English profile, around half showed complete fidelity in the test, but only about one in ten profiles had any text.    Of the French profiles, about one in ten indicated full fidelity, but about 9 out of 10 had some text, some of considerable length. 

So the French appear to be verbose cheaters, while the English appear taciturnly faithful.   There can of course be many reasons for this difference, even the translation of the test causing the difference.  

But still, explaining everything in life with hard-wired brains is certainly a simplification, that can be misleading.   

78. Cultural Differences - Acquired or Hard-Wired?

Cultural Differences - Acquired or Hard-Wired?

I just watched a documentary on Cultural Psychology.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1662427912715121093#

They compared Asian and western perception of the person in connection to others.    They call the western culture independent, and the Asian culture interdependent.    This seems quite similar to my dichotomy between the individualistic and the particlistic identity.  

Cultural influences of the personality are acquired and I understand the documentary as comparing cultures.  

But it leads me to a speculative question.   If external distinctions between populations, like the form of the eyes and the color of the skin, are inherited, could the end points of the scale of hypoanimality to animality also be inherited and differ? 

Are the observed cultural differences an expression of the predominance of different hard-wired tendencies in the brain, or are the different cultures overriding in a different way, what is equally hard-wired?    Is culture determined by the hard-wiring, or is the hard-wiring differently modified by different cultures?    

Does more hard-wired hypoanimality in western societies cause the independent individualistic identity, or does the culture of a more independent identity allow the hard-wired hypoanimality to be expressed and perceived more often and more freely?  

64. Chatting and the Limits of Cultural Globalization

Chatting and the Limits of Cultural Globalization

I am looking for a compatible partner from anywhere on this globe.   But even if I would want to restrict my search by distance, frontiers in the mind would be an obstacle.
When I draw a circle with a radius of 450 km around my home, it includes areas of 4 languages spoken, English, French, Dutch and German, and 4 capitals, London, Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris.    But the capital of Germany, Berlin, is not inside the circle.   
When I draw a circle with a radius of 90 km, it still includes areas, where people speak German, French and Dutch.

Lately I had some annoyance in fending off romance scammers mainly from the Ivory Coast, while I never had such trouble with the ones from Nigeria and English speaking African countries.   I will write another post about that.   But I got aware of some differences in the paradigms of how dating sites are working, and those differences are making the romance scammers from French speaking African countries much more of a nuisance.

When dating-sites started, computers and Internet connections were slow, and there was not much else to do but have profiles and make contact by messages.   But when the technical possibilities advanced to allow instant messaging, and there were more choices, there were different developments.    The English speaking world, copied by the German and Dutch, developed chat rooms, the French speaking world developed dialogue systems and they are also using the possibilities differently.  

As two typical examples, I am using the English site Ukchatterbox, and the French site Tchatche.   
Both systems show a list of who is connected, with gender and age directly visible, the Tchatche also gives the location.   And in both sites, people can click on a name and start a dialogue or private chat.   Tchatche allows to make a selection, who is shown in the list, the chatterbox is divided into chat rooms.  
Those chatrooms are the fundamental difference.    Tchatche only enables one to one dialogues, while the chatterbox has chatrooms, where at least a dozen, probably many more people write statements, that appear all mixed up.   People reply to statements, that have already disappeared at the top of the window, and every time, someone joins, everybody greets that person.    What they do blur out to the room or to a target person in it, is usually banal.    Such chat rooms are like mental diarrhea.
Chatrooms may work fine, as long as up to 5 persons talk about one common topic.   But what goes on in a chatroom with 20 persons blurring out nonsense, to me is so preposterous, that I just cannot see myself take part in it.   To the 50+ room of the Ukchatterbox, there are usually about 100 persons of both genders connected.   While the mass-gibberish is running at high speed, only about every few hours, somebody contacts me for a private chat, and then many times it is someone so much too young, that I wonder, what he even does in a 50+ room.

In contrast, Tchatche is a very active site.   Sometimes, there are nearly 25.000 persons connected at the same time.   Of these, about 300 to 400 are men in the age group, that I am looking for.     Since Tchatche only serves the one purpose to have one to one dialogues, it is very active.    I have no clue, why guys half my age from Africa contacting me even expect to get a reply, but blocking them is just one simple click.    So in the Tchatche, I am contacted frequently.  
But here is again one difference.   The chatterbox allows to enter a full profile, that can be looked at before contacting.   But most men there do not fill in any information, and they contact me as a haphazard person, without even looking at my profile first.   I prefer to be chosen by my profile.
Tchatche limits the information to a few sentences in the presentation.   Therefore I perceive a dialogue on Tchatche as a first step of superficially getting to know some basic facts about someone and if there is basic affinity start a correspondence.

I do not really like instant messaging.   It leads to superficiality.   When I write an email, I can think carefully, how to structure my thoughts, I can look up words in the dictionary, I can take my time to do this.   In an instant message system, I have to answer fast, as the other is waiting.   Also of course I too am waiting for a reply.   I could stare at the screen and wait, when I know, that the other is only talking to me, but many times, someone may be chatting with several persons or be busy with other things too.  So instead of staring at the screen, I switch the window, start to read something and then just forget the chatting, and then the other is waiting.   
 
Therefore I prefer emails, but to get in contact, I wished there were sites in all languages, that would combine the activity and the one to one dialogue of Tchatche with an extensive profile, where I could check first, if I want to start chatting with someone or not, and where the other would first read my profile, and then initiate contact.   

But in spite of the economical globalization, people still continue to have language frontiers in their minds.    They stick to their own language and those, who decide on the paradigm of dating sites are ignorant of how things are different in the sites of another language.    Only cosmopolitans like me sit on the fence and look upon both sides.