The thing is, The Internet could have been designed to hamper communication. By design it is well suited to stripping every aspect of nuance, every drop of humour, every particle of body language from our communication. Each and every inflection is lost, sometimes to be replaced with a bland and uninformative "emoticon" (did he mean that he was smiling, or is he using that a defence against retribution?). Even a telephone conversation has inflection which communicates considerably more meaning than just a transcription ever can, yet now we regularly use text-only (or effectively text-only) communications many times a day. The scope for being misunderstood is vast, and it seems to happen often enough to me too, so you are not alone.
On the flip side, this stripped-down form of communication provides a levelling mechanism for those not well suited to verbal or face-to-face communications. People who are shy, stutter, or simply do not have a forceful enough character to come to the fore in physical meetings (computer clubs, conventions, thing slike that I guess) can rise tot he challenge on-line as they have the opportunity to prepare what they say better, or even just to feel that the annonymity that the net provides lets them express themselves more clearly than they ever could in person - so while some of us lose huge chunks of our communication armament, others have their communications lifted above what they might otherwise be able to communicate.
With the bad, always, comes the good also. One cannot exist without the other. When this forum works well - as it does reasonably often - the misunderstandings and even arguments are quickly sorted out and/or forgiven. Though sometimes we may take a considerable detour along the way
*I suspect that either Douglas Adams or I stole the dictionary idea from the other, although it's possible that we both came up with the idea - it's amazing how many people can come up with a new idea, or a new joke, only to find that someone else has done the same thing - often much earlier. So I may even have plagiarised my comment on plagiarism!
