I apologize for sounding like Andy Rooney, but has anyone ever noticed how people are really hostile on the net but not in person? It's as if everyone has developed a separate personality just for the net. Usually, when someone refers to a "net personality," it's taken to mean a person who is widely known on the Internet. I'd like to discuss a different interpretation: the Jekyll-and-Hyde behavior which many people slip into when communicating electronically. Almost everyone's a culprit -- it's hard not to be, considering the impersonality of a computer.
When they can't see the person they're "talking to" face-to-face, people will be much more blunt; this is what happens all the time on the net. If you've ever posted to the USENET, you've more than likely gotten a follow-up message saying something to the effect of "You are a dope!" (or worse). Usually such messages will follow a note that was only mildly controversial (like a posting claiming that Microsoft is a conglomeration of non-programmer-marketing-types). A euphemism for such blunt responses could be "being straightforward." However, the comments often are designed to insult the recipient, which is more than straightforward -- it's demeaning, especially considering that these people probably have never met!
The missing piece on the net is anything that resembles human interaction. Considering the fact that a huge majority of the people on the net are not professional writers, there will always be a problem with figuring out what is meant by a sentence. And plain text articles can't express the seemingly infinite nuances of spoken language; hence the completely vague smiley faces [:-)] that appear in articles. Sorry to notify all of you Net Surfers out there, but faces made out of the ASCII character set drastically simplify the methods of human communication that have been under development for five thousand years. What if I posted that Bill Gates had a sordid childhood, but I was only sort-of kidding? It certainly doesn't mean much to write [70% ;-)].
Probably nothing can ever solve the problem of the lost human element; we'll just have to deal with it or (gasp!) talk to each other in person. Certainly, video and audio will help considerably for live conversations, but video isn't particularly feasible for archived messages like USENET news. Audio is one way of adding some amount of personality to messages; at least it would help to prevent misinterpretation of a message.
So now you're asking: "What the heck was this rambling supposed to inspire me to do, anyway?" Well, the answer is clear: Make sure you remember that you're actually talking to a human being (remember those?) -- one who has feelings. It's not without reason that someone can be labeled a jerk after making just a few posts. If he's condescending to others, that's what will happen. And, if you're trying to joke, write punch-lines that are self-evident -- or just post the message as a uuencoded 8-bit mulaw sound file. Take it from someone who always writes things that people misinterpret (including in the Banks): Just be excellent to each other!