Maybe stating the obvious, but it&#x27;s fascinated me for a while how online interactions with high affect content are almost exclusively aimed at the interactors&#x27; imaginary constructions of each other - there&#x27;s so little of a person in their tweets or forum posts that imagination (&#x27;fantasy&#x27;, &#x27;projection&#x27;, or whatever) is required in considerable degree for there to be any realistic sense of the interactee in the interactor&#x27;s mind.<p>And yet, perhaps especially in online &#x27;shaming&#x27; or targeted critique, the shamer is (presumably) unable to discern that they are really tilting at an imaginary person they have constructed themselves from rather scant information.<p>Not that it&#x27;s a new behavioural feature, of course - propagandists and demagogues have relied on this sort of propensity forever. Maybe it&#x27;s the capacity of internet media to &#x27;present&#x27; a person by tiny amounts of information that brings it out.<p>By &#x27;tiny&#x27; we could be talking about a single bit, btw - I&#x27;ve seen plenty of reactions apparently to individuals fully formed in the reactor&#x27;s mind, despite that their information consists only in the fact that someone clicked &#x27;downvote&#x27; rather than &#x27;upvote&#x27;!