Gut Reaction

Many years ago a computer programming teacher acting in the role of a mentor advised his young students to think carefully before responding to questions when approached by an interviewer.  I was one of those students.  He said that should he ever be approached by a microphone wielding reporter with cameraman in tow, he would want to sit down with a cup of coffee and carefully think through his responses.  Realistic or not, this made sense at the time. If you are going to have your 15 minutes of fame, shouldn't it be based upon your true beliefs and not due to your gut reaction?

Obviously, this statement was made long before the advent of the Internet as we know it today.  In fact it was before Microsoft Windows became part of our every day life.  Back then, should you have something that you wanted to share with the world you would write a book, write to the newspaper editor, or in the case of the school environment write essays.  In all of these cases, time was an important aspect of the writing process in that you would have time to truly think through what you were writing.  The subject matter would be researched, outlined, paraphrased, written, edited, and re-edited. So, the advice was given in an environment where people did not need to practice self-editing as the words came out of their mouths or flowed through a pencil/pen onto paper.

For me, the dynamic has completely changed.  It seems like much of what I read, primarily on-line, is a gut reaction to something else also written on-line which is likely also a gut reaction.  While I have read many blog authors state that their process is thought out whereby they plan out what they have to say, I have a hard time believing that they are able to stick to this process in the fast pace environment of on-line activity.  It seems to me that many of the services that we now use encourage the gut reaction response.  If you are using Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Blog Comments, Jaiku, or other such services and you see something that you find interesting, disagree with, or even agree with, you immediately respond.  If you don't say what you have to say right then and there then you likely will not think to return and respond later.  Not to mention, that the conversation would have moved on by then anyway or someone else will have beaten you to your point.

So, are our responses our true beliefs?  Or just, gut reactions?  Have we become better at self-editing as we write?