Sure it would be nice, and maybe even more productive for them to talk, but look at what we know of their past... MANY of them have secrets, why would they start talking now? "You run, I Con, Tiger don't change his stripes." All I am saying is I think its very real, and there are many people that would be the same way, even in a survival situation. I am not trying to say anyone is right or wrong here I am just saying how I feel and how I perceive the characters.
I live in California. I've been through some pretty damaging earthquakes. The one thing that I notice is that when something of a disaster happens everyone who lives near or around you suddenly breaks down their "walls" and EVERYONE becomes supportive of one another. We all talk, constantly, nonstop. Someone hears a new piece of news, it gets passed onto everyone else, if for no other reason than it's "gossip" about the situation. I've never, EVER, seen people cluster into their own small, individual camps and keep secrets and lie to each other. Just the opposite.
Obviously the writers for Lost feel their storyline will propel forward better if this group of people constantly lie and keep secrets. But it's in no way because that's what people do in disastrous situations.
I am sorry you had to have to go through that in order to know that is how people react... But I am sure there were still things people didn't know, people that kept secrets. I am not saying you and your neighborhood did...but there are many differwnt personalities. I am sure too that people on your stree were not Con Men, Doctors who lost their edge, A girl on the run, a Iraqi Torurist, and Crazy overwirhght guy who nobody likes, killed two people, went crazy, and then won the lottery... a man who agreed to become a murder for the love of his life so he could be with his love... but ruined that in the making... there are all kinds of reasons these people are keeping secrets. I am a pesemist... I am not saying there are not people that band together (look at how all the reshirst banded together, I am sure they are talking), but where not watching those poeple.
Not when it came to the disaster itself. One reason we told everything we heard or discovered is because we wanted to know everything that everyone else heard and discovered as well. You instinctively know that information never flows one way, you encourage others telling you what they know by telling others what you know. Anything that would help us get through it. Seriously, they aren't reacting even remotely how people would act in a situation like surviving a plane crash together. Once you get your barings, you become closer out of an instinct for survival if nothing else. It would have been more realistic if the first season showed the survivors constantly sharing information and not keeping things from one another, and then slowly returning to their "civilized" selves by keeping important things from one another and lying to each other. But the show had them doing so right off the bat.
And that's the thing about disasters...there ARE no "con men", "iraqi soldiers", "fugitives on the run", "millionare lottery winners", etc, etc. All those identities fall by the wayside because those identities no longer hold any value or relevance. On Gilligan's Island the fact that Thurston Howell is a multi millionaire may have mattered lol...but in a more realistic portrayal like Lost the fact that Hurley is a multimillionaire is, at best, a mild curiosity to say "hmm" to.