The future of the list?

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

It's ironic that this subject should come up during the reading of
Mason & Dixon. Ironic because that book seems to be much to do with
transcending both minor and major differences, learning to live with
and profit by them, in fact. Ironic also because this seems to have
passed many people's notice, as it seems has much of the discussion of
Mason & Dixon.

I was rather disappointed that the GRGR petered out somewhat towards
the end, particularly so when I did my best to pull out all the stops
for the last section and received very little by way of response. I
have been equally disappointed during the MDMD that so few people have
bothered to make positive contributions. But, and this is a *major*
qualification, the small number of people who have consistently made
thoughtful, detailed, sparkling and well-considered contributions -
and I am thinking here of the likes of Eric Weinstein, Matthew Wiener,
Jody Porter and others - these people have more than made up for the
deluge of garbage which has been polluting the list of late.

What I find most disappointing about recent traffic - and the flame
wars which have surrounded Jules' postings are merely one case in
point - is that posters have betrayed not just their own intellectual
limitations but their low expectations of other posters. In the good
old, bad old days even the most vitriolic of flames used to be
relatively witty and used to assume that the audience would get jokes
and references whose wit owed more to the chisel than the mallet.
These days posters not only repeat previous insights in prosaic terms
(e.g. pace Jules claims for Lineland, the cocktail party analogy is
almost as old as the newsgroup and one of my mail folders contains a
posting to rec.arts.books from 1994 whose eloquence and wit in
developing this very analogy would put 99% of this month's pynchon-l
postings to shame; pace Vaska, the mentions of Yoyodyne in Buckaroo
Banzai were noted in a posting in the 92-93 archive), they also
patronize (e.g. I do not require Peter Giordano's ill-informed and
self-justofyong advice on how to assess the reliability of Jules'
comments).

I believe that in the end we (collectively) get the pynchon list we
(collectively) deserve. Unfortunately, I also believe that some subset
of the list probably deserves a better list than we (collectively) do.
Now, that's just my opinion, perhaps shared by other people, and I am
sure there is little or no doubt on anyone's part as to whether I
include myself in the relevant subset. But then so, probably, would
almost everyone else, and there is the rub. I agree with (I think it
was) Paul diFillipo (sorry if that was Paul Mackin or some other Paul
or not even a Paul at all) that a moderated list would be a dead list.
Not so much because of the vagaries of any particular moderator's
editorial policy, but because it would slow down the ping pong which
makes the list so exciting most of the time.

What is the solution? Well it would help if people were more scared of
posting. Yes, another feature of the good old bad old days was that
anyone who posted irrelevant rubbish or wasted bandwidth used to get
told quickly, cruelly and with all due sarcasm that they were wasting
the time of other list subscribers. These days there just is not
enough napalm to go round.

So, in the absence of wrath from the skies, perhaps we could impose a
bit more order from within. Keep your postings relevant, for sure. But
we all know the on/off-topic issue is often a red herring. The most
important criterion is that your post be pithy - succinct and witty,
that's what we all enjoy. And I promise that I, personally, will do my
best to flame and bug the shit out of anyone who posts 100 lines of
nested quote followed by a lame-brain `me-too' comment. Not because
the me-too is off-topic (it may or may not be) but because the poster
did not even spend 5 minutes sorting out what they wanted to say
before posting. If someone cannot take the trouble to learn how to
edit their postings think how little editorial control they are likely
to apply to their thoughts.

My advice, whether you want it or not, is that posters spend more time
composing their posts, that they reread them before posting and that
they ask themselves whether, in the end, this is a worthwhile
contribution to the group's understanding or just a bit of chat which
we could as easily live without. Shame on you (hopefully by the
megabyte) if you ignore my wise words.


Andrew Dinn
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We drank the blood of our enemies.
The blood of our friends, we cherished.