The future of the list?

[Jules Siegel]

At 03:18 PM 07/22/97 BST, andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk wrote:

>(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; 

When people are under constant attack for every little thing they tend to
get defensive and see affronts in otherwise harmless comments. I confess to
being quite defensive these days, so much so that I've been unable to make
the kind of observations that some here enjoy and have been reduced to
reacting from a bunker mentality. I'm glad to hear that I didn't invent the
cocktail party analogy and I would like to see the message to which you refer.

>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.

This is undeniably true but I think the very volatility of the list gets
people a bit too excited and they tend to react with a vehemence that
quickly becomes insulting rather than amusing.

>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.

Under ordinary circumstances I favor anarchy over too much control, but I
don't think that a little authoritative intervention is always a bad thing.
People do become obsessive about their positions and they sometimes take a
great deal of pleasure in wounding others merely because it seems to be
socially acceptable to do so. Some here have been repeatedly told in very
direct terms that their ill-considered attacks are not acceptable. Yet they
continue.

I see that some of this advice has finally begun to take effect, but I don't
think it will endure. People involved in obsessive attack modes tend to
become very thick-skinned in the heat of battle. I think that an occasional
enforced period of cooling off is the only thing that will really work for a
hardened warrior.

As I have said in a number of private messages on this subject, define the
behavior that you wish to limit and propose to the list owners that they
publicly admonish anyone who engages in it. If the behavior continues after
this admonishment, the list owners should inform the individual that his or
her posting privileges will be suspended at the next violation and will not
be restored until he or she agrees to desist from the offending behavior.


--Jules Siegel Apdo 1764 Cancun QR 77501
http://www.yucatanweb.com/siegel/jsiegel.htm