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Yahoo considered harmful?
I sometimes wonder if the ability of anybody with a web browser to create mailing lists is a negative factor for the net today. It's not that there's a quota on the number of mailing lists in the world, but that the easier it is for people to create 'em, the more clutter you get and the more redundant lists you get. And then there's the increase in the email announcing such lists (and people discussing such lists on other lists).
One of the Jewish lists I'm on is run by someone who is clearly fairly new to the net and Just Does Not Get It. He frequently creates new lists (most of which probably fail) on very specialized topics, and broadcasts announcements to every list he knows that might be vaguely related. I can't think of any actual topics off hand, but if I said (purely hypothetically) "single men under 30 who are studying Tractate Pesachim", I wouldn't be far off. This isn't specialized as in "advanced"; it's specialized as in "weird and unnecessary".
I just received mail, on an SCA list, announcing a list for SCA people who have adopted children from China. I can imagine no topic that touches this overlap. It's not as if being in the SCA poses problems for adopting children from China or being Chinese impedes one's participateion in the SCA. It's just weird, like creating a list for left-handed computer scientists who prefer Pepsi to Coke.
A concurrent trend (I'm not saying anything about causality) is that many people now seem to see mailing lists as "communities" more than "discussions". (Yahoo is partially responsible for that.) The number of way-off-topic posts to mailing lists I'm on has increased in the last few years. You always had the occasional virus warning or appeal for a good cause or the like, but they're more frequent now. (I don't know if they are more frequent per capita, though.) And way too many of them, if asked privately to not post virus warnings to Info-Something, respond that if you don't like it you should use your delete key.
One of the reasons Usenet ultimately failed (I mean since the September that Never Ended, in 1996 IIRC) is that people stopped respecting the topic boundaries of the various newgroups and treated it as one big chit-chat session or flaming ground or spam outlet. Automation took care of most of the spam, but the other problems remained. (Remain, near as I can tell. I read very little Usenet any more, and most of what I read is moderated.)
So after Usenet a lot of us returned to mailing lists, which were lower-key and more likely to stay on topic. But now, any yahoo can create mailing lists, which is fine if they don't interfere with other lists, but people learn bad habits on those lists and then migrate to other ones. So now, I can't count on posts to tech_writers to be about tech writing, or posts to sca-something to be about the SCA, and so on, and thus it's harder to manage the flow of email.
I'm not even going to start on naming conventions. :-)
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You hit the nail on the head with your observation about communities versus discussions - that's clearly what's at work with the SCA Parents of Adopted Chinese Children - but I disagree that it's especially new. Newsgroups always developed a sense of community for as long as I can remember; key "net-personalities" adopted social roles like any other community pillar, people would arrange "real world" get-togethers based on no other connection that newsgroup participation, and the (occasional) off-topic post about the community ("netbob@farkle.edu was in a bad accident; get well wishes can be sent to...") was considered legit, especially during crises ("Netbob's house survived Hurricane Waldo intact, but we're still waiting to hear from Geekster and Mondo")
The difference today is that this has gotten that much more pronounced, which I submit is inevitable once the population with access goes over a certain threshold. It doesn't take many from the net-accessible population as a whole who think of a list exclusively in terms of a community to drown out the (similarly) small and focused community that's using it on-topic.
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A.
who met her fiance online.°
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He's made some more balanced statements; his Short History of the Internet (1993) (http://www.forthnet.gr/forthnet/isoc/short.history.of.internet) is a decent pre-web primer with a mild but recognizable editorial edge, and there's a more recent Q&A with him at Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/interviews/99/10/08/1147217.shtml) where he gets substantially more blue-sky.
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A.
(who does agree with the rest of what you said)
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Man, I'm getting old; I read that and thought "since when do alt.* groups have any institutional legitimacy?!" Of course, they've gained some since I last cared....
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On reflection, maybe the bigger part of the problem isn't the message itself but the dozens of posted replies to it per list.
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Erg. There's a duke in our kingdom who forwards 'important' stuff to about 30 different lists at a time with the message, "sorry if you get this more than once". If you were really sorry you wouldn't be doing it! Especially since it's a flyer for the event that you are autocratting that is available in the kingdom newsletter and the web page, and it's the second time you've sent it out this week!
And that's my pet peeve on this issue, sending out 'weekly reminder' event flyers that are no different from the flyers available elsewhere. I'm autocratting an event this weekend. When the flyer was first written, I sent out the text to the baronial list. I webbed the flyer and some additional information (classes being taught and stuff), and posted the web addresses to the kingdom list and the nearby baronies. A couple of reminders before registration deadline (registration is due for this event, more information is available at web address). Is any more than that needed? I don't think so.
For any event, if I have not already made arrangements to get ahold of the flyer by Friday afternoon, chances are I'm not planning to attend the event, and you won't be able to badger me into it.
Reminds me...
He's had constant acess to a computer now for probably a year or two (if not more), and yet he only knows how to read and respond to email click on links that people email to him, and play civ (and now he's on livejournal). He still refers to mailing lists as web pages - 'the canton web page' 'web page?' 'you know, the list' 'oh.' He received a MOL report via email and had to copy the names of the fighters over for the marshal's report. Instead of copy and paste he printed the page and retyped the names. Next time I walked him through a copy and paste. The next time he printed it out and went through the same process again.
Users like him are becoming more and more common. Every time my sister sends a virus warning, I send a link to one of the debunking pages, but that doesn't keep her from sending the next one. They don't have to learn, so they don't. And that goes for netiquette as well. My head almost blew off when someone sent an html message complete with fancy font and background and the next message I opened was someone asking how they had added all that fancy stuff. ARG!
Is there a solution? I don't know. I've noticed that the livejournal communities (or at least the ones I'm on) seem to stay on topic better. Perhaps because people can post random stuff in their own journals?
Sorry about ranting on your page.
Re: Reminds me...
This was ok before AOL sold email to the world, because the rate of growth was low enough that the people who'd been doing this stuff for a while were in a position to be able to help educate the newcomers. September was noticably different on Usenet because of all the college freshmen getting email for the first time. But now there are so many newcomers to the net (and computers in general) that it's impossible to manage, and newcomers can go years without bumping into clues that they could (or in some cases really ought to) do things differently. Consider Joe and Jane Average -- when they decide to buy their first computer, where do they really learn how to use it? (Let's presume that they don't yet have kids to teach them.) I have friends like this -- a couple, no children, not unintelligent by any means, but utterly stumped by the computer they bought. They use it to play games, mostly, I think. Eventually they'll figure out how to hook up their modem, and then they'll be stumped and online. And then they'll hear convincing stories about virii or people getting their kidneys stolen and they'll just have to warn all their friends. :-)
Re: Reminds me...
I keep hoping the kidney one is true...if so, I request that someone take my right kidney away. It's too prone to kidney stones! ;)
Seriously though, your peeve is noted and seconded! :)
kidney stones
Kidney Stones
So, Ira's still around, but mostly gone. I'm still in some pain, probably from all the trauma that's been done to my kidney lately, but that should go away soon.
I return to work tomorrow, but I'm not sure yet if I'll be working whole days right away. I'm just going to have to see how I feel...Thanks for asking!
Re: Reminds me...
This segues nicely into one my fonder dreams about the Web. Once upon a time, the high cost of decent graphics design and publishing acted as a barrier to entry that screened out a lot of mass-media communication by the confused, deceitful, and lunatic. You usually had to convince at least some substantial group you and your ideas had some legitimacy just to play. As a result, people could (and by and large did) adopt the heuristic that "the more slickly produced, the more legitimate."
The Web, far more so than desktop publishing or local-access cable, is pretty well shattering any validity that meme might have had. The sublime as well as the ridiculous all share approximately the same distribution of hasty, ugly, thrown-together sites versus slick, persuasive high quality packages. You truly cannot judge a book by its cover anymore.
So, this leads to my naive idealism: having shattered the promise of quality production being your sign of quality information or argument (if necessary, the hard way, repeatedly) we will as a culture have to get better at critically assessing content despite presentation just to keep up.
A skill particularly useful given that, as folks have no doubt been poised to reply, the heuristic I described has been pretty seriously flawed for some time, with resulting benefit for the well-connected confused, deceitful, and lunatic...
Re: Reminds me...
Hmm, never really thought about it this way before. I was in late middle school/early high school as the net was getting big, and I remember that when you were taught to write papers, almost anything you could find in print was fair game to use: books, newspapers, journals, etc, because it had (presumably) been reviewed to some extent before being printed.
Now, all of a sudden, we had access to lots more printed stuff, but had to actually assess the validity of it ourselves. Who wrote this? Someone who knows what they are talking about or not? Has it been reviewed by anyone else? Is that person trustworthy?
My teachers were all very leary of the internet because it was so new and there was no guarantee that anything was worth the time it took to download it, and I've picked up that trait. But in the college english classes I've had to take I've seen less and less of that caution being taught, and I'm not exactly sure why. It's not good.
Re: Reminds me...
Then of course I came to CMU and lost access to a decent NNTP server. Probably for the best, I didn't need to spend three hours a day reading rec.arts.sf.written and others.
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Oh yeah, I forgot about that. When I was a student undergrads didn't have access to what was then the ARPAnet. Employees of the CS department did, though, so when I got a CS work-study job I got access to mailing lists. (SF-Lovers was my entry into the wider community.) CMU got Usenet around the time I gradudated, again only in the CS department, and because I retained an account on a CS machine I had access. (I didn't have access to the news application, though; I read news right out of the spool directory. Eventually I wrote my own reader, once I decided that Usenet was a keeper.) Anyway, I had thought that Andrew had opened up Usenet to the entire campus, but maybe I am mis-remembering. I wasn't an Andrew user back then. But I wouldn't be surprised if the feed was sluggish and the expiration times were short.
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No, technically I can read much of Usenet via Cyrus using Pine or Mulberry. However, I grew up using Forte Free Agent, so I just couldn't go back to using a mail client for news. I am told that the CMU Computer Club recently upgraded their NNTP server so that it no longer sucks, but I cannot verify.
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(Prior to that, the TOPS-20 systems had their own internal bboard system instead of newsgroups and Internet access was more tightly controlled; in fact, the first couple of years of popular Andrew use, Internet posting/email access was an added level of access that you had to apply for, but that opened up pretty quickly.)
IIRC, the email and newsgroup interfaces were initially different but were quickly unified such that your mailboxes looked like newsgroups only you could access. I graduated over ten years ago, of course, so I would expect things to have changed since then. I was astonished to see news that AMS was retired only recently.
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OTOH, I see your point. Some folks get carried away with a new toy.
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