Re: Silent participation
Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se)
Fri, 10 Sep 1999 10:16:00 +0200
As Paul reminds me,
I have been writing about the Xlists as a "safe place" for putting out
"half-baked ideas" without dwelling upon the compatibility between safety
and critical processing. Indeed, the reminder makes me think I may have
been uncritically repeating an item of collective wishful thinking on this
list, recycling parts of a discourse used for describing AND producing the
list as a forum where all voices may be heard, and ideas may be jointly
processed "from flour to bread", without either fleshing out HOW this might
work (or be self-consistent) or exploring to what extent the Xlists are and
have been a safe place. We are living with a contradiction here, and when I
look at the patterns of participation I am always reminded that there's a
lot of silence in this conversation -- and I am convinced that this is not
just the silence of participants who are subscribed but "absent" --
travelling, offline, or just too busy to even read the mail they're
receiving -- and not just the silence of active readers (whose invisible
contribution to the activity puzzles me, methodologically, as much as Nate)
or the silence due to lack of time for writing or disinterest in current
topics. There will also be the silences of participants for whom the XMCA
is NOT a safe place for "speaking". Criticism is a difficult matter in this
medium with its blend of informal intimacy and disembodied distance -- it
is not easy to establish a common ground or interface that makes for joint
critical processing of ideas without hitting the half-baked contributor as
ad hominem critique. The way that Xlist contributors "disappear" (by
unsubscribing or ceasing to post) after smaller-scale or larger-scale
episodes of conflict and flaming is one of the things that has convinced me
that this "place" is far from safe. And yet I do think that a measure of
"safety" and trust is necessary for critical processing to be
developmental. Speaking for myself, and it may sound totally illogical: I
do not trust words to stand still and keep their unambiguous meaning, so in
order to speak I need to have a trust in people, in community... even
though that, too, does not stand still.
You are right: I have found this too difficult to deal with to even START
writing about it.
Eva