transaction and transgression in the bunny field

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Sat Aug 12 2000 - 15:11:42 PDT


Ah, welcome home to XMCA! ... just back from time away in Europe, and
catching up my life and work here.

An interesting mystery to me how emotions flare more unpredictably in this
e-medium. What one person may read as unoffending concern and mild
complaint, another bristles bushily at ... and we all hope time and new
threads of interest will remind us that most of us tune in here for the
ideas, and just put up with the ruffles and flourishes .... (except perhaps
for those with a taste for soap-opera; we have had some exciting episodes,
though I hope our ratings go up when our dramatics declines ....)

Someone wondered if voices more heard here in the past have gone off and
started a new and wonderful list that everyday startles and inspires the
way we remember the 'good old days' of xmca doing ... our archivists can
probably tell us what the annual frequency of really good threads was in
those days ... and I wonder if anyone knows whether xmca has had
cyber-offspring? ARE there any descendant groups spawned in our upstream
rushes?

I think we've always had a sort of dynamic balance on the list between
those who tune in for the steady transactions and those who look eagerly
for the startling transgressions. Temperament perhaps, maybe longevity's
disease -- I find the longer I read here the more I recognize the same
arguments and ideas recycled in new combinations and the more I long to
hear something really different. But I've been listening and writing for a
long time. There are always a lot of newer participants, especially I think
among those who rarely write, or wait quite a while before participating
publicly. Statisticians: what percentage of xmca members have joined in the
last year or two? how does that compare to the percentage of new members as
it stood four or five years ago? What about the distribution of postings:
are a larger fraction of postings coming from a smaller number of people
than a few years ago, or is it about the same? Demography can play a big
part of the ecology of communication.

It seems to me that xmca rarely operates parallel sustained threads. We
seem to tend toward monologue, with brief interruptions or additions. When
we have two or three threads started, they usually converge. When a new
thread attracts attention, the old one dies out. This tends, I think, to
create an unnecessary feeling of zero-sum, or competition for attention.
The original design of xmca/xlchc had a whole hierarchy of specialized
sublists, and within those it was supposed to be possible -- as technically
it still is -- for different subgroups of people to participate in
different threads of discussion. If you use the web-based archives to read
the list, you can see how this works, and other list communities do this
very naturally. Here we all seem to want to move where the action is, a
sort of herd instinct I wouldn't have expected in this community of
independent-minded cats.

Let a thousand flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought ...
productively co-exist. JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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