Eva's message has tempted me out of the quiet corner where I lurk, very
actively. I have found the discussion about postings very interesting,
both in itself and for what it says about this community, and on the
assumption that there are more like me out there, I would like to throw my
own xmca story out there too, because it is indeed, I think, a part of the
xmca story.
Eva wrote:
> What happened, administratively, in February 1998, was a technical change
> of the subscription procedure. Before that the self-description of every
> new subscriber went to the list - which automatically produced an increase
> in the number of active contributors, both in terms of single-posting
> contributors, and in terms of newcomers getting involved in a more or less
> brief exchange of greetings and question-answers.
I was a junior graduate student when I joined xmca late in 1997 purely on
the advice of someone whose judgement I very much value, who just said,
"You should get onto lchc, they're doing very interesting things there.
You will like it." Well, it took some perseverance to find out that lchc
was now xmca, and then I leapt into the void. I didn't know what lchc did
or believed, just that I was going to enjoy listening in. I complied with
the request to send a self-description, not knowing what about me would be
interesting to the list, and, as Eva describes, there was a short flurry
of messages welcoming me and asking me, in essence, what I thought made
xmca concerns relevant to my own. When I replied with "what do you have
in mind?", the silence felt to me like a collective sigh: "Oh no, an
absolute beginner who has never even heard of CHAT, how can we take time
out from our discussions to patiently induct a new member?" And I was
embarrassed, but I kept on reading through every message: some made sense
and some didn't, but anyone learning a new language knows that that is a
good sign that you are in a good place to keep going and not to give up.
So no one, in the end, had to take time out to lay it out for me, I have
been reading postings all along and making sense in ways that have been of
great value to me in my own thinking, both for my focused research and for
living my life and thinking about things.
The last three years or so, then, have been spent getting answers to my
original question: I think I do now have a pretty good idea what the list
members "have in mind" (PLEASE don't deconstruct that!). And when
Engestrom came to Boulder recently, I was unimaginably pleased at how well
lurking on this list had prepared me to hear him, indeed, to feel as
though I was "meeting" an old friend (if I am not being presumptuous).
I think that is a great accomplishment of xmca for at least some of its
members: that people who don't know what books to look in and then don't
have access to talk about what is in those books have a resource for both
of those things. It's not what *everyone* on the list is there for, but
for *some* of us, being on the list is invaluable just for that.
It is not the only way to learn, of course, but I have always valued
sitting in on good conversations until I could say something myself, and I
have never seen the sitting quietly part as any less valuable than the
talking part. (I admit that my quiet lurking doesn't help to inform the
others in the conversation what I am thinking at any moment, but with
patience that does happen when the time is right.)
Eva says:
>
> I admit that I may have been wrong there: having selfdescriptions by
> newcomers sent to the list as a regular feature may have been a good thing
> for list dynamics.
I don't know what has been the experience of those who joined the list
without undergoing the "in the spotlight" experience, it would be
interesting to hear from them. But I can say that it seems to me that the
only thing that I would have changed in my own experience would have been
to get back a message that said something along the lines of: "It's ok
that you don't know what kind of conversation this is, sit in for a while
and you'll find out." Of course that's what I did anyway, but I have to
say that my awareness of my novice status has kept me from asking any more
questions that would cause that embarrassed silence.
So if (as Eva dreads) we *were* to go through the reworking that would
send newcomer self-descriptions to the community, we should, I think, be
prepared to reassure tentative ones such as I was that not knowing what
the conversation is about from the moment of entering it is quite
acceptable (as I now know it is, but I didn't when the silence was the
response).
I guess my main point is, when you worry about trends in posting habits,
it might help to remember that you are, by your example, training new
posters for the future who perhaps just aren't quite there yet. (Maybe I
am just about ready? And more like me? The concern you have shown about
who is in the conversation lured me out of my quiet corner, maybe others
will too?) I'm tickled by the spectacle of people in an active, sometimes
even heated, discussion worrying about how they can make it more active
and even more heated, about who they can get to take part. It's what
makes me stay, wishing to come out of lurking but still hanging on every
word while I screw up my courage to jump back into the spotlight (which is
what the first time of anything, really, feels like).
--Alena
PhD candidate
Department of Communication
University of Colorado at Boulder
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 01 2001 - 01:02:12 PDT