RE: different strokes

From: Ana Marjanovic Shane (anashane@speakeasy.net)
Date: Mon Aug 20 2001 - 20:32:21 PDT


Thank you, Philip, for putting it in such nice words.
I have similar feelings and reactions.

I was very surprised to find my name on the list of top 20 in 1996!! I
always thought I was a lurker more than a talker. It seems I was wrong.
Many people whose vices were here at that time have left - as Mike and
others pointed out - and many new came. I try to read each posting to get a
sense of who is who (since we don't get them any more). This helps me
construct some instinctive social map.

But the times have changed for me too. I experience a lack of time to
follow everything with equal attention and even less time to chime in.
There were times when I spent almost half an hour constructing a comment or
a reply just to discard it and forget it - because I was not satisfied with
the clarity of what I wanted to say and I was too tired to continue. (I
don't know if you can hear my "accent" when I write. In spite of Eugene'
Matusov's remark that "I don't have an accent - it is what others have",
sometimes language is an obstacle which is too great to overcome in the wee
hours of the morning when you have to get up at 6am and go to work).

And so I lurk and keep feeling that this is my intellectual home.

Ana

At 01:06 PM 8/21/2001 +1200, you wrote:
>Perhaps we can understand what happens on xmca, and how different people
>respond to it in different ways, if we unpick it a bit as an activity
>system.
>
>An Email listserve is an artifact that mediates, in this case, intellectual
>discourse. The artifact has the quality of egalitarianism because the
>mediational rules that govern access to it make it open to anyone. Once a
>member of the system there is no active moderation, and we can all say what
>we like.
>
>On the other hand the lack of anonymity serves to mediate behaviour. In my
>case I have no prospect of, or aspiration to, join the American tertiary
>academic system. My actions here are culturally mediate primarily by my
>desire to have some legitimate acceptacne in an intellectual community of
>practice. But that is a very different matter from how I might act if I were
>a graduate student, very much aware that there are people here who may one
>day hold by career prospects in their hands.
>
>Now if I am here and already on the plateau of academic status (and
>possibly, tenure), then the way in which Arne contributed will be familiar
>to me. As I recall his postings they could be considered typical of the
>challenging intellectual rough housing that is typical of European (at
>least) senior common rooms. If you operate in that environment the
>prevailing culture expects you to be able to take it and dish it out (gender
>issues here? - my mental picture as I write this is of the common room at
>Christ Church, Oxford, with wall to wall males drinking fine wine, indulging
>in intellectual sparring and preening and even, in one case, keeping score
>on the back of an envelope using the scoring system of tennis). These same
>people can be extraordinarily gentle and nurturing in tutorials with
>undergraduates.
>
>But if I bring such a mental model to my participation in xmca, assuming
>that this is a forum for intellectual rough housing of that kind, then there
>are undoubtedly many who will be intimidated by such an approach to
>discourse, sceptical of its value, or contemptuous of it. Accordingly I may
>be intimidated into departure or silence, or I may choose to depart because
>I assume that is the sort of forum that it is and I despise it... and so on.
>
>Given that xmca is a self-organising community with no formal rules for the
>conduct of discourse, it is scarcely surprising, then, that it waxes and
>wanes, and goes through phases of different character. My personal choice
>has been NOT to withdraw completely, but to lurk when I feel that the phase
>is not congenial. There have been long periods when I have deleted all xmca
>messages from xmca unread - occasinally peeking in to see if anything has
>changed.
>
>Of course, when I choose to become engaged, like now, I have the effect of
>reinforcing xmca in the voices that I feel comfortable with. At other times
>I have felt that things were not entirely the way I was at ease with, but
>they were close enough to justify coming in and challenging. I am especially
>prone to do that at times when I feel that the United States is dominating
>too much, because I feel the need for this forum, recognise that there is no
>critical mass without the Americans, but want my non American voice to be
>able to be heard.
>
>However I also recognise that in behaving in a way which reinforces xmca as
>a place that mirrors my personal needs and values, then I am almost
>certainly helping to make it uncongenial for some with different needs and
>different values - but also that some of those people are voices that I want
>to hear even though they might irritate me. Out of these perceptions I try
>to act here in a way that is inclusive. I only occasionally bite back when
>someone demeans or insults me, and try to model the golden balance of
>advocacy and inquiry that nurtures participation.
>
>So all in all xmca is an interesting study in what happens when an Activity
>System is defined by an abstract goal and high level needs, while being
>mediated by artifacts and cultural rules that are fundamentally chaotic, and
>with a division of labour which is also chaotic and non-perscriptive. Order
>comes from the individual choices made by individual members, and these are
>mediated by the socio-cultural artifacts of other systems to which groups of
>members belong.
>
>
>
>Phillip Capper
>WEB Research
>PO Box 2855
>(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
>Wellington
>New Zealand
>
>Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
>Fx: (64) 4 499 8395
>
>-



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