Re: Re(2): Discourse structures & Confused in California

Rachel Heckert (heckertkrs who-is-at juno.com)
Tue, 13 Jan 1998 08:21:36 -0500

Diane and list:

>what would constitute a "failure" in posting to this list? I mean, it
>seems like you are suggesting that a fear of failure is what prevents
>lurkers from posting. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding...?
>
You got it! That's exactly what I'm saying. Evaluation anxiety, fear of
looking foolish - "what if someone who winds up on my dissertation
committee reads this and thinks I'm an idiot." "Failure" has as many
definitions as there are people - times the number of situations in which
each person feels they can be critically evaluated. And how our society
has set up education so that the fear of failing is so constantly
grinning over the student's shoulder!

I'm pretty weird for a grad student, being past the half century mark
and older than some of my professors, but I can hear a lot of this coming
from my under-thirty fellow students, who are looking at life-times made
or marred by a bad committee, a dissertation topic which turns out (after
two years) to be unresearchable, and just general free-floating dread.
For me being in school is a shot at a second life, no one in my
department but me has ever heard of xmca (only one has heard of Mike
Cole) and I can give my middle-western informality free rein. But what
about all those for whom the stakes are too high to risk?

>Do you mean suggestions about content, or are you asking if there is
>an
>implicit protocol in the discussions?

There are always implicit protocols - some stricter, some more
permissive. (I get the feeling that xmca has one of the more permissive
ones.) Some guidance as to what people are already doing in terms of
protocols (NOT content) could give a lot of lurkers the courage to take
the jump. Once in, it becomes easier to experiment and innovate/create.

An additional possibility: some lurkers may lurk because they have
expressed creative/nonconforming thoughts in the past and been punished
for it. An assurance that xmca is lurker-friendly could bring them -
with some very worth-while ideas - out from behind the bushes.

Rachel