Oik. I hope I haven't been painting myself into that corner by prying apart
the three cascading activity systems that together produce the textweb of
joint Xlist activity.
Xlist archiving does not start from the very beginning -- but I see no
reason to believe that there was, in the dawn of X-time, an initial "stage"
of nothing but technical communication, followed by a "stage" where there
was social/ /academic networking but no discussion of actual issues.
Participation in the computer mediated cross-writing of the Xlists will
have been motivated from the very beginning by a shared interest in
discussing topics related to what eventually came to be called CHAT. There
will always have been some necessary dealing with the contrariness of the
technology over the shared public channel -- from the quandaries of manual
portage between systems in the pre-archive era, over the gateway problems
of the late 80s and the organizational details of the era of multiple
subconferences and the changeover from reflector list to listserver, and up
to the "gremlin-induced" events of late. And as a social/ /academic network
the Xlists came into being as a new, additional channel for contacts
previously occuring in other ways -- all these other channels of
conferencing, visiting, journal circulation etc. etc. are still there,
making the Xlist activity system a part of a much more extended network. In
this sense the mailinglist is a very open system: participants come and go
all the time, and plausibly coming into the mailinglist goes by way of this
extended collegial network.
What I did want to say was that the "abductive multilogue" of CHAT
discussion via mailinglist is dependent on functioning technology in the
computer network and functioning social relations in the academic network
-- I cannot imagine these preconditions away, while there will be (on the
Net as a whole) activity circuits all geared to channel creation and
maintenance and activity circuits (like alt.good.morning) geared to social
networking -- so I _can_ imagine away the multilogical layer of "idea
production".
The vocabulary of "development" does carry a heavy burden from its history.
I would still like to be able to use it as a handle on what happens with an
entity from its coming into being and throughout the trajectory to its
ceasing to be.
Eva
PS: Thanks for the ref Gary, I'll update the link as soon as I can.