backdoors, selfpresentations and xlist history

From: Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad@ped.gu.se)
Date: Sat Jan 22 2000 - 13:16:48 PST


Hi Elizabeth

Not an illegal backdoor, but a "backstage" conversation: what others here
used to call "back-channels" -- these one-to-one spinoff conversations,
occurring around probably all functioning mailinglists, are called by many
names. As I had just learned that the little mhm-s and ah-hah-s of
face-to-face conversation are "back-channels" I did not like "back-channel"
for the spinoff-exchange purpose. Then, there have been many episodes of
self-reflective discussion of the virtual space of a mailinglist here, over
the years. Mike, in the early days (which I know only throught the
archives) worked hard to herd all discussions into the public arena, as it
all to often happened that people responded only directly to the person who
had asked a question, or proposed an idea -- collective discussions ran the
risk of dissolving. He used to tell people that his favorite image of the
list was as one big table. In later discussions, when I have been present,
and the phenomenon of lurking was also incorporated in the metaphorics,
there has been the idea of an auditorium (big enough to hold 300 :-) with
people getting on and off stage to say their part (and several
in-out-doors)... some in the audienced poised for getting into the
discussions, others listening intently, others whispering to neighbors...
etc.etc.

What happened in my case was that I disagreed with Eugene about something
he'd written, and sent a quite long message to him. We had an exchange of a
couple of rounds, and then he encouraged me to put it all into the public
channel. Which I did.

You know, I think I have obliged myself to give a mini-lecture about the
history of the XMCA and its fore-runners as a background to the subscriber
quantities. But first I am curious about your interest in gender and CMC --
do you work in this area? Take it as an invitation to talk about your
research interests if you'd like to. And please, all ye lurkers, feel
invited, too: what are YOUR interests that brought you "here"? Though I
must confess, I will not be able to respond to you all... time, time, time.

Now for some very local history: with the interest in communication that is
one of the hallmarks of the Xlist network, and also because it was an early
starter back in the mid-80s it is not surprising that there's been quite a
lot of research done on the Xlists. I know that there are a number of
people still out there who researched this mailstream before me.

Archiving in a form you can reach over the Internet started in November 87,
there are myths of earlier material on tape or Apple II floppies somewhere
in a hidden vault at UCSD, and modern archives aren't all in one place etc.
etc. etc.
In the beginning of archiving there was only one list, the XLCHC, then in
1989 they started developing a system of "subconferences" for different
topics, like literacy, activity theory, or classroom research, with
overlapping subscriber populations and XLCHC as the main forum.

All the "conferences" were "reflector lists", collective aliases where
staff at the LCHC had to add and remove subscribers manually. I also
suspect, although I haven't asked any of the techies yet, that people could
post to those aliases without being actually subscribed to them. Evidence:
the great number of requests to GET subscribed that came over the public
channel. There was one advantage to this system, in the personal contact
that gave lab staff (and Mike) the opportunity to ask new subscribers to
present themselves and their research interests etc. to others over the
list. But it was also a labor intensive setup, so in 1994 the number of
subconferences was reduced, and the remaining ones converted to
automatically served mailinglists (which still means a lot of
troubleshooting). Oh, and while up to the reform the lists had been
accumulating subscribers at a rate exceeding the increase in the
contributor population per year, so that in 1994 less that 50% of the
subscribers posted anything to the lists, this trend was broken by the
reform.

But the personal contact between newcomers and the LCHC was lost, and
self-presentations got more scarce, occuring in a much more random fashion.
By this time, also, the network that had been started on research funding
devoted to international CMC, was maintained, as far as I understand,
mostly by creative deployment of other resources at the LCHC.

So there was another reorganization in the summer of 1995 -- there was then
basically only one single list, the XMCA, and to facilitate the
introduction of newcomers, the subscription procedure was re-coded into a
two-step procedure: you'd send a subscription request to the server, which
sent you a request for a selfdescription, and when you submitted THAT to
the server you were subscribed, and your self-description went as your
first posting to the list. So everybody who subscribed with this procedure
will have contributed at least one posting to the XMCA that year. Some of
the self-descriptions did get conversations started, when other subscribers
asked followup questions. Others did not.

You would your own self-description back over the list as a sort of "it
works" signal. You would also get the accumulated file of previous
selfdescriptions sent to you. A good idea, but as the file grew, and grew,
and grew... well. I cannot give an impartial account of the inconveniences
with the procedure, as much as I have argued against it as long as it was
in force. From February or March 98 self-descriptions were no longer sent
to the list, and the long file was not sent to new subscribers... although
I think the two-step procedure remained as a kind of technical scar for
some time.

So you see, these varying conditions have affected the ratio of
contributors to subscribers, all over. And then there is also the scarcity
of preserved subscriber lists. But I'll have to end here for tonight with
an apology for not coming to the end in this round, either, AND with the
hope I haven't bored you all too much.

regards
Eva



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