>I wonder whether some "silences" were not exactly silences per se, but were
>back-channeled "off-line" as private messages to individuals, so they
didn't
>get posted on the x-list?
When I first discovered my first listserv (a Blake list I believe), I
remember that the first message I received concerned list commands, how to
leave the list, and also a long section on netiquette. In that section a
distinction was drawn between material that should be sent directly to the
list and material that should be sent to the author of any given message. I
think the idea was to reduce the amount of mail that any member might
receive by eliminating material that responded to an individual query, that
might be of more particular, rather than more general interest. Also, truly
personal messages were singled out as being unsuitable for posting to the
list.
As my use of listservs increased I found that this distinction varies from
not being recognized at all to being somewhat scrupulously observed.
Obviously it is a judgment call in any case. Sometimes, when one member
would criticize another person for posting what they considered
inappropriate material, others on the would reply that they were glad that
the personal interest stuff had been posted generally. A lot of times
requests for specific material generated messages of the form: "When you
send Joey the biblio on pine tar nuts please send it to me too." Clearly
the silent participants form part of the audience and as such shape the
messages that active participants make.
Then also, there is the broad area in which communications is established
through lists that takes on a life of its own off list, sometimes even
leading to the formation of new lists. This was the case in a community
currency listserv to which I belong which generated a special group who
formed their own list concerning the more technical aspects of community
currency software.
Having now read Eva's CoCoMu paper with some care, and on the basis of this
rather long and deeply participated thread on silent participation, I think
that the entire issue of member silence and off channel interaction deserves
a prominent place when evaluating the conditions for the sustainability of
what she is calling "mulitlogue". It seems too easy to say that the
apparently silent members are not to be considered subjects in the
multilogue analyzed as an activity system.
In fact, given the amount of interest, and the conflictual relations that
emerge when discussing silence and lurking, one might consider this
phenomena to be somewhat more central to the existence of the multilogue
than it appears on the surface.
Paul H. Dillon