Paul, and everybody
What is the boundary between the too personal and good practice on the
list, has "always" been under negotiation -- or discussion, or debate -- on
the Xlists. Not a lot of closure, but some kind of joint development of a
PATTERN of practices. Thus, I am not sure where you draw the boundary --
except that I am convinced that you, Paul, do not draw it in the same place
as I do. It has been clear to me for a long time now that you and I
disagree deeply about what sort of thing XMCA communication is or should be
-- and also that your philosophical training puts me at a disadvantage.
You had expressed yourself quite clearly (in the context of the Mary Daly
debate) on what you see as the conditions for critical analysis -- even
before the two of us had a brief exchange, onlist, in September over
scholarly mailinglists as "safe places" for discussion in the context of my
"multilogical" paper from 98. You bring up Netiquette -- and yes, you were
probably online before I was -- as to the rule of making a distinction
between the relevant and the personal. And I bring up my fears that your
ideas of how to carry out a critical analysis in this medium makes you
forget (or ignore) the Netiquette guideline of never forgetting there is a
human on the other side.
The practice of addressing others by name cannot be what you mean by "too
personal" -- it is such a common practice here and elsewhere on the Net.
For one thing, it is one of the ways of re-connecting "speaker turns" in
this interleaving of threads. I am less sure what you think about the
practice of continuing to address "you Paul" as if the two of us were
having a conversation in front of an audience, knowing full well that they
are there, and acknowledging their right to "put in their oar" at any
time. It would, of course, also be possible to write about you in third
person. So to speak: turning to the audience and away from you as an
addressee. I should think that Xlist contributors do any of these, as a
matter of course. I have not studied it, in particular. On the other hand,
the Xlists have been where I have learned most about Net communication, and
there have been plenty of role models for the friendly, informal,
conversational style and personal address that I prefer to use -- Mike not
least. And also a long-standing practice of "telling stories from our
lives" for various purposes related to ongoing discussions. (Your own
Pokemon story is a good example). I have also, as you can see, learned
other, less cordial genres.
Then there has also been a long-standing practice of forwarding "private"
material of relevance to the list -- In the archives I have observed Mike
struggliing through the early years to keep discussions from slipping away
from the shared space into private channels, which would cut off threads
prematurely. URGING people to keep things in the shared channel. The
mailflow was less intense then (and thus under constant threat of
"evaporating"), and participants were still in a very exploratory stage:
how do we do this? how does this kind of collective correspondence
function? The practice HAS been taken up by list participants, agreeing to
forward brief dyadic backstage exchanges to the list (exchanges not
originally written with the list audience in mind) -- to forward WHEN
RELEVANT (and often hedged with an apology). So one thing you might mean
when you write that my recent posts fall into the personal and are of no
interest to the list, is that my disagreement with you about the "full
effect" of the Internet being likely to count as on the "positive side" has
been irrelevant and of no interest to the list. The ensuing thread with
several participants should be evidence enough that this was not the case.
In addition, both communication in general, and electronic communication in
particular, are among the fields of common interest to Xlist subscribers.
There are just SO many interesting threads and postings in the archives on
these topics -- sometimes self-reflective (list-reflective) at other times
more general. So I cannot see that meta-discussions of how we communicate
on the XMCA are out of place, either.
I realize that I will need to clarify about "community building". I am very
well aware of the myriad of exchanges going between xlist participants
outside the xlist arena -- well I am assuming it's a "myriad", for one
thing because I have had my own share, for another thing because the
products sometimes end up in the common channel, by mistake or
intentionally, and for a third thing because they are referred to in list
exchanges. Not least they "always" surface in discussions over
participation patterns. It has NEVER been my ambition to chart all that.
(Let someone else take on that challenge for a minor part of a thriving
mailinglist).
"Personal" in this sense of intended for, and sent over, a one-to-one
channel is not my object of research. The community building that IS
visible over the common channel, and/or carried out over the common channel
is rich enough to study without delving into the analysis of backstage
exchanges. What I refer to as community building is what goes on over the
list and/or is reflected in the list mailflow: the institutions that
identify list participants as an academic community and the on-list
practices that produce/maintain the social link between participants. That
produce the trust that is necessary for submitting one's tentative thoughts
to the collaborative discussion. But I have already answered you, back in
September, that this may VERY well be that I have swallowed an idealized
version of Xlist self-referent discourse. I'm working on coughing it up.
Then, the reason that I used "community building" when I submitted the
abstract to ISCRAT (in September 97 I think) I was very influenced by (but
also in disagreement with) Francoise Herrmanns analysis of the actions
performed through online discourse. She -- and others on the list at the
time she was writing about (1994) used this terminology, and I was there,
and absorbed it as a "tool" for getting understood then and there. By the
time I wrote the abstract I had begun to discover that Francoise had not
invented the "community building" terminology. Thence Barry Kort -- who
also has a presence (in forwarded- from- elsewhere form) in the Xlist
archives. Then, the more I read and learn, the more I find myself a
foreigner to the semantic pattern of how "community" is used in the USA.
When used in theorizing vocabulary -- like "communities of practice" it is
hard to find a good equivalent in Swedish. Or, perhaps it is just to my ear
that attempts to use the concept in Swedish sound like bad translations.
Parroting.
And here I will have to cut off for tonight
regards
Eva
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 01 2000 - 01:03:27 PST