At 22.51 -0800 0-01-28,Kathryn Alexander called to mind
the multi-layering of our textually mediated intercourse in this network:
the peculiarities of what Tom Erickson (who should be around here,
somewhere) has called "persistent conversation". As you can imagine, these
issues are of burning interest for me, too, making myself at home in the
Xlists archives as I am -- while still continuing to participate in
spinning a future from the past of this network. It's messy. But once again
I take my reassurance -- as a general background for starting to question
-- in the fact that Xlist practices have, for as long as there are archives
availble, included these foldings of time back upon itself. And as I
continue to write this posting, I am sure to be repeating things others
have said better before me, in old Xlist metadiscussions. Yes, it IS kinda
crushing to come in as a ginny-come-lately to this network.
Similar debates about a range of issues DO re-surface with some regularity
-- as Nate observed the other day when re-animating an exchange between
Phil Agre and Yrjö Engström from 1991 on the topic of activity theory and
history. AND as Mike has observed in several opening-the-academic-year
messages, like this one from Oct 1st 1992:
"However, another feature of XLCHC discussions does seem to warrant some
thought-- at least, I have been thinking about it. This is the fact that
there is a heterogeneous but constrained set of topics which comes up once
or twice a year such that in some cases (zone of proximal development,
context, learning/development/play, Vygotsky vs Piaget, genetic
methodologies, activity centered instruction, etc.) have reappeared over a
number of years. By itself this is no problem. The discussions are always
interesting. But I get the nagging sense that it should be possible for the
discussions of these key conceptions in
socio-cultural-historical-activity-centered theories to CUMMULATE."
(For simplicity, and because for all his modesty Mike IS the Xlist
"listowner", I will, probably, mainly refer to him, although there have
been many others taking similar approaches to cumulativity and to diversity
-- as in my FWD from Mike/89 the other day -- on the Xlists. Voy, that's
something for She Who Dissects Sentences to parse)
While there HAS, forsooth and verily, been recurring collective
recognitions of the fluid, conversational nature of the Xlists (which is
shared by many other cyberplaces), the proliferation-of-copies afforded by
the electronic medium makes me hesitate about the ephemerality. Yes,there
is ephemerality in the adoption/adaption of conversational genres to the
intercourse, as well as in the invocations of "getting behind in the
conversation" from contributors apologizing for joining a topic "late". I
dare say it is also there in the "sense of community" that affords
interactional coherence in this weird "now" of a mailinglist. BUT the
packets of text cannot really be considered ephemeral, can they? For one
thing, Xlist archives HAVE been kept -- which in the beginning was a quite
manual process as email labor goes: "xfamily" staff at the LCHC saved Xlist
mail to disk. For another thing, individual participants will also have
been able to keep more or less comprehensive archives -- with or without
the knowledge of the current subscriber collective. This appears in the
LCHC archives on some occasions when files lost at the "center" are
recovered from elsewhere in "distributed memory". Nowadays it's "all" on
the Web, for the world to see. That's hardly ephemeral. All our bloopers
for posterity, together with whatever of wisdom we produce. There is
certainly a tension between ephemerity and persistence in the many uses of
electronic conversation.
There is discussion more or less from the beginning (bottom?) of the
X-archives about the dual long-term functions of the archiving of the
X-mailflow, for research, and in the service of cumulativity in the
discussions. The first function is evidenced, for example, by early ideas
about using hypertext tools for analyzing particularly interesting
discussions like the "tools multilogue" of 1988. The second function has
many forms. I have not really pried them apart, but I'm thinking of major
"forwards from the past" like the compilation of a scheduled discussion on
Bateson from spring 1993 that Mike floated on to the list when Bateson was
again on the agenda in September 1994, or the various ways in which Arne
Raeithel used the search tools and capacitous hard disk of his "Power
Crutch" -- for retreiving old postings of his own, or for medleys on some
current topic. The signposts pointing to the archives when they had been
put into online storage must also count here, among the "community service"
functions of the archives. So what Nate and I do in that vein has an
ancestry among Xlist practices.
Still, these re-cyclings are but a minute patch in the sieve-for-memory
that a mailinglist constitutes (which Mike keeps lamenting in many vivid
images), EVEN when Mike pursues wizardly strategies for the purpose of
cumulativity -- strategies which have "always" included various methods for
distributing responsibilities between participants and deflecting
attributions of authority or expertise from himself, re-deploying them to
the collective. So a great deal of Mike's quantitative presence in the
archives is made up of these efforts.
Sorry Kathryn -- I'm running out of time to elaborate this as I had thought
I would. But you can see that I find it very interesting, in many ways,
when you enter into dialogue with an ephemeral Mike of 1989 who says:
>> Given that a major purpose of this discussion is to have a NON-
>>dominating discussion among geographically/institutionally distributed
>>people who share certain intellectual interests, and perhaps certain values
>>(so many people have joined that I am not at all certain of the latter, and
>>perhaps misjudge the former), it is unhappy to think that we are
>>unwittingly recapitulating some of the same power structures we struggle
>>against in our formally designated work lives.
To which you say:
>I think we can't help but do this recapitualtion struggle, except that
>in this kind of exchange, the discourses and power structures are
>visible, so perhaps there is some possibility for the reflexive
>responses that might permit change. I don't think there is any such
>thig as non-dominating discourse though.
MY take on it is that it is by "written utterances" like these that Mike
has done (and is doing) his powerful share of shaping the Xlists into what
they have been, are and will be. Kind of a prolepsis towards the impossible?
Eva
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