Looking up River
A Play in less than one act
------------
Feminist says:
"That's goddamned offensive. Do something about it"
Numb-er-than-a-stick-of-wood guy says:
"huh?"
Feminist says:
"make a gesture towards giving up privilege"
Numb-er-than-a-stick-of-wood guy says:
"Ah. Ok. Since this is a play,"
" the only thing i can think of is not saying anything"
"So I guess I won't say anything for a month"
"See ya"
History (the Narrator) says:
"It won't make a difference -- what a Stupid Guy"
"You need to make a springboard. Try using what's below to start."
Numb-er-than-a-stick-of-wood guy doesn't listen, doesn't get it. Goes
offstage.
The audience sits and waits for the next act. But there is none. Nothing
happens. Some eventually think "What a stoopid play" and wait for the next
one.
------------------
Excerpted from:
Contact, Community and Multilogue.
Electronic Communication in the Practice of Scholarship.
http://w1.314.telia.com/~u31414381/writings/iscrat98/cocomu.html
"Second, as already noted, the presence of silent participants may be
problematic in several respects. In the sense that many subscribers seldom if
ever contribute postings they do not contribute to the production of collective
goods on the virtual commons (Smith, 1992; Kollock & Smith, 1994). From the
perspective of community building activity, lurkers by watching the activities
without offering themselves up for observation may reduce the level of trust in
the community. This would seem to be a more sensitive issue on the xlists with
their high proportion of multilogical activity in the mailflow than in the
electronic fora studied by Rojo (1995), where most users participated mainly in
the "fishing for information" mode, while relatively fewer users were involved
in the more interactive modes of "enjoying the debate" or "social networking".
Through the long and well archived existence of the xlist cluster it provides
an interesting object for the study of list participation dynamics. The role of
lurkers on the xlists needs to be examined, as it is contradictory construed in
many ways: as problematic or as non-problematic, and as problematic for
diametrally opposite reasons. The presence of non-posting readers on the xlists
has occasionally been seen as troublesome, both from the perspective of
community trust and as a potential dead-weight in the system. On the other
hand, in meta-discussions on the xlist multilogues, there has also been worries
of the opposite kind: might there among the silent participants be an
alarmingly great number of silenced voices, are there people out there with
things to contribute, who are too intimidated by the discourse to dare post
their share? Then, discussions on the lists have repeatedly suggested that
lurking is not necessarily negative. For one thing, the academic information
distributed through this activity system may legitimately be read as a kind of
local community newspaper ‚- the newsletter analogy appears, for example, in
the Xfamily Welcome Message ‚- where responses from the readership within the
same medium are optional to exceptional. There is a logic to this, as the
information offered in the activity system where academic community is built
basically refers to activities in other, related, activity systems, and the
canonical response to an item of information may be the active participation in
one of the list-related, offline activity systems. However, the presence of
lurkers does seem to introduce a contradiction in the multilogical activity
system: a split of the community into performers and audience and a
corresponding mismatch in construal of the activity. The performers act within
a collaborative activity. Prevalent discursive practices manifestly provide
openings for others to enter the stage. The audience of lurkers, however, act
within an activity of consumption ‚- keeping up with developments, enjoying the
show. On the other hand, with reference to the power law phenomena emerging in
the interactive dynamics of mailing lists it could be argued that unevenly
distributed rates of contribution is an inevitable logistic outcome. "
=====
Bill Barowy
"Everything is a becoming, without beginning or end"
__________________________________________________
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