Thanks also for providing yet another turn in the ricercar' of common
knowledge -- of how to find out whose channel of communication has broken
down, when the very same channel is your only means to reach the people in
question:
At 21.35 -0500 98-11-16, Jay Lemke wrote:
>I hope that we are not still missing other members of our community who are
>verifiably on the list but not actually receiving mail
=2E..now, the ghost busters at weber tell me there's also been the opposite
case: people who GET mail, but who cannot unsubscribe because the
listserver sez they're not on the list. Yes, they ARE thinking about hiring
a shaman at the LCHC in addition to the wizards and gurus they've already
got, but for the time being the actual boring work of mining through UNIX
files who-is-at weber still lands with a few ordinary people of the
xfamily who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu (peering red-eyed at their screens all night...)
There's been some interesting distributed cognition going on around this
xmca brownout -- one thing that strikes me is the collective forgetting of
things like the passage of time and the existence of the xfamily as an
electronic helpdesk for the xmca. These forgettings are by no means evenly
distributed, there were no doubt people who DID contact the xfamily,
wondering what had happened. But for my own part I first tried the
listserver automatic -- and as my resubscribing happened to work, I then
just communicated my growing worries about the extent of the problem to the
LIST (i.e. to the people NOT affected by the brownout or, like me,
successfully resubscribed). I didn't think of sending a simple query to the
xfamily. And I KNOW about the existence of this address, while others may
never have seen it, so there's a collective level for this forgetting, too:
no obvious artifact supporting this particular memory.
At 21.35 -0500 98-11-16, Jay Lemke also posted some musings about the
brownout event as a kind of list-stress oriented towards the preservation
of the community. Well, over the years of the list it isn't only flame wars
and the community building aftermath of malfunctions in the communications
channel that boost the level of activity and the level of participation.
There's also been plenty of discussions taking off in a more celebratory
fashion, getting heated occasionally, but not to the flaming point...
although, where to draw the line between flames and other disagreements is,
of course, in itself debatable.
However, I would like to spend my words on the re-collection of the list
community after interruption. There are some interesting events in the past
of the xlists related to this -- for example two or three episodes where a
spontaneously emerging gap in the mailflow has been TAKEN as a possible
technical malfunction, which then spaws a flurry of reassuring and
reflective contributions. When the XMCA started up in September 95 under
its new name (after the old XLCHC was closed down in the beginning of the
summer) the "hands up" procedure had a much more formalized flavour, as
that was when a self-description had been made an obligatory part of the
automatic subscription routine (at the time these selfintroductions were
posted to the list -- the gremlins ate that part of the script last fall,
at the same time as they were told to quit sending two years' worth of
self-intros to new subscribers).
In the corresponding situation when the XLCHC was reorganized from a
reflector list to a listserver in May 1994 (which Francoise has written
about) there WAS a flurry of I-am-here are-you-there? messages as people
re-subscribed -- a community building event with less of an opening-round
style. In that event Bill Blanton very aptly associated to crews stranded
after a space ship crash in a SF movie or reassembling after a parachute
drop. I find some of that flavour in our current re-assembly of "who is out
there".
We have discussed this before, Jay, and I remember you voicing a similar
feeling that I have: that when I write to the xmca I may well be addressing
a few participants by name, but that I nevertheless have a sense of
addressing a much larger audience. An audience, I suppose, when I think
about it, consisting of everybody who ever posted something to the list
that I saw (even if some of them will be gone without my knowing, to me
they are still, very vaguely there). Some in the crew I "know" fairly well,
because they've posted a lot or because I've been in backstage
correspondence with them (and a few because I meet them IRL), others I
don't know very well, except that they came "here" so they will be
interested in CHAT etc. Which also goes for the people I have never seen a
posting from at al, they're still vaguely there. Just like, in a dimly lit
auditorium there's a feeling of presence, although only a part of the
audience can be clearly seen by the speaker.
The brownout with the ensuing threads on "list problems" and "hands up"
reminds me that there's a lot of projection work in producing this image of
the audience -- which is presumably fairly accurate most of the time (c:a
300 subscribers + you and me, Jay :-) but which, from our limited
perspectives cannot be told apart from the breakdown situation where two
thirds and more of the audience was suddenly gone. All we know is that THIS
person was there to send that message at THAT hour, and THIS OTHER person
at THAT time. From this we construct this virtual place of asynchronous,
aproxemic but nevertheless continuous presence. When we lose trust in the
projection, it takes collective work to repair it.
More hands up, please!
Eva