>a public, archived, academic-based discussion list.
We gotta change this around.
We are not here to post academic essays. Or are we?
This is not a journal.
This is a chat line with the focus on writing rather than sex.
This technology offers the opportunity to do at any time in the privacy of
our own offices what we would do if we were at a conference and chatting in
the bar after the show, reading, paper, etc. (we consent. we are adult...?)
If that is not its function, but its function is to operate like a
publication, then it needs to be edited like a Journal. Doesn't it?
We are in a peculiar situation. We can now archive chat. What fun. But it
has a different function from archiving copies of Journals.
I would like to feel quite happy to say here what I might say in a cafe to
friends and acquaintances (taking 'responsibility' for what I am saying but
only in that moment and with the agreement that I might change my mind and
contradict myself any moment). It would feel a bit odd to have somebody
taping what we say and preserving it for posterity, but it doesn't seem a
good idea for us to let that stop us talking about what we think is worth
talking about.
There are a number of options.
1) this list should become a conventional Journal with academic submissions
2) this list should cease to be archived (so comments should no longer be
deemed publication but should be treated as individual letters to the
people involved)
3) we should learn to self-censor ourselves so that we can pretend it is
not a publication but continue to publish it
4) we can leave it as it is with some of us being irresponsible and others
telling them they ought to be responsible
I don't like any of them. I want a different way of thinking about the lists.
Email newsgroups are not the same as Journals, Conference Phonecalls, TV
Chat shows, etc. They are a form which seems yet to have resolved its
contradictions to previous modes of communication. Lists need new attitudes
to engagement with them. Perhaps what they are most like is a contraction
of the writing of letters and the publication of those letters decades
later. We are talking to each other privately, but those private
communications are then made public (but when reading the archive we are
voyeurs - aware that we are observing communications not meant for us and
not meant for the time in which we are now reading them). There must be a
distinction made between the posting of an email and the archiving of it.
Otherwise we are too constrained. Maybe that is what is required. An editor
for the Archive. Or indeed a Censor?
If we let ourselves censor ourselves before we put finger to keyboard, then
many of the opportunities of this new tool are lost.
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