Drew Davidson wrote: > I took Rob's comment the other night completely wrong, BTW, and I > apologize to him for that and then impuning him in public on this list. > That was really rude of me. Sorry, Rob.
Thanks, but please don't sweat it. I've had reactions like yours to speakers, perhaps if I'd had your context I'd have interpreted what I said/did just like you did -- for all I know I didn't pay enough attention to what you said either and contributed to the problem. Besides, I've been impuned in bigger forums than this :-). [Cultural note: there was this great study done at Xerox PARC in the early 1980s as office email systems started becoming prevalent about how narrow the bandwidth of email was, and how that narrow bandwidth often failed to convey sufficient context. As a result, an innocuous comment was perceived as being incredibly provocative in the receiver's context, and flame wars got born in which behaviors in email were much more violent than the same behavior face-to-face...and indeed, people two cubicles from each other would trade increasingly flaming messages vs. just going to talk to each other. It was a really interesting set of observations, more anthropological than technical. The issue of narrow bandwidth and the absence of shared context isn't limited to just email of course, but its speed allows a conversation to spiral out of control as the messages which are rapidly composed and responded to fail to consider building up the necessary information infrastructure to succeed in communication. Which is why there's not going to be the collected email of anyone the way there's the collected correspondence of, say, Thomas Jefferson. When the bandwidth is so low, and latency is so high, the effort our ancestors put into them to ensure that the communication was successful was intense. A freehand speaking experience, or a Q&A on topics off the prepared one suffers similarly, but not to the same degree. I tend to be very informal in my communications, and if I'm not careful get too informal and create misunderstandings. This is probably way more than you could have imagined wanting to hear, but if you're interested in that Xerox paper and are an ACM member who subscribes to the Digital Library, I think you can get it on-line -- it's from the Transactions on Office Information Systems (I think -- something like that) around 1980 or 1981.] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
