At 2:39 PM -0700 5/21/01, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>On Monday, May 21, 2001, at 11:21 AM, Nick Simicich wrote:
>
>>Believe it or not, most subscribers prefer a focused list.
>
>Nick is mostly correct, but -- I think it depends on the list.
>
>When a list of mine develops a sense of community, I find it tends
>to wander. I find that it's that wandering that develops the
>community aspect, because that's where they're interacting as
>people, and not merely discussing the narrow topic at hand.
In the Alfred Hitchcock movie classic entitled Vertigo from 1958,
Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) says to John Ferguson (James Stewart)
something like "One wanders, two are always going somewhere." Someone
may be off topic and someone else may follow up, so they're going
somewhere, just somewhere else. As far as the list itself wandering
is concerned, I dunno.
>Life is a slippery slope.
It is. Every list though naturally can't turn into a community where
you can live your entire life. No list offers more than one little
slice of life. But given that we're lazy, it's so much easier going
off topic on the list whose members we know than subscribing to
another list dedicated to the other topic whose list members we may
not know. Emotions blend, the intellect separates.
I read "Flowers for Algernon" on Saturday (prompted by seeing the
movie Charly the same morning), and in the book there's a Fay Lillman
who doesn't like the lines in the neighborly "My God! I have never
seen a place as neat as this" room of the then intelligent main
character. She drinks gin to wash them away, "It'll take the starch
out of those straight lines." I wonder if the on topic scopes on
lists are all that different from such lines. Anyway, Indiana Jones
once said that Philosophy is down the hallway, so there I go.
--
"There was a time when I would have paid you $1000 to watch you eat
a popsicle." -Kelsey Grammer to Jean Smart, Frasier: A Day in May
