Hello All, James Devine wrote, for what it's worth, Jurriaan is new to pen-l and posts a lot of stuff that seems new to me. And then some complain that he posts too much! Jim
Doyle I agree with this point, but I would like to dilate on this also. For Michael, how much people post may be directly related to how much the list costs, so I am not asking for someone to bear a greater burden for the personal opinions and thoughts of individuals. Second to this Carrol tends to observe what is readable, so if a posting is two web pages long it is about readable but something longer is not. This has some merit in my view given the form. However, I believe there are other issues also affecting this discussion. If one looks at the business world collaboration applications are a major part of the business climate. From Instant Messaging to the more complex Content Management Systems (CMS) a major component of working groups is the organization of the content and making of documents that are done by more than person. It is dead obvious that two web pages is not adequate to express much content. On the other hand non of us wants to read only book length tomes on the web. It seems to me that these are worthy areas for Marxists, and leftist who were previously known as Marxists but call themselves something else. I'll make some points that I think are relevant as well from my own perspective. The web is a medium in which access to people with disabilities is possible and a part of the technical debate about the web. So a text based list is about as accessible as anything one encounters on the web. That makes it pretty democratic in some senses. But not for those with cognitive disabilities. They may require more visual based solutions to content. Secondly from my point of view, most of the time individuals write these things. We just have the most impoverished view of working together by seeing individuals writing by themselves to produce something for these lists. Instead what the collaboration 'is' is the debate about which underlies Carrol's and Michael's observations. Individual voices are guaranteed to emphasize the divisions. Contrarily, many thoughts can be shared and built together which email lists obscure. For example, if I shot many photographs in a major peace demonstration, my pictures will hardly be different than anyone else's. So If we combined the best from many people we'll have a wonderful collaborative work but not any sense of the individual voice. Individual voices are important because experience gives 'some' people a deeper insight in making pictures and so forth. And that is what a list serves to provide many voices, but many projects really require a variety of persons contributing to be truly powerful. For example to write adequately about racism really requires having more voices than Caucasian men can bring to the issue. One cannot answer on a text based list certain sorts of questions. For example the use of images on a web site is much more useful than to paste images into an email. The form of email lists simply doesn't allow more ambition toward making images. Primarily in terms of bandwidth issues. Finally file size and productivity are related to how much images are used. One can get by fairly well with 35kb pictures posted to a web site. But an email is often far smaller file, mainly due to brevity of expression. A hundred images is viewable in a matter of seconds but according to a 35kb standard text is over 3mb in size reads like a major chore at 3mega bytes of file. So text based lists in some ways hover in the nineteenth century when journals were text and images were an extreme luxury. The communal nature of thinking processes is not well served by email lists. But email lists do encourage global conversation and should not be discouraged until the higher production bandwidth and collaborative tools to reach more ambitious goals are widely available. Doyle
