<quote name="Dave Smith" date="Sun, 29 Jun 2008 at 11:49 -0600"> > I think this phenomenon happens because it's easy in an email to trim > away things you don't want to respond to, and focus only on the part of > the email that you disagree with. It's easy to believe that someone > disagrees with you 100% because they chose to respond to the 1% of what > you said that they disagreed with, even if that 1% was totally > tangential to your main point (which the responder may *did* agree with, > but you'd never know). I'm not sure if I like or dislike this because > frankly, it'd be a boring list if everyone just responded with "me too". > However, I do think it encourages argument and nit picking rather than > good old-fashioned discussion. > > What are your thoughts?
I think mailing lists are a well suited medium for discussion. Threads and point-by-point replys are useful and not available in other forms of discussion. Clearly there is the tendency to have rampant tangents, and this can be a downside. I also see your point about perceived/conveyed dissagreement. There are upsides, too. People will talk about what they want to talk about, and on a mailing list they don't have to compete for limited sound-space, this also means a small number of people can hijack a thread all the way to the moon. As for dissagreeing on only one point and ignoring the rest, it still leaves you able to decide if you really care about the point they dissagreed with. The twinkies for example, you're wife probably didn't care that someone had an opinion about twinkies in particular. People wanted to talk about twinkies, so a whole new subthread was born. This doesn't have to preclude the original discussion about $BEHAVIOUR running its course. So yes, I think mailing lists are a good medium for discussion, with at least one caveat: let the user beware and employ filtering tools. Von Fugal
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
/* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
