In article <kgg3n3prkttagif460eil1nn42g05tlfb4@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Dana Nutter \
deinx nxtxr <li_sasxsekREMOVETHIS@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> li [Anonymous] mi tulis la ...
>
> > I am not saying that it is immoral or fattening for people to start a
> > thousand little Yahoo groups, each with less than 10 active
> > participants -- all of whom also comunicate daily in the auxlang list.
> > I personally believe it is a fantastically inefficient way to
> > communicate.
>
> On the contrary, it gives us a small haven away from the Auxlang
> members, some of whom couldn't care less about our projects, and
> do nothing but criticise them at every turn. Now we can
> communicate amongst ourselves without all the distractions
I agree with your "haven" comment. I have been thinking about this a
lot. To me, here are the main advantages of having lots of forums
scattered all about:
1) It makes it almost impossible for any single person to be an
all-pervading presence. If you don't like me, for example, there are
places where you can go to get away from me; there are forums that I
don't know about, and there are forums that I do know about but haven't
joined. And that's a good thing, because no matter who you are or how
well-intentioned you may consider yourself, there are others who just
can't stand your personality! Let them have a few sanctuaries, for
mercy's sake.
2) The diversity and widespreadedness of forums makes communication
less vulnerable to earthquake, terrorist attack, government repression,
and other types of failure.
3) The diversity and widespreadedness of forums makes possible
completely different rules for each forum with regard to: advertising
stuff you are selling; posting huge quotes from copyrighted material
that go way beyond fair use; verbal abuse of other forum members (some
folks like it rough, others want protection); expressing thoughts that
are not "politically correct," and so forth.
So my feeling is, long live the diversity and widespreadedness!
The supposed disadvantages of being scattered into many various forums
are: a) it's inconvenient; b) there isn't enough "cross-pollination";
c) there aren't enough people in some forums (like this one) to provide
"critical mass."
Counter-arguments would be: a) it's only inconvenient to those who want
to know what everybody else is doing at every moment, and maybe it's a
good thing to inconvenience them; b) we don't want cross-pollination as
much as we want havens where we can get away from aggressive opponents;
we can cross-pollinate ourselves as much as we want by visiting other
forums; c) it's good to sit quietly and think your own thoughts once in
a while; endless chatter is a destructive diversion.
---
Richard K. Harrison of Florida
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