RE: [-empyre-] lists and gender roles

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

hi sue,

my feeling is that discussion of list and other such software is not
irrelevant to the political, social, and personal dimensions of managing
lists. was that implied in your post? the political, social, and personal
problems that arise on lists are often related to the way the software
configures the 'space' and the possible forms of relations between people,
groups, and subgroups. lists propose one single 'room', one folder. and they
are usually plain text-oriented, because of security problems with allowing
html email and attachments, so they are not so good for other types of
writing, polyartistic approaches.

which reminds me of something mcluhan said:

"The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message,
as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name....
Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a
matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some
way the "content" of the electric light, since they could not exist without
the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that "the medium
is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale
and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media
are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human
association." from Understanding Media

this will not come as news to you, though, i imagine. your trAce project (
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk ) has experimented with a number of fairly high-level
"social softwares" from Webboard to the current software you're using which
i can't remember the name of. you may have found that different "social
software" alters the "form of human association"?

ja
http://vispo.com