Re: [-empyre-] Size matters?

[Danny Butt <db@dannybutt.net>]

On 8/10/04 8:35 PM, "Charlotte Frost" <charlotte@digitalcritic.org> wrote:

> Perhaps I should post this message a few times and see where that gets me!
> ;-)

Into the "nagging woman" box I suspect :7... I'm enjoying this dialogue a
great deal. Charlotte, your questions around linking are very suggestive, as
I think of linking as also a "performed listening" at the same time as being
a retelling, and I find it fascinating to see what various people choose to
listen to [you can probably tell i'm on a spivak kick at the moment] both
within lists and the "shared world" of electronic resources around "us". Of
course, gender (and race, and..) suffuses the questions of what we see as
our shared world as well as our strategies for making reference to it
through explicit or implicit links. And then of course there are the
intra-group reactions, where, for example, a female brings up a number of
questions around sociality that are met with a number of
technical/philosphical "solutions" that kind of miss the point lol. Not that
I'm not responsible for much of the same non-listening myself at various
times, but as a new list-owner (http://www.place.net.nz) I'm fascinated by
these questions - how long is an acceptable silence? how do people feel that
they're being heard? how do the decisions made by moderators around the
list's positioning, their own posts [or their nom de plumes lol! I never
suspected Melinda!] or that of others structure what is or isn't possible to
say? Teachers and consultants have quite a deal of tacit and codified
knowledge on what works in physical environments, but a lot of it is shared
informally. But in relation to lists, as you point out Charlotte, not much
is available at all! Things of course become more complicated when there are
multiple facilitators (over ten of us on fibreculture) when you not only
have list dynamics, vulnerable to screwing up by the acts of your colleagues
who are supposed to be looking after it, but you have a whole lot of
backchannel as well about how the list is or isn't going and what should be
done about it! And everyone has different ideas on who's screwing up or who
understands what's required. And everyone has different time scales as
Andreas suggested.

Of course, the technical architecture does make a difference - I use chat
for family, lists for dialogues I'm interested in, web boards and blogs tend
to be things I check only occasionally, though when I sort out an RSS reader
I'll probably check blogs more often. Like josh, I too drew up a use case
for a new piece of software I dreamed up (this was in '97) that would link
e-mail lists and NNTP, for the holy grail of "community" management. Never
got off the ground, should have pitched it to some VCs. I think everyone
pretty much had the same idea, but all the software sucked, just like
content management systems generally.

[Anyway, for a study of power and the network society Josh - but what could
be better than theyrule! - I would recommend: a) the sociology of science
literature as you've somewhat identified (power to establish truth) b)
economic sociology (Granovetter et al - who uses money) c) information
economics (Arrow, Lamberton etc. - how the people with money think about
money) and d) cultural sociology/cultural studies. Throw all that in with
some class analysis and you'll probably have a better version of my thesis (
http://www.dannybutt.net/research.html). If I was doing this again I'd start
with colonialism and the economics of the slave trade - the true basis of
the global economy! See Buck-Morss "Hegel and Haiti" in Critical Inquiry as
one starting point, others will have more]

A lot more to say on this topic and other parts to pick up but I'm probably
showing too much length already. Thanks everyone for some thoughtful
contributions.

x.d

--
http://www.dannybutt.net
#place: location, cultural politics, and social technologies:
http://www.place.net.nz