RE: [-empyre-] Size matters?

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

What's being overlooked here in general I think is the issue of 
governance, which, more often than not, goes behind the scenes. Nettime is 
a good example; in fact, I wrote an email to the list complaining about 
the direction it's been going in recently - and it didn't make it through. 
Yet there's no _stated_ policy - here either, as far as I know - as to 
what is acceptable, and what isn't. Admittedly, most governance is ad hoc, 
by heuristics, but this leaves subscribers in the lurch. There has been 
trouble of this sort on any number of lists - Poetics, my early 
fiction-of-philosophy, Cybermind, futureculture, etc. etc. As to Beehive, 
I definitely feel that mez's etc. work should have been presented as close 
to the original as possible (and yes, definitely, you should know Talan's 
work!) - if not, at the very least an open dialog should be established.

My problem with your viewpoint is your notion of the list apparently as 
gallery or pseudo-gallery. My own work is distributed across several lists 
(as is mez, Lewis Lacook, etc.); not all the pieces are sent to all the 
lists. I'm well aware of the skein-nature of net discourse, the dialogic 
of the membrane. A single list, any single list, is likely to be more than 
problematic in terms of governance.

On the other hand, there are MOOs - postmoderncultureMOO had terrific work 
on it, but collapsed, as well, due to governance issues (dealing with the 
Quota Review Board), just as MediaMOO collapsed due to governance issues 
(dealing with anonymous logging-in). So it goes -

- Alan


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