So I'm on this mailing list, and it starts into the cycle that personalities can drive mailing lists to distract the participants from the discussion at hand, and the implied metadata wanders off course, like the membership.
It's disappointing, of course, to see terse criticism become interpreted as attack, and see affront at believed attack lead to attack at the tone of affront. Being a day job working stuff, I don't have time to step in and try and steer the craft as much as I'd like to right now - so I stay back and watch my inbox fill slowly with things to get back to. But I know that the community is who steers these crafts, laying the pheromones of productive discourse.
Shelley has a description of the situation and some response.
When I shared a bit of the tempest with AZ, her response was
Christ almighty. How do these people have time to do any work? All they do is fight, fight, fight. In multiple locations. It's turning the Web into a 24/7 version of the Itchy and Scratchy show.
Which may be a bit extreme - in the noise there's been some good signal, and I'm still hopeful. But the noise does distract me from the music.
Posted by esinclai at May 07, 2003 07:09 PM |
Hm.
a) Isn't this the easily observed historically predictable behavior of threaded discussions in a computing environment?
b) if so, and the particular problem (social-status seeking disrupts idea-based communication) is both predictable and persistent, doesn't it argue that there's a design flaw in the process?
Anyway.
Posted by: mike on May 7, 2003 07:30 PMSince I see the same behavior exhibited often enough in non-computer-mediated interactions, perhaps the design flaw is in the people. :-)
Posted by: Liz on May 7, 2003 08:11 PMYes, it may be a human behavior, and it is a common behavior. But it can also be a common behavior for the group to gently tune the behavior of its participants.
This sounds, as I write it (and as I've brooded about it this evening) a bit orwellian (or probably huxleyan, actually), but in practice I think it need not be. I've been on plenty of lists where the membership can gently say "this is unproductive, let's try for productive instead" While I've seen the opposite, I've also seen that disruptive elements can wane with time, leaving the productive elements standing (and typing).
Are humans broken? I don't think so. I think our behaviors sometimes are, but our learned behaviors need not be.
Posted by: Eric Sinclair on May 7, 2003 09:57 PM