nettime's meta moderators on Tue, 22 Oct 2002 17:48:53 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> mysteries of nettime... (2x) |
Table of Contents: Re: <nettime> mysteries of nettime's inner workings revealed Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@transmediale.de> Re: <nettime> mysteries of nettime's inner workings revealed Benjamin Geer <ben@beroul.uklinux.net> ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 13:47:23 +0200 From: Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@transmediale.de> Subject: Re: <nettime> mysteries of nettime's inner workings revealed (post as appropriate) folks, thanks for remaining so cheerful in all this - what a quagmire ... - and thanks for protecting the list from this kind of junk. if you ask me, it shows how important moderation is for nettime. sure, the list would be different if it was not moderated, but i for one would certainly not be subscribed to a 'bolder' nettime list. btw, i think the answer to the question 'how many per day?' should in this case not be '42', but '0'. if he really needs a reliable number. greetings, - -a ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 14:00:31 +0100 From: Benjamin Geer <ben@beroul.uklinux.net> Subject: Re: <nettime> mysteries of nettime's inner workings revealed On Monday 21 Oct 2002 14:49, nettime's_moderators wrote: > [sadly typical thread in which clueless poster gets angry at > moderator because poster has not bothered to try to > understand the mailing-list culture that moderator is > politely, doggedly referring to] To anyone who has ever moderated a mailing list, this sort of exchange is probably all too familiar. I'd suggest it's because people approach mailing lists as if they were a product of consumer culture, and therefore completely fail to understand the type of distributed power embodied in a mailing list. The clueless poster sees a mailing list as being analogous to a magazine: somewhere out there, there are some people who send me this stuff on a regular basis. To clueless posters, the list address represents a centralised, opaque source of information, like an office full of magazine editors. These posters don't realise that what's behind the list address is... themselves, and all the other subscribers. This is why, when they want to unsubscribe, they send a message to the list address. The poster in this example seems to have taken the magazine metaphor a bit further: he/she saw nettime as a way to get his/her writing out to as many of the magazine's consumers as possible. True to the spirit of consumer culture, the poster gleefully identified something that appears to be a 'free lunch'. If someone is stupid enough to give away lunch for free, why not take as much as you can get away with? The poster's question could be rephrased: how many of my messages per day can nettime's readers stomach? If you ask the question in this way, it's clear that the answer is going to have something to do with taste, and that you'll have to read the archives to get a sense of what it might be. In mailing-list culture, participation requires a self-adjusting sensitivity to tacit limits, which are negotiated with the other participants through trial and error. The poster's insistence on being given a specific maximum number of posts per day reflects the consumer-culture idea that rules and laws are the only limits to individual behaviour: if it's not against the rules, there's no reason I shouldn't do it. If I'm writing an article for a magazine, all I care about is whether they publish my article. An issue of a magazine is therefore merely a temporary encounter among self-seeking participants. On an unmoderated list, I share equal power, with all the other subscribers, to determine the content of the list. With this power comes responsibility for maintaining the list's character, which by rough consensus we agree that we like. Like the Mozilla developers who use Mozilla as their regular browser, we must 'eat our own dogfood'. On a moderated list, the only difference is that the moderators, who ideally are sensitive to that rough consensus, act as its guarantors by smoothing out the worst excesses. Ben ------------------------------ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net