MY FIRST RECESSION
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defining open publishing of lists and weblogs
“The dilemma of information in the Internet era is not that there is insufficient content, but that there is too much of it. The situation has been called ‘drinking from the fire hose.’ The problem is to find a filter for relevance and quality. Personally, I am on the verge of unsubscribing — not because there is insufficient GREAT content but because there is too much GOOD content.”1
Discontent in List Culture Leaving general concerns over the state of the Net for what they are, the key purpose of this study has been to analyze the ways in which Internet culture deals with filtering and information overload. Fear and desire over the plethora of info are in permanent flux. In times of transition to the unknown, it makes sense to frequently change one’s pink and black glasses. Plowing through online content, one experiences the fine line between meaning and noise. Yet it is liberal nonsense to say that this is all a matter of one’s personal mood or taste. There is a growing discontent with the way e-mail lists operate. There seemed to be no way out of the dilemma between open and closed (moderated) lists. Open lists tend to become noisy and irrelevant to those who prefer less traffic and more content. Moderated lists, on the other hand, show a tendency to become quasi-edited magazines, thereby losing the “informality” of the e-mail exchange of ideas and material. Collaborative mail filtering, the motto of the list, is in danger of losing its lively, social aspect. The debate over open versus closed lists has exhausted itself and is showing signs of repetition. Sydney Net scholar and Cybermind researcher Jon Marshall writes, “The Net has always seemed to be a place of suspicion filled with untraceable tension and despair. It is open to projections of hostility and love, to an awkward suspension of one’s being before the uncertainty of the response of others. Flame wars and a sense that the end of the Net is nigh have always been common.”2 Besides moderation and filtering, the linear character of one post appearing after the other is another commonly mentioned constraint of e-mail lists, which can only deal with a certain number of topics at a time or users inevitably lose overview. Not more than three or four threads can take place simultaneously. Discontent about the limitations of lists goes back a while. As I remember, discussions inside the circle and on neighboring lists about the necessity of building Web-based multi- layered “workgroups” were going on in 1996–97. It took a few years for something to happen. Despite all the technical changes in recent decades, electronic mailing lists have stayed pretty much the same.3 The move in the 1990s from majordomo list software (Unix code) to mailman (an open-source application with a Web interface) did not make a real difference to the way in which list communities operated. In the second half of the 1990s, system administrators and