Quoting Tim May ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): [list stagnation redux] > The reasons are more than just lack of filters or moderators. The actual > content is minimal. The heyday of many of these lists was, not too > surprisingly, around 1991-94. This was the period when huge numbers of > e-mail accounts were becoming available to lots of people, through > faster modems and the rise of services like Portal, Netcom, Earthlink, > AOL, etc. And then in 1994-5 the Web hit big. So we had a huge pool of > people coming online. Not a coincidence that "Wired" appeared in 1993, > that online journalists began to be noticed, that the EFF was formed, > and on and on.
It's a rather widespread trend. These days, people seem content to relegate wild futurist speculations and detailed, meaningful discussion on various technical fronts to science fiction works or to refereed journals. Usenet (and the mailing lists of my acquaintance) has for a long time been a sewer where people go to fight over their personalities under the guise of conversation. But there is virtually no open dialogue on weighty technical matters. So much for the so-called weapon of openness. There is an up-side to this. Legislators, cops (of all sorts), sociologists and the like, as a group, will fail to acquire an inkling of the deeper issues of meaty technologies even as they are deployed by corporations, large and small. Their `experiments' in social control (GAK, wiretapping laws, bioethics regulation, etc.) will be for the most part uninformed and therefore compromised, if not doomed to failure. In the meantime, scientists, programmers, engineers, and technologists will carry on with their work quietly; routing around the damage of the government until it is no longer relevant. And from where I sit, that isn't a bad thing at all. Regards, Steve -- Just fake it. -- Include "35da3c9e079dcf68ec3a608e8c0a47f6" somewhere in your message when you reply.
