Gotta have this sentence here so it doesnt' look like i'm completely bottom/middle posting :)
On 6/23/06, Todd Walton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 6/23/06, RBW <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Well, completely to my and others' shock, she was hooked on the computer thing. She dived right in and found much to love. She liked being able to email people she knew, and we had a (verbal, face-to-face) discussion about email one day. I was very surprised to learn that she had immediately come to the purposeful conclusion (everything about this woman is purposeful, she's very strong of mind) that "bottom posting" was better than the alternatives. She didn't call it bottom posting, of course, but she described it in detail. She and I agreed almost completely on the etiquette of quoting. (I say almost, because I think that it's okay to top post if you're only replying to the general gist, nothing specific, and she goes all the way and says bottom post always.)
While anecdotes are good, they're not very convincing. It's just one more person who agrees to an opinion.
> Especially since unlike us where we have a conscious hold on > each other for conformity and awareness, the average Joe views their > online behavior (and falsely so) as entirely personal, entirely a matter > of their own invention and entirely confidential, Outlook behavior > modification not withstanding. That's one of the best explanations I've seen, RBW. Sometimes it feels like top posters are living in a black void and they imagine the words of others as something that is fed to them from an uncaring and unconscious word generator. If they reply it's a lazy act of bottling up proto-thought-of-the-moment and spilling it into the keyboard. Once the thought is gone, it's out of mind. Flush the toilet and walk away. Another feeling I sometimes get is that the top poster considers their words as something to put on a pedestal, as if no reply is necessary or wanted.
Do top posters always give you this feeling? What if the top poster does think about it, but prefers to top post, would you have these same thoughts about them? Seems pretty unfair to be so judgemental based on top vs bottom posting. Quoting the specific thing you're replying to, and then putting your
reply afterwards, is an implicit acknowledgement that your words don't exist in a vacuum, that you're having a conversation in which others matter.
The only reason I'd bottom/middle post is, in this case, because there's so many different subjects covered. I have many simple paragraph-per-e-mail conversations, where top posting is exceedingly appropriate, and indeed, it is a conversation. -- Nicholas Wheeler Systems Administrator Development InfoStructure -- KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
