Greetings Economists, On Feb 18, 2008, at 8:03 PM, John Gulick wrote:
who brings more clutter than enlightenment to "left-wing" maillists.
Doyle; Many Lists seem to function on the principle of argument and perhaps long threads with a lot of detail. What's the purpose? In most cases there is little done to work together toward common goals. Rather the oppositional stimulation between people is primarily what draws these small scale confrontations. My quarrel with lists is not so much flames as that the form yields such small results for such prolonged labors. It's not as if tech savvy people like Ravi don't offer occasional alternate courses, it's that the method of work to combine is so difficult to pull together into something larger. To me the call to limit list mail to a size too small to merit work in photography dooms the content to irrelevancy. Typically when doing pictures I'll work on something like a single 4 mb size file (reduced from 110 mbs of file space). Which 4 mbs might be the whole size of of the list for several days. The lists are 'text' friendly web hostile environments. The technology demonstrably does not build socialist connection. The few examples of working together tend like Michael Perelman working on econospeak to emphasize individual voices and sort of web page clunkiness. Probably augmented ubiquitous computing will start to change that. Ubiquitous refers to chips embedded everywhere rather than on the desk top. And augmentation is the antithesis of virtual. What this emphasizes and relieves in the current situation is the concept called presence. The sense that one's community is connected to one and that one is doing something with them. Right now that is crude social networking, but sometime this will convert to take advantage of skilled political thinking to build something besides argumentation. After that one will look back on this as a wonder. A wonder why people tolerated the limitations when they wanted to build socialist community. thanks, Doyle Saylor
