ss wrote:
Time was when conversations tended to be relatively highbrow and intense.
But don't; people think that we have now broken a particular barrier in
being "comfortable as home" on silk - and that is reflected in the topics
that have started appearing on Silk? For example:
* Sponsor request for club membership
* Laptop repair info requested
* Phone repair information requested
* Old coin sales info requested
* Personal services info requested
Silk started off by us forcibly subscribing people we knew in the real world.
To that extent, its origins were in the comfort zone. More often than not, in
the flaky days of the Internet in India, the posting would be followed up by a
call to the person to check if the message had got through. And then the
postings for the day would be discussed in person over copious quantities of
beer.
And then, along came Kerry (RIP) http://arachnis.com/kerryo/. Here was a person, whom
none of us had met, with a point of view on almost any subject under the sun. And quite
soon there were many Kerrys on the list. It kind of forced the original members to step
out of the comfortable "touchy, feely" zone, and move on to more abstract
subjects. And it stayed that way for a good number of years.
To quote from Chris Kelty's paper
(http://silk.arachnis.com/anthro/Recursive_Publics.pdf):
<quote>
Although the topics on Silk List ranged from science fiction and movie reviews
to discussions on Kashmir, Harry Potter, transhumanism, or Napster, the
function of the list was mot so much to provide a forum for the subject matter
at hand (this could be had in many other places) but offered instead a site of
connection for loosely affiliated groups sharing particular concerns about
technology, society, and the Internet that were neither explicit nor determined
in each case by the same cultural or social location.
</quote>
The silk list I am writing this message to is not the one Chris describes. And
I miss it :)
Bharath
