I'm enclosing an article which appeared yesterday in `Good Weekend' Magazine, which comes with the Sydney Morning Herald, the biggest newspaper in this state. I actually helped to start this article off - it was written by a journalist who is a friend of a friend and who was looking for information to do an article about listservers. Naturally I shot off an e-mail to him detailing our adventures here at Bananafish straight away, and he contacted me (and later, some other bananafishers) to talk about it. As you'll see, he was particularly interested in one story, and used it as the basis for the whole article! I haven't enclosed the whole article (which was very interesting and hopefully I'll get a copy up on my webpage sometime soon) but I'm sure you'll find what is here quite interesting. Anyway, read on - our 15 minutes of fame (: ! _________ THE MAIL OF THE SPECIES Behind all the white noise on the net, a quiet revolution has been taking place. John Casimir looks at the boom in e-mail lists, where 18th Century civility meets 20th Century technology June 1998. Lesley Podesta was between houses. Her possessions, 62 cartons of a life, were in storage. In a week, she would move into a new home with her three-year-old son, Michael. Until then, the pair were camping out at a friend's place. She was watching television on the night of the fire. When a news flash interrupted the program, bringing pictures of a warehouse ablaze in Footscray, the 37-year-old wondered out loud if it could be the building housing her belongings, but laughed off the idea. She thought her cartons were in nearby North Melbourne. She was wrong. "Every single thing we owned, apart from the two suitcases of clothes we had, was burned," Lesley recalls. "It was horrible. We lost every photo. Everything." Devastated by the loss, she took time off from her job as a manager at the Department of Employment, Education and Youth to return some order to her life. When things began to normalise, she e-mailed a couple of overseas friends, people she had met through the Bananafish mailing list (www.nyu.edu.acf/staff/oconnort/jds), an online forum for discussion of the life and works of author J.D. Salinger. One of Lesley's digital acquaintances, United States academic Will Hochman, relayed her message to the other members of the list, explaining why she hadn't been contributing to their conversations lately. Soon after, the care packages started to arrive, bundles of concern winging their way around the globe, commiserations from a circle of friends Lesley had never laid eyes upon. "People sent tapes of records," she recalls, "because I lost all my music. They sent drawings for framing. But mostly, they sent books, because I lost my entire library. Will sent me all the Salingers to start with. Then people asked what other books I read. When I said I had eclectic tastes, they just started sending books they liked. It was lovely, really lovely. Some just sent cards, postcards or notes. I probably got about 30 packages from list members, mostly from the States, but also from England and Australia as well. All of them from people I've never met in the flesh. It was amazing." There's a critical orthodoxy which holds that computers are a dehumanising, de-socialising force. Lesley Podesta is one of many who know the opposite to be true. The word 'community" occurs frequently in her discussion of her online experiences - she describes the members of the Bananafish list as "very close". And if community seems an odd term to attach to a geographically disparate group of people who awareness of each other is based on nothing mo than electronic correspondence, then maybe it's time we attempted a redefinition. Virtual communities such as Bananafish exist in their tens of thousands in the online world, invisible congregations of people brought togeth by common interests, by the opportunity the Internet provides to seek out like-minded individuals and build real relationships with the no matter where they are. As Wired magazine noted earlier this year, 'The hot new medium is e-mail!" For all the fuss made about the glamorous World Wide Web, the fact remains that plain old text-based mail has been the most successful application of the Internet. Despite the predictions of pundits and hopeful economists, what people most want from the Net is not entertainment or commerce. It's the chance to connect with other people. And for this reason, one of e-mail's most important contributions to, our culture is the mailing list. You don't hear about mailing lists much. The media, always on the lookout for shock or novelty (Woman gives birth online! Couple to lose virtual virginity!), hasn't seen them as sexy they're just ordinary people swapping messages via their computers. But although they may be one of the Net's most low-key stories, mailing lists are also one of its most positive and profound. "The Internet will be mainly used for text for a long time to come," says McKenzie Wark, multiple mailing list member and lecturer in cultural studies at Macquarie University. "It's not multimedia, it's a return to writing. And really, lists are a central tool for the revival of writing. "In the mass print age, the novel became the central literary form, a consumer product stamped out en masse. But in the 18th century, before the novel mattered, correspondence was a central literary form, and we've gone back to that culture. Only now it's not a tiny literate elite who can participate. (The article then goes on to explain exactly what a mailing list is and how it works, which I assume you all know (:). The live chat areas of the Internet are often dominated by facile conversation. The Usenet newsgroups are weighed down by advertising, fights (known as 'flame wars') and the white noise of irresponsible posts - the sense of community in these places has often dissolved as more people abuse their fragile ecosystems. All this, to a great extent, has left mailing lists as one of the few places able to provide polite, intelligent onversation. Scott Southwick, who runs the Liszt Web site (www.liszt.com), a searchable directory of more than 90,000 mailing lists, describes the mailing list as the most civilised form of online community."The format lends itself to calm, thoughtful, literate, mature discussion," he says, 'where relationships between the list members actually grow and deepen over an extended period of time." Multiple conversations are a common list occurrence - each 'thread" of discussion carries its own title, so it can be easily chosen or discarded from the e-mail in-tray. Some threads go on for months or years; others fizzle and die.Two-way lists, at their bottom line, are discussion groups. Some are like refined salons. Some are like raucous poker nights. Some are like dinner parties. Some are like support groups. Some are formal, some are casual.Some lists have a handful of members, some have hundreds. Some have owners who moderate all posts and keep conversations strictly on track. Others are more organic. Not all grow into communities. Many wither on the vine through lack of interest. Others spiral out of control, burning up in flame wars. Others were simply never meant to he conununities: they're places where people can share knowledge on'a topic and nothing more. Ultimately, they take on the personalities of their inhabitants - they're only as interesting as the people who take part. (There is some more discussion about lists here) If lists themselves are literature, it seems appropriate that, like Bananafish (which is maintained by part-time fiction writer Tim O'Connor from the campus of New York University), the first non-official, non-technological Intemet mailing list was a literary one.Lists had originally appeared on small, local computer networks (usually at universities) in the 1960s as a method of sending administrative messages to the network users. The first known social list coalesced in the mid-1970s. SF LOVERS, a group of people sharing their ideas on science fiction, was the extra-curricular creation of the researchers on Arpanet, the precursor to the Net built by the US Department of Defence's Advanced Research Projects Agency. No matter what an invention is intended for, it seems, people will define its uses. Mailing lists were developed for purely practical purposes. That they have travelled so far, that they have shown a capability to make us reconsider our relationship with technology, as Lesley Podesta knows, is testament to the power and place of the human in the machine. ---------- The rest of the article examines some `case studies' of people and their experiences on particular lists. Well, I think the article certainly reflects my experience of listservers. What do you all think ? (if you got this far (:) Camille verona_beach@geocities.com @ THE ARTS HOLE www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442 @ THE INVERTED FOREST www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest