A Perfect Day for 15 Minutes of Fame

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Sun, 18 Oct 1998 21:49:52 +1000

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