Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 04:12:34 -0400
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: Elspeth Kovar <ekovar at worldnet.att.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Enough

At 09:32 AM 6/6/2005, dicconf wrote:

>On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Elspeth Kovar wrote:
>
> > May I suggest that everything not involving bookstores, moving about in
> > submarines, cats or quanta be put on hold for 24 hours?  Time enough to
> > pick things up again after that once people have stopped to breathe.  And
> > yes, "everything" includes the British or any other government as well or,
> > given the current temper, we'll have people arguing about the Mongols or
> > some such.
>
>Why do people suffering data overload constantly ask other people to shut
>up, rather than learning to use their delete key?
>
>Other people enjoy talking about other subjects.  You are not under any
>pressure to track on their postings.  It's not as if this were a
>conversation in a crowded room where the noise level could interfere with
>hearing.

It's not a matter of data overload, it's that people were behaving in an
emotionally overloaded manner.  The physical noise level doesn't interfere
with conversation online but the emotional one does.

By now you've noticed that I didn't ask that people shut up.  Rather, I
suggested that everyone take a break for a day and breathe.  I included the
implication that it was because tempers were getting out of hand but didn't
say so outright; I can now see how that could have been missed.

It comes down to the old matter of the disadvantage of usenet compared to
the letter column in hardcopy fanzines.  Here it's easy to fire off a
response without thinking rather than having to take the time to craft a
letter.  The latter usually, although not always, requires that people read
what they're responding to a couple of times and thus think.  (To the best
of my knowledge they could also write in long paragraphs rather than having
to break things up into short ones to make online reading easier.)

So now and then on the WSFA list someone suggests that everyone take a
break for a day from whatever is getting folks hot under the collar.  I
phrased it in the reverse direction, giving a somewhat facetious sampling
of things that people could talk about.

[At which point it does become personal to me rather than the usual Feeding
and Care of the WSFA List that many of us do.  I probably should have done
it the other way around but I was concerned that if I listed the things
that people were reacting strongly to there was a good chance that some of
my own strong reaction would leak through.

That's something for which you can quite rightly take me to task: here I am
trying to encourage people to behave like adults and I haven't managed to
do it myself! The best I could do was take my own advice, putting my own
responses to anything other than one email about the mood of the list on
hold for 24 hours.]

The advantage for the community is that when we as a group do so there
aren't emails that come in and sit there, taunting us to respond.  To the
best of my recollection the last time there was a political blow up none of
us did this and it blew up indeed, but at other times it's worked.

At the same time it's not something to be invoked casually or at the first
sign of people getting intense.  That not only dilutes any effectiveness
but cuts off interesting discussions, neutering the group.

>-- Dick Eney
>     It's just "d" in the Pine program, for instance...

"The "delete" key is your friend."

The 'delete' key does work in Eudora although I prefer to use the software
itself to first mark things read and then move them to the 'trash'
folder.  If there are unread messages there I always check before emptying
the mailbox to make sure that my spam filters haven't caught something they
shouldn't have.

Elspeth