I will unlurk for this one...
It seems to me that one medium-specific element of this
situation is the ability to forward messages to tens
and tens, or even hundreds, of people. As I recall,
one of the old rules of Netiquette was that people shouldn't
pass along to lots of people stuff they find in their
inbox without being pretty sure that all of those people
are interested in getting the material. Over the many
years that I spent as the administrator of a big (1800
subscribers), high volume(50-100 posts per day) non-
academic Listserv list, I ended up in many subscribers'
address books, and as a result I received a *lot* of
unsolicited forwarded material that people sent to
everyone in their address books. If some people seemed
frequently to be sending material to me and others, I would
email them and politely ask them to remove me from the
list of people to whom they forwarded this stuff. It
did become quite a bother, given the number of people who
were mass forwarding messages they thought were interesting,
funny, or cute, and thus I think there is a technologically
specific element: these weren't people who would have
called me up to tell me such things, or written me
letters, or even perhaps recalled in conversation that
they wanted to mention the material to me.
It does seem though, as Nancy indicated, that email
works as a two-edged sword. This same function just
as easily works to bind people together in communities
of interest/affinity.
What I often wonder is the degree to which rules of
Netiquette are still observed, how, by whom, and in what
kind of forums. The Welcome File that I wrote for the
list mentioned above starting in 1994 now looks positively
Victorian in its insistence on following specified rules
of Netiquette.
Holly
-----
Holly Kruse
Faculty of Communication
University of Tulsa
600 S. College Ave.
Tulsa, OK 74104
918-631-3845
holly-kruse(a)utulsa.edu
