I haven't been following all the events on the list lately, but the difference for me was that I used to receive the list in the form of a digest, which meant one big post per day. With the recent changes, I am receiving all individual messages and do find this unusual and annoying. I suppose there are instructions somewhere as to how to get back into digest mode, but it is hard to find time and patience to look for them. I personally don't want to unsubscribe. Maria ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeremy J. Shapiro" <jshapiro@fielding.edu> To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2004 5:10 PM Subject: Re: [Air-l] online group dynamics
I imagine that there are people who, when they first discover the Internet, with excitement and enthusiasm join all kinds of lists with the idea of the infinite possibility of everything that is out there, everything that they would like to keep track of and be involved in, and so on, but, being real people with real-life constraints, they don't really have time to keep up with these lists and don't really participate in them, but just let this mail accumulate on their computers that they occasionally -- every few months or every few years -- delete them. Or maybe just save them for some vague time in the future when they imagine they'll have time to look at them. Then one of these lists will act up -- there will be a lot of communication on it or there will be some kind of repeating messages such as "unsubscribe" -- and all of a sudden these same people suddenly feel that they and their computers are being overwhelmed and swamped, and so they suddenly feel the need to get off the list or lists, but they never really paid attention to the list or the original instructions as to how to unsubscribe, and, being now in a panic, they don't even pay attention to the fact that these very unwanted messages contain unsubscribe instructions, and so they just start sending "unsubscribe" messages. So these people may very well be not people who specialize in Internet technology but rather just were vaguely interested in the list or the idea of it. I think many of us have seen this same phenomenon happen on many lists, and the people who are sending unsubscribe messages tend to be people who are only peripherally connected to the list.
Jeremy
At 06:28 PM 8/17/2004, your brain seems to have output the following: -------------------------------------------------------- I was thinking along similar lines as Guillaume earlier today. How funny that folk who supposedly specialize in internet technology/online communication (right?) can't follow simple directions! I *hadn''t* moved to the level of analysis of considering that some folk might be doing it on purpose, just to get a rise out of somebody else. :-) I tend to privilege a more habitual (unconscious?) behavioral explanation of folks not paying complete attention, becoming annoyed, and reacting from the annoyance, instead of dealing with the lack of presence. :-) Guillaume's leap implies more agency for the individual. I like it!
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