Also a disruptive person (and I speaking only in the general here) can hijack the entire direction of a list, thus limited the beneficial effect of filtering out an individual's messages. A troll, for example, might work to intentionally raise disruptive points and get other list members talking about irrelevant or unproductive topics. Filtering out the comments of the troll, in that case, will not restore the integrity of the list. Again, I am just speaking generally. Mark
Is it just me, or does anyone find this kinda funny. I mean, it strikes me a bit odd--an odd importation of face-to-face communication notions into a non-f2f setting--to suggest that someone can "dominate" discussion on an email list. Unlike f2f conversation, email list participants can filter the stuff they get from the list either automatically or by deleting any message they see that comes from a certain person. Either filtering method is quite easy to engage in, so non-use of filtering can't be blamed on laziness. Does anyone else get the feeling that we tend to attend to list posts in a manner similar to the way that we attend to topical f2f utterances--i.e, we focus on them, give them the floor, without discrimination. Anyone with similar insights? --Christian Nelson
-- Mark Warschauer Associate Professor of Education and Informatics University of California, Irvine 2001 Berkeley Place Irvine, CA 92697-5500 tel: (949) 824-2526, fax: (949) 824-2965 markw@uci.edu; http://www.gse.uci.edu/faculty/markw