Two responses: Deborah Finn's intuition has some precedent in the research literature. In Smith, McLaughlin, & Osborne's early JCMC article on "Conduct Control on Usenet" (back in the day when download speeds were slow, and detecting and deleting redundancies was quite effortful), the authors noted that to avoid the perception of "bandwidth piggery" individuals would apologize up front for cross-postings. See http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol2/issue4/smith.html More recently, Hee Sun Park et al. (2005) document that Koreans (and members of other cultures, in subsequent research) tend to apologize in the introductions of unsolicited (SPAM) messages. See Human Communication Research, 31 (3), pp. 365-398. --Joe === Joe Walther Professor of Communication Professor of Telecommunication, Information Studies & Media Michigan State University https://www.msu.edu/~jwalther/ Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:44:39 -0500 From: Deborah Elizabeth Finn <deborah_elizabeth_finn@post.harvard.edu> To: Barry Wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca> Cc: air-l@aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Why do people apologize for cross-posting? Message-ID: <CAJwDAXq-Fj51UjZWkHASApBSXyzZPcy+KKravuNVtzaeY8Momw@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 6:25 PM, Barry Wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca>wrote:
How else do you get the word out to multiple lists. Please be proud of yourself.
Dear Barry, My theory is that it dates back to the day of Usenet. If you cross-posted to multiple Usenet groups, the members of all those groups would see all responses. This meant that folks from alt.fan.kirk-rules would have to be contaminated with content written by members of alt.fan.picard-rules. Oh, the humanity!