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@utulsa.edu