If I may chime in... From time to time, particularly early on in AoIR's (short) history, there's been discussion of whether the list should be moderated or not, etc. Nothing uncommon, I think, we've all seen examples of what can happen with lists. In any event, my strong feeling has always been that the best lists are self-organizing and self-sustaining. I would strongly prefer that we refrain from filtering, making rules, etc., at the "executive" level of AoIR, and allow the list to function as it will. Most of us, probably all of us, already have means of filtering e-mails in numerous ways. I would prefer to have AoIR neither sanction nor censor expression. Thanks, Sj

And where a moderator is prepared to spend a significant amount of time boot strapping discourse, was there any interesting data? I'm interested as a group analyst. Anecdotally, my experience suggests discourse is quashed when dominated by the conductor, however helpful s/he tries to be. And often, the helpfulness belies intense maternal anxiety or an expression of narcissistic needs (or both), either of which can be experienced as suffocating. In these circumstances, short discussions in very small sub-groups/pairs predominate, usually pivoting on the leader. I also have an idea that in these circumstances the person of the leader/moderator comes to attract greater extremes of idealisation and denigration from members (reflecting the schizoid splits that complement this immersion in narcissism). The person of the leader/moderator also plays a significantly greater role in shaping the culture of the group (ie to a much greater extent, the culture comes to reflect their person). Ben ----- Original Message ----- From: "Quentin (Gad) Jones" <qgjones@acm.org> To: <air-l@aoir.org> Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2002 9:14 PM Subject: Re: [Air-l] Impact of Moderation

Steve Jones wrote:

...

In any event, my strong feeling has always been that the best lists are self-organizing and self-sustaining.

I recently published research in a conference paper on Usenet discourse dynamics (Jones et. al. (2002) "An Empirical Exploration of Mass Interaction System Dynamics: Individual Information Overload and Usenet Discourse." In: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, IEEE, Big Island, Hawaii.) and just sent off a paper today to a journal that examined and compared Usenet and Listserv discourse dynamics. I looked at over 1000 discussion spaces and 3.5 million messages.

Moderation appears to impact negatively on the chances of messages getting a reply, on discourse being sustained, and on the average word length of messages (moderated discussions appear to have on average longer messages). Obviously there are a variety of reasons for this but I think the evidence speaks against moderation unless 1) a moderator is prepared to spend a significant amount of time boot strapping discourse or 2) the discourse is so politically sensitive that it is required.

Quentin

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" Most of us, probably all of us, already have means of filtering e-mails in numerous ways. I would prefer to have AoIR neither sanction nor censor expression." my primary method of filtering emails has always been by subject..... but subject headings seem to have gone the way of those in academia...no more plain labelling that nicely coincides with those keyword searches..but instead...a rather catchy title that has little or nothing to do with content my secondary method works better.......i check who has posted the message, and based on prior readings from them i'm sometimes guilty of just deleting them...unless i'm in the mood to be amused, annoyed or entertained and then...I just might read them and now a thought comes to me...what if everyone on the aoir list has read my previous postings and is now deleting me unread?......see how easy it is to add to the noise!! denise carter