taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (10/28/86)
This article is from WAnderson.wbst@Xerox.COM (Bill Anderson)
and was received on Tue Oct 28 08:30:34 1986
In CAS Digest, No. 47, Dave Taylor writes about problems with network
news group discussions that arise from individual authors organizing
their own submissions (I hope I got this right!) :
... information [is] hard to find and hard to understand....
[Since] the discussion lacks a rational organization it tends to
wander and sometimes never seems to answer the initial questions or
points addressed initially.... On some networks, notably USENET,
the problem is sufficiently great, and sufficiently amplified by
the volume of postings, that a large number of people that could
and should contribute to the discussions don't because they don't
have the time or interest to weed through the postings....
The solutions that have evolved so far are quite illuminating -
the most typical being a network of friends who mail each other
'interesting' postings from areas and groups they suspect the other
doesn't read. I have a group of about forty people who will
forward things of interest to me as they encounter them. But this
is all rather on an ad hoc basis and we need to have a more formal
system....
My question is Why do we need a more formal system? A good friend of
mine occasionally sends out letters that are collections of newspaper
and magazine clippings annotated with his own commentary. They're
wonderful to receive; a kind of new personal letter form. The best
solution may be providing communication links for smaller groups and
networks. For me smaller groups are better; there's more chance to
commune if the community is small. In fact, I've heard support for the
idea that the best size groups for social activity are 12 or fewer
people. As for lost information I fall back on Sherlock Holmes
statement when confronted with a difficult encryption problem: "What one
man can invent, another can discover." Does is really matter if I
rediscover something? How much of the information overloading the media
needs to be available to everyone?
Bill Anderson
[I almost hate to say this, but it's statements like the very last line in
Bills' message - "How much of the information .. needs to be available" - that
really hints at the possible dangers of the information consultants. What if
we totally depended on others to supply us with information and they all agreed
that 'event a' wasn't important enough to tell us...but it was... -- Dave]