Re: PEN-L contributions

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
LP writes,
When there is an absence of learned contributions on economics from all
the well-established academics on pen-l, naturally you will see other
people-including myself-using the forum for a discussion of issues that
are not quite economic in nature. For that I apologize in advance.

Doyle,
I don't agree with this first statement.  The issue of economic postings is
not how you pose the above.  I have substantive disagreements with the
thrust of this whole essay by LP.

LP,
Perhaps establishing a
faculty lounge atmosphere is what's necessary.

If that's the case, then there is something deeply wrong with the left
academy. If its leading lights view listservs as just a place to post
job, conference or journal announcements or queries for a print work in
progress, then you end up with the intellectually arid atmosphere of
H-Humanities.

After LBO-Talk was launched, it became fairly obvious that a lot of the
discussion that had been taking place on pen-l was being diverted there.
I proposed to Michael Perelman at the time that he set up something at
H-Humanities which would be a no-nonsense mailing list for left
economists.

Doyle,
Louis says the problem is that educators are shying away from Pen-L because
their attitude is the problem.  I don't think so.  In particular LP says
LBO-Talk drew off discussion from Pen-L.  On LBO Chuck Grimes made an
interesting recent comment.  He said he didn't like the blogs of people like
Max Sawicky because they weren't as free flowing as the listservs.  However,
Max's site is pretty popular nevertheless.  And some blogs attract more
100,000 readers a day.

I think LP's criticism lacks substance.  Essentially a lot of academic work
is done collaboratively.  A famous example in biology is that S.J. Gould
wrote important papers together with a single (or two) other
collaborator(s).  Physics projects like the Stanford Linear Accelerator can
have a few thousand people working at once.  One sees numerous books on the
neuroscience market with multiple authors each writing to a single chapter.

The sense of a proposal about collaborating on economic issues is missing
from LP's comments.  Since LP puts this in the context of a technology of
listservs rather than any human exchange I'll focus on the technology.  But
if one were to widen the issue one could examine human collaboration in
terms of language, symbol, common work process, shared attention, and
include human and close non-human relatives.

The Slash dot list functions a little differently from Pen-L in that it's
mandate is technology.  Pen-L usually has people writing their own stuff
whereas Slash dotters comment on technology in the popular press.  Slash dot
list looks like a news aggregator with some personal opinion about the
common interests.  It's safe to say that Slash dot has participation from
the highest levels of technology.  The daily hit participation is very
large.  I don't know the figures but it is reasonable guess on my part that
the hits to the site are over a million a day.

Slash dot deals with controversy differently than does Pen-L.  People can
say anything but their comments are assigned a level.  One has to drill down
to the bottom level to see rants and rage content.

Since LP ignores blogs compared to lists like Pen-L he seems to make the
point that a list could do the same work as a blog.  In fact the content of
any given day on a blog is determined by the blogger.  So there is a
narrowing of content to the specific individual's taste.  People follow an
individual because they have qualities people like in that person.

A list is more or less more open to the daily content being posted than is a
blog.  However, one can feel like when one posts and no one responds that no
one reads one's posting.  A critical human sense of human connection gets
lost.  Writers traditionally wrote by themselves with no sense of what the
audience did until their books sold enough to sustain their output.  Lists
are like that.  One can't tell what is the impact upon silent lurkers.

Functionally though a list while reflecting threads of back and forth about
some subject a listserv does not reflect a common (a single document signed
by multiple authors) collaboration.  What they reflect best is conflict of
emotion about the content of a particular thread.  If people don't feel that
way about each other the threads die down.  Which one could mistake also for
just plain lack of interest.  The list technology does not allow the
collaborative processes structures to be captured by the listserv technology
method.

We all know also the flame issue.  Writing itself does not carry many clues
about the dynamical states of emotion of the writers.  Usually what appears
are intense reactions between writers in a thread to the extent words allow
portraying such things.  The crude nature of the feelings drives more
delicately inclined writers away.  It's a bit like gladiators coming to the
ring to post to a list serv.  No matter what the subject.  Some women
comment on this occasionally, one could say women's lists are more inclined
to treat each other gently.  But the sense of collaboration is the same.  If
one posts to women something that doesn't catch other peoples attention the
thread dies down.  Collaboration is not well addressed by listservs.

Most science is done about subjects that are really boring to most people.
The value of the science is the training of a decade or more to do certain
kinds of brainwork to understand a material subject.  It does not appear to
me that lists capture that sort of process.  For example both Michael
Perelman and LP have been complaining about how people participate on Pen-L.
I doubt their complaints will change things much because serious brainwork
is spread out of time about subjects in which interest or attention issues
are important.

What matters in brainwork is not so much volume of chat, but relevance of
chat.  That is a library like function.  In all the threads written how much
of it is of worth to my particular thoughts?  A google search on a subject
turns up a lot of words on a subject.  A list thread will turn up a certain
amount of thoughts on the thread from two or three or perhaps up to 10
people.  But we know those 10 people are limited in what they know.  And the
thread stops shortly.  So if the subject is boring and needs a much longer
time span to serve as decent brainwork these lists don't really solve the
problem.  An academic used to working in those ways would not respond well
to the challenge of on the spot responding that list demand of participants.
Besides most academic work is boring routine.

Collaboration is not simply writing one's opinion in either.  It means that
people that agree on something write together to make something that one
person could not do by themselves.  The tool of lists serves does not work
well that way.  For example collaboration really demands what the technical
industry calls synchronous, but is more clearly said by the phrase, 'real
time'.   The immediacy of the lists is an illusion.  One reads threads in
sequence and gets the illusion of synchronicity, but you can't do real world
work that way.  The reason goes back to flame wars.  The emotional content
in real world work is important as well as the words.  The emotion content
can be adequately portrayed in conference telephone calls and to a lesser
Instant messaging will use emoticons written text just can't efficiently
portray emotion.

Secondly written or text work implies that a word is static.  Not dynamical.
But collaboration is by it's nature a dynamical work process.  So lists far
from addressing the dynamical feature of brainwork imply as writing has for
centuries the permanent and static nature of the written word.  What you
said yesterday is always and forever who you are.  And unchangeable quality
of the ideal human being.  A platonic ideal quite in conflict with socialist
thinking.
thanks,
Doyle