Re: one more pen-l option

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
Michael's suggestion is how I use Pen-L.  I recommend it as an option.  The
flood of email is completely shut off.  There are a number of refinements I
would like to see.  The list of thread topics normally just gives the
subject line and an author in date order.  A summary of the content seems
possible also.  Also RSS notification of threads of interest would be nice.
All this pointing toward a more web based system of communication to move
away from the awful social problems email can have.

Looking down the road, threads are a way to classify content shaped by
conversation or the networked qualities of communication.  So RSS implies at
some point that classification of information goes toward being automated.
Google does that a little bit now.  It implies when we talk to each other a
common understanding is forged.  So normally a conversation on a list
doesn't engage everyone.  Can automation evolve the conversation to a much
larger number of people being engaged and what does that imply?

People complain about lurkers then complain about email volume because both
represent a bottle neck in the process of building a classification of a
topic into a common mind set.  I don't want to mystify classification.  A
lot of mathematical logic has explored the issue of classification and big
business like Google take it seriously.

To me classification is how we stabilize a concept.  Some things are central
to the concept, and color is a good example of a classification that is
shared to varying degrees in the population.  Color research tends to find
that color starts out at a small number of primitives for all people and all
societies then adds color concepts and categories as the local society
evolves in complexity.  If we could automate a conversation so that what is
spoken to each of us at once via the list is what each of us talk back to
then we cross the bottleneck barrier.  We can't conceptualize this as some
great power saying something centrally and we all pipe up our little assent.
That structure is one to many, rather we must grasp that a classification in
society is many to many and automation is there to shape that we all work
together.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor