Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 19:11:58 -0400
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Link: http://www.slate.com/id/2262954
The Joy of Listservs
One of the Internet's earliest innovations is still one of its best.
By Farhad Manjoo
Posted Thursday, Aug. 5, 2010, at 9:14 PM ET
During one frenzied weekend in 1986, Eric Thomas,
an engineering student in Paris, invented what
would become one of the most important things on
the Internet: the listserv. Actually, what he
created was LISTSERV, a network program to manage
e-mail discussion groups. Those with access to
the fledgling Internet had been using mailing
lists since the 1970s, but the lists always had
to be set up manually—only a list manager could
keep the group's participants up-to-date, and
that took a lot of work. With LISTSERV came
automation: a moderator would set a few simple
rules—who could access the list, how often mail
would go out, etc.—and then users could manage their own subscriptions.
.
After LISTSERV, e-mail lists took off. Thomas
says that within a few years, there were hundreds
of discussion groups, then thousands, most of
them hosted at universities and devoted to
scientific research or technology. (One of the
biggest early lists was LINKFAIL, where people
could report Internet outages; LINKFAIL
eventually got so big that its own traffic began
to generate network failures.) Soon other
list-management programs popped up to compete
with LISTSERV, and it wasn't long before people
began using listserv as a generic noun to denote
an e-mail discussion group. Legally, that's a
no-no—LISTSERV is a registered trademark of
L-Soft International, Thomas' Swedish software
company, which offers several examples of proper
usage on its site. For instance, you shouldn't
say, "Let's post a message to the listserv."
Instead, say, "Let's post a message to the LISTSERV® e-mail list."
It's impossible, of course, for L-Soft to police
those rules: Listservs—whether or not they're
LISTSERV® e-mail lists—long ago became a basic
feature of the Internet. They're so entrenched
that you rarely notice them anymore. We all use
e-mail lists all the time, yet in our frenzy over
Twitter, Facebook, and other novel communication
tools, we forget how valuable well-managed e-mail
groups can be. I admit I only got to thinking
about listservs after JournoList—blogger Ezra
Klein's now-defunct, off-the-record discussion
group of liberal reporters and academics—popped
into the news. Klein has written that he started
the group (using Google Groups, not LISTSERV) to
give journalists a private space to discuss the
news in a way they couldn't in public.
I was never on JournoList, and it has always
sounded like an unworkable idea to me—how can you
expect a bunch of reporters to keep all those
discussions secret? (Blogger David Weigel, whose
leaked JournoList e-mails led to his resignation
at the Washington Post, was recently hired by
Slate; I've never met Weigel or even e-mailed
with him.) At the same time, I understood Klein's
impulse. That impulse being: Listservs are
wonderful! For a lot of topics, e-mail
lists—especially off-the-record lists—are better
than Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr at fostering a
sense of community and generating deep, thoughtful conversations.
.
Unfortunately, e-mail groups don't have the same
buzz as the latest wave of Webby communication
tools. "I remember 10 years ago, you'd have
people saying things like, 'Hey, I'm starting the
Let's Fix the DMCA mailing list,' " says Declan
McCullagh, a CNET reporter who started Politech,
a pioneering mailing list covering tech and
politics, in 1994. (It went on hiatus on 2008,
but McCullagh plans to relaunch it later this
year.) "You just don't hear that as much anymore.
Today people would be more inclined to start a
Twitter hashtag or a Facebook fan page or something like that."
That's a shame—in a world dominated by blurbs,
tweets, and sound bites, we need more mailing
lists, not fewer. Reader, I'm asking you to join
me in a new mission—let's save listservs! If
you've got a favorite mailing list, e-mail me the
name and topic or post a comment below—I'd like
to learn about it even if it isn't widely
accessible or if it's on a subject that I
probably won't care about (like sports). I don't
want to out these lists in order to destroy them,
a la Tucker Carlson; I'd like to promote them to
the world, because we should all be participating in more listservs.
s.
Why am I so into mailing lists? In part, it's
from personal experience. Over the last decade,
I've worked at three online magazines—Wired.com,
Salon, and now Slate. I was a big fan of all of
these publications before I started at each, but
what surprised me the most about each of these
publications was how much more interesting they
were on the inside. Many of the stories you read
on Slate—it could even be the majority—are
inspired or informed by e-mail discussions. I
open my inbox every morning and find it filled
with links to news, plus long threads of
hilarious, profound, and sometimes completely
infuriating discussions about those links. The
forum is a prized source of information and a
wonderful sounding board: When I have an idea I
want feedback on, I post it to Slate's e-mail
group; it's a much more reliable way of getting
good, meaningful responses than, say, putting out a call on Twitter.
.
The quality of the discussions at my various
workplaces stems in part from the caliber of the
people there, but that's not the whole story. In
the past few years Slate, like all publications,
has tried to open its internal discussions to the
public through Twitter and Facebook, but those
platforms can never mimic what's going on in our
e-mail groups. That's because the e-mail lists
are closed: When people believe their thoughts
are being shared only with a small group, they're
more comfortable to express what they really feel
and can thus say more interesting things.
There are advantages to listservs even when
they're not private. E-mail is available
everywhere, for starters. "In a world where
devices proliferate, e-mail is king, equal on all
of them," says Jim Griffin, the co-creator of
Pho, a huge and storied e-mail list devoted to
discussions about digital entertainment. You
can't say the same about Twitter and Facebook,
which might not work correctly—or as quickly, or
at all—on all mobile devices or across other
platforms. E-mail is also more accommodating of
long messages. There's no character limit, as on
Twitter, and there are many handy tools that
allow for functions not available on Facebook
(you can save a draft, check spelling, add inline
links, and organize a torrent of messages using automated filters).
McCullagh points out that different social norms
apply to e-mail, too. For example, comments on
Facebook tend to be relentlessly positive.
Because posts there are tied to your real-life
identity, it's difficult to criticize someone
sharply on his Facebook page; if you do, it's
considered rude, like swearing at someone in his
own house. Mailing lists, meanwhile, are very
accepting of flame wars. As James Fallows notes,
these can sometimes be annoying—especially if
you're not a party to them—but the best flame
wars can be thoroughly absorbing and informative,
and I've even seen flame wars change people's minds.
This leads to perhaps the best thing about e-mail
lists: They are just about the only medium online
devoted exclusively to discussing things. You
start a Facebook group to popularize an idea (1
million people against hipsters!), you start a
Tumblr to make fun of the idea (Look at This
Fucking Hipster), and you start a Twitter account
to get a lot of people interested in your pithy
observations about the idea. E-mail lists, by
contrast, are devoted to getting people to talk
about an idea. What's more important than that?
Become a fan of Slate and Farhad Manjoo on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.
Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and
the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a
Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at
farhad.manjoo@slate.com and follow him on Twitter.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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