On 9/12/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
Folks,
I have just spent some time reviewing the List's archives for the past several months, and it is clear something is changing and not for the good. The dialogues have become more combative, argumentative and downright mean. The individual contributions have become more aggressive, intolerant, patronizing, bullying, insulting, and downright mean. There has been a steady decline in fairness, civility and just plain listening.
Also, it appears that the majority of the Members of this List are willing to scrutinize anyone or anything but themselves.
What's going on?
Marc Riddell
Did you read through more than just the last few months? There's six years of archived lists; they make for pretty interesting if headache-inducing reading. I would be interested in your conclusions based on a year or three's worth of data. (Of course it's very time-consuming to read archives, I know!)
Most of what I've seen in the archives is that there are issues that come up periodically, with never much consensus or a slow shift in how the issues are argued; and issues that keep coming up but have a drift towards consensus until something gets done. It's also interesting to note the various groups of people that crop up, are very active on the lists for a few months or even years, then go away; versus the few hardy souls that are still posting and have been here since the beginning. Also interesting are the brilliant ideas/proposals that you see pop up once in a while that seem perfectly reasonable, but nothing ever happened with; occasionally an entirely different, newly enthusiastic person will come up with the same idea later. There's definitely a rhythm to what issues come up and how that I haven't really spent enough time with the archives to determine; but the lists seem to have been pretty argumentative since the beginning all in all, with presumably a steadily expanding readership, but perhaps not a proportional increase in posters at any one time.
-- phoebe