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134 Herbert Hrachovec

support the activities of the research team and I spent some of my
seminars discussing their agenda. The result was a strange mix be-
5
tween universal reach and local circumstances. Several scholars,
searching the net for keywords like “global” and “village” were in due
course directed to give-l—only to be disappointed when they discov-
ered that German was the dominant language on the list. English
was also acceptable and was indeed used by some participants feel-
ing more comfortable in their native language. Reading German
was, however, a prerequisite of actively participating, a fact that had
simply been overlooked when the acronym was chosen to attract an
international audience.
It took list members several month to become aware of this
dilemma and some more time until a new reading of give was pro-
posed: “Gehirne in vollem Einsatz” (roughly “Brains giving their
best”). This playful echo of the original meaning of the list’s name
did not, however, remove a more fundamental ambivalence acutely
felt at the time. Viennese students were suddenly exchanging their
opinions and pursuing their academic curriculum in front of a world-
wide audience. Describing the situation in these terms might sound
unduly pathetic. Still, I want to argue that the description is—up to
a certain degree—legitimate. Compare the thrill of suddenly talking
to ten thousand people over a microphone. An individual voice is
suddenly broadcast by an enormously powerful medium. To disre-
gard the phantasies such scenarios evoke makes for a severely re-
stricted philosophy.
Foundational experiences are not for keeping, but neither are
they just discardable by-products as history unfolds. Starting Janu-
ary 1995 a lot of traffic on give-l was concerned with administrative
troubles as well as with several papers written on the occasion of a
symposium sponsored by the City of Vienna. But there was a less
pragmatic undercurrent: no one had done this kind of thing before. 6
Some (largely implicit) account of what the activity amounted to was
presupposed in our practice. In the background of computer-mediated
transactions a proto-theory of mailing lists was taking shape.
I was, as it happened, at that time commuting between Essen,
Germany and Vienna, using the list for some teleteaching. The list
itself eventually included about one hundred fifty persons of which
approximately fifty were based in Vienna, often knowing one an-
other personally, e.g., from taking part in my seminars. Under these
circumstances a certain technologically induced euphoria took hold
of several contributors. It has often been remarked that e-mail com-
bines features of writing and conversation, producing “texts” that