Page 152 - Culture Technology Communication

New Kids on the Net 135

carry some of the immediacy of face-to-face encounters. This feature
was certainly appreciated, but another, more conceptual peculiarity
of e-mail discourse impressed itself even more deeply on the group.
Texts (or tele-events), when broadcasted all over the world, often
produce an inherently passive audience that has no choice but to ac-
cept whatever the distributors make available. Local meetings, sem-
inars for example, provide opportunities to shape events in person.
Technically speaking, mailing lists are trivial extensions of SMTP,
but they offer entirely new social dynamics.
The notion of a “global audience” has in the past, somewhat
metaphorically, been applied to people reading their daily paper or
sitting in front of television sets. With the invention of mailing lists
the term can be given a much more literal meaning. Real-life audi-
ences are distinguished from “audiences” in a derived sense by their
member’s actual awareness of each other. Public events in their
most basic form demand bodily presence and enable people to react
to each other’s interventions spontaneously, whereas a media event
synthesises numerous single addressees into a more abstract social
gathering. The mechanism of mailing lists, as it turns out, goes a
long way to combine the requirements of global reach and local
awareness. One might be able to watch one’s neighbours watching
TV, or notice the book one’s friend just bought, but there is no way
to know in general who at a given moment is watching a particular
program or what persons are reading one’s favourite book.
In contrast to this, every mailing list has a simple “review” com-
mand, enabling each member to automatically retrieve the names of
all fellow-participants. This is, admittedly, not the bodily co-presence
characteristic of on-location meetings, but it is one of its closest ap-
proximations yet by means of media technology. Participants in mail-
ing lists de facto know precisely whom they are addressing themselves
to and they know that those addressed know that they are noticed in
this way. Furthermore, if the system works, electronic mail is practi-
cally simultaneous on a global scale, so that responses to a message
can in principle be given in real time. A group of people might be dis-
persed all over the planet and still each of its members can know of
each other, address the group at any time and receive instant feed-
back, which is itself subject to quasi-immediate comment. As these
possibilities dawned on some of the members of give-l, exchanges on
the list acquired an importance far exceeding the issues at hand.
For a time it seemed that one could have the best of two worlds:
7
instantaneous social interaction without bodily presence. Key mem-
bers knew each other and physically met: still they were thrilled by