Trista wrote:

>I wouldn't feel comfortable speaking to a room full of people wearing
>black hoods.  And I feel the same way about posting to a list where
>everyone is anonymous.
>
>Trista

You probably have no idea how close to actuality that statement is to the
whole topic of my list.  You see, for me, and all the people on my list,
it is almost always the case that we are in a "room full of people wearing
black hoods".  Of course, thats the nature of what we are talking about.
The people on my list all have a condition called prosopagnosia (often
refferred to as "face blindness") and information about our list can be
found at http://daniel.drew.edu/~galperin/folks.html

So for us, it is thus doubly important that we all know who is on our list
so we don't feel disadvantaged twice over.  Yeah, we don't know who we are
talking to in person, but the internet allows us to communicate without
any of that ever mattering.  In the same vain, most of the people on my
list do not have the willingness to allow outsiders to lurk on our list
because they will be anonymous in our list where people might as well be
anonymous in person when they confront us in person.

This is why I have adopted my very strict policy about introductions to
the list, because we can not afford to *NOT* know who the people on our
list really are.  Do I care if people use pseudonyms?  Yes, I do care,
because again, that would be one extra disadvantage to the rest of the
people on our list.  (This was actually the focus of a very recent policy
discussion we had, and there seemed to be a good 3/4 majority in favor of
using real names as opposed to pseudonyms.)

I seem to repeat this last point a lot these days, but again, here it
is:  My list policy may not work for your list, and that will greatly
depend on the size of your list as well as the dynamics of the people on
your list, as well as the topics of discussion which your list may revolve
around.

Glenn