> Eric is right about people not wanting to include the keyword. I made
> this suggesiton to my list where we have 6 topics so that they would
> only get mail from the topics they wanted. Not only did they refuse to
> do this some signed off as if I were asking them to do so something
> ridiculous. My warning is that people might misinterpret your
> intension. I thought that the topics were a good idea. -- Paul.
 
Thanks people (and Eric) for these comments and suggestions -- and also
for the private e-mail!  I've been running my list for over a year, in a
simple-minded way, and we've really done pretty well.  But there are a LOT
of interesting options available, and I want to find ways to push this
technology harder.
 
The entire concept for my list is, at core, a *network design*.  My
background is in mathematical epistemology and cognitive science, and I've
developed what purports to be a universal theory of conceptual structure,
that might conceivably be used as a framework to interpret *any* academic
discipline or topic.  It amounts to a universal language, written in
computer algebra, -- and the concept for my list is based on this theory.
This network is highly interdisciplinary, and is intended to eventually be
a "bridge" between disciplines.
 
So, this "topics" option seems to me to offer a lot of potential, since
many specialists on my list are excited about some aspects of our work,
and unfamiliar with or put off by others.  It might be very true that
subscribers can be lazy about keeping track of topic keywords, -- but in a
more controlled environment, where talented people are trying to compose
fairly serious statements, they might be willing to make the extra effort.
And I am creating a "User's Guide", designed to be printed, and maybe left
laying around the desks of the most active participants.
 
The biggest single problem with listserv is its non-parallel, relentlessly
serial format: you get 'em one after the other, period.  And it's up to
YOU to sort out the threads, find stuff that's interesting, and make sense
out of the flow.  This fact alone tend to blow people away, and limits the
number of subscribers to a fairly low level, since most people cannot
handle a daily message volume from a single list of (for example) 3,000
lines.
 
The Topics option seems to offer a way around this, -- and make listserv
considerably more like a conference, -- with the vast advantage over a
conference of still being a universal Internet medium, accessible from
any node.
 
I see myself as as "applications" developer, looking for ways to use the
Internet as a general-purpose problem solving medium, that coordinates
distributed resources, and finds ways to build cooperative projects --
perhaps *massive* cooperative projects.
 
Can listserv handle this kind of stuff?  Yes, I think so.  This is all
experimental, of course, and some phases of this work may prove to be dead
ends.  But "the partitioning of the message space within an integrated
context" is a very powerful approach for coordinating large-scale
projects, -- and those 11 independent topic dimensions (and the 12th
miscellaneous category "other") look to me like a way to multiply the
power of a single list by a factor of 12.  Done right, one list becomes 12
lists, in one integrated design.  If that is 10 separate disciplines or
projects, with a common category ("other"), and maybe one administrative
topic, this could conceivably be a way to powerfully amplify the social
and scientific implications of this technology.
 
I've heard it said that the Renaissance occurred primarily because of the
printing press.  Perhaps the Internet (and listserv) might help motivate
another renaissance.  We are living in an age of dissolving intellectual
and geographic boundaries, and massive global interconnectivity.  Logic
designs that exploit this potential could become fantastically powerful.
 
Sure, these are just blue sky speculations.  But the potency is at our
fingertips.  If we use it well, there's nothing to stop us...
 
- Bruce Schuman
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