I really appreciated Douglas Winship's post because it raises an issue that, I believe, is essential: the relationship of technology and the purpose that technology serves. I assume that this list (the listowner's forum) exists primarily to help members with technical difficulties, however it also offers the opportunity to consider the broader implications of what we are doing and to ask ourselves whether certain things that *can* be done, *should* in fact be done. Technology may be value free but the human beings who use the technology should keep in mind that ultimately we are accountable for the uses to which we put technology. When I read the initial post concerning the 140,000 member list (it's not "listserv"--but that's another issue on which I tend to fixate, the issue of proper use of language :-)), I found myself shuddering, not because I considered it technically impossible but because it seemed humanely unwise. Then, of course, I stopped myself and reminded myself that I am using the topics feature fairly successfully in ways it was not intended to be used and that therefore there was no reason to use the listserv program to do things it wasn't originally intended to do which I presumed was to facilitate dialogue among individuals of shared interest. So, why not set up a list simply to send notices to 140k people, or six billion, for that matter? But since the number of subscribers would make two way communication dangerous, in the sense of flooding people's mailboxes, I then wondered whether using listserv (or another such program) would be responsible use of technology. Much better, in this case, would be simply to send out one's information to members of an emailing list. I few months ago I briefly subscribed to web audit, a web-site counter service. Someone there made the mistake of sending billing notices to individuals out over some listserv list. When I received a bill not intended for me I quite innocently, not realizing what was going on, sent a note back, informing them that this was a mistake. When I came home about seven hours later I had over a thousand new messages in my mailbox. The ones I read were from irate strangers from all over the world asking me to stop sending them my junkmail. There were also all sorts of messages from people who had done what I had done. I felt like the sorcerer's apprentice unable to stop the flood, though I did send one more message to the crazy billing list, asking people to respond to NOTHING from that address since it clearly was some sort of jumbo mail distribution list with potential for exponential growth . . . I still shudder when I remember that period (the angry mail kept coming for days). Regards, Ingrid Shafer [log in to unmask] & [log in to unmask] http://astro.temple.edu/~arcc http://192.146.206.5/www/faculty/shaferi/index.html