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December 1994, Week 1

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Subject:
From:
Chris Amirault <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 2 Dec 1994 10:31:33 -0500
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Re. the debate over archiving killed msgs. Jeremy wrote,
 
>>The killed messages from the trial period are in the SCREEN-L archives
>>currently. If we continued to go with moderating, though, I will *not*
>>be able to store the killed messages on an ongoing basis.  When a message
>>gets killed it'll just be dead dead dead.
 
And Dr. Missy replied,
 
>Normally this wouldn't bother me.  But, what about some type of
>statistical notation of how many killed messages there were... and for
>what reason?
 
I guess I just don't understand people's desire to see the killed msgs; it
seems motivated by a mistaken notion that there are conspiracies lurking in
the interstices of the net. It seems to me that most of those msgs are
deeply uninteresting -- and the ones that aren't, the ones that actually
are relevant to a discussion of "censorship" or whatever, usually make it
onto the list in some form or another, b/c the indignant writer finds a way
to get the issue out. A few years back, I posted a note to one list that
had a cuss word in a quotation to which I referred; the moderator deleted
the offending naughty bit. I then posted a note to the list about the
editing, which the moderator happily passed along with an appended note
about why he did what he did. No muss, no fuss: everyone on the list got to
see what happened, and major constitutional calamities were avoided.
 
To me (a moderator of H-Mac, btw), the idea of archiving killed msgs for
general use is a waste of moderator time and disk space. 99% of those msgs
are silly, useless, uninteresting -- and then there's the 1% that might be
of some value to conspiracy theorists. But the desire to archive the killed
msgs seems to presuppose a structural mistrust of moderators. Admittedly,
what a moderator thinks is smoothing out the functioning of a list may be
more problematic to someone else. But no moderator wants to instigate a war
around censorship and would be happy most times to let the list wrangle
with the tough calls. Remember, this very discussion was instigated by
Jeremy himself. Do we really need to have an internal affairs mechanism to
check up on him? I think not.
 
So, as you can imagine, the idea of asking a moderator to do statistical
analysis on killed msgs seems absurd to me. Look: if a major concern
arises, we'll deal with it. Meanwhile, this list ain't broke.
 
 
Chris Amirault.......................Dept. of American Civilization
Moderator, H-Mac.........................Brown University  Box 1892
Chris_Amirault@brown.edu.......................Providence RI  02912

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