Blog civility vs listserv civility

There's a row brewing in the blogosphere at the moment which might benefit from a look back to the listserv past, and since this blog grew out of a listserv and is still operating across those two worlds I'm curious to hear what you think about this issue. It all began with an argument between Mena Trott (co-founder of Six Apart software, upon which our blog sits) and Ben Metcalfe which occurred recently at Les Blogs, a blogging conference in Paris. Follow those links to read both sides.

As a result**, Nancy White is convening a panel at SXSW to discuss Blog Civility. Nancy and I both go back a long way and years ago when trAce first began I used to regularly visit Nancy's site to learn how to manage online community. She also interviewed me in 1999.

I'm very interested to see that the discussions going on then are now being revisited via new technologies with different kinds of functionalities such as those used at Les Blogs. if you have time, check out the Les Blogs incident and post a comment with your views on it, especially in relation to listserv issues. To be honest, it looks pretty calm compared with the flame wars of yore! Not to mention the Rape in Cyberspace at LambdaMOO and various other cyberconflicts. But then, the world is changing and civility is a much hotter public topic now than it was 5/10 years ago. What do you think?

**correction: as Nancy points out below, this panel was organised quite a while before Les Blogs.

Comments

[Nancy White]

Sue, the reminder of "what has come before" is an important one. And often lost in the brouhaha. BTW, the panel idea came way before Les Blogs -- that just was a natural point to announce it. There is a group of us who have been having occaisional international telephone calls to talk about this idea (and others) for some time now!

[Sue]

Thanks for that clarification, Nancy. I look forward to hearing more.