http://acorn.grove.iup.edu/en/workdays/Millard.html#anchor103556
here's a para:
"Flaming is often juvenile, crude, and destructive of communities; when it is done badly, unsportively, it is little else. If mean-spirited and inept flaming can damage a community, however, imaginative flaming can crystallize and energize one. "Community" itself, as James English has cogently argued in Comic Transactions (drawing on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy), is a contested site, a term often deployed in mythic and nostalgic senses to exclude as well as include, often through some form of violence (English 19-30). The incendiary rhetoric that characterizes Internet lists transforms them from idealized communities‹collections of earnest bourgeois selves politely munching cucumber sandwiches‹into dynamic systems open to productive autocritique. Forcing attention onto the issue of the self's ephemerality and constructedness raises the question of how a community of such beings functions. This is a rhetorical question in the literal sense: an open question about the effects of rhetoric, not the vernacular "rhetorical question" that merely implies a presumably unquestioned statement. A community whose functions include dissing is by no means equivalent to a dysfunctional community."
and, i think the issue might not be whether or not we are polite to eachother - please no - but what rhetorics are used in the service of what inclusions/exclusions.
cheer up all,
angela