Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> [bounced bec Ed Herman isn't a subscriber - given his snippy tone,
> he'd fit right in!]
>
What in your opinion is the source of that snippiness of tone on the list? The nature of e-lists? The shock of 9/11? Bad apples? The platonic essence of Left Politics?
I too would like a shift in tone -- but could we even begin to agree about what identifies tone in e-mail? For example, I would say that the two largest source of bad tone on e-lists are (a) posts carrying questions without the poster's own position being laid out and (b) posts from P in respect to Q which feature more posts from Q than the post being directly responded to. If someone refers to two or more of my posts, they are talking about me, not about the content of any of the posts.
It is almost impossible to ask a question in a neutral or friendly tone. I tried to give a neurtral or friendly tone in a post last week, which I corssposted to Pen-L; Michael Perelman suggested that such cross-posting was undesirable, which suggested to me that he saw the tone of the post as "challenging," i.e., unfriendly. He was probably right. Questions bristle with personal implications.
If I say "X is Y," anyone can attack or defend or qualify the assertion that "X is Y" without necessarily referring to me, no matter how sharp or even vicious their disagreement with the proposition is. But if I ask "Do you think X is not Y?" there will usually be an implication that something is wrong with the _person_ and not just the ideas of anyone who fails to see X is Y.
Take the first paragraph of this post. I have been interested off ond on in the question of the rhetoric of e-mail lists -- so abstractly those questions could be considered neutral or even friendly. I bet most will have a hard time 'feeling' them that way.
Carrol