[PLUG-TALK] Re: [PLUG] E-mail etiquette: why MS users don't have it

[gepr at tempusdictum.com]

There's another reason to top-post that I haven't seen on this OT 
thread.

For a long time, I used to participate in fairly theoretical
discussions on mailing lists for things like analytical philosophy,
autopoiesis, and modern physics.  Many people would make attempts to
intersperse comments and argue with each other about pretty
complicated and deep issues.  It simply doesn't work.  You cannot make
sound, coherent arguments with sound-bites.

Interspersed emails are like TV commercials, political ads, or debates
between hot-heads.  What normal people used to do is write entire
letters to one another.  They made cohesive statements, in _context_.
If they were responding to something the other person said, they would
fold that other person's statement into the context set by the
_current_ author, rather than folding their quip-ish comments into the
_old_ context of the previous author.

So, it makes total sense to top-post if you think in terms of letter
writing and good old-fashioned rhetorical style.

A deeper issue that argues _for_ top-posting is that of _linearity_.
Somehow, with the growth of hacker culture, "context" came to
designate "a couple of lines above and a couple of lines below"... no
doubt due to things like code complexity measures, compilers, and
"diff".  But, in dialogue and rhetoric, that's not what context means.
Context means the entire context in which the previous statements were
made.  And that means the whole speech, letter, email, book, or
whatever.  When responding to a _whole_ argument or point of view, you
can't chop the previous author's email into a billion little "pieces
of context".... Context is not ANALYTIC.

Context is non-linear... it's complex... the whole is greater than the
sum of the parts.  This interspersed reply technique that we (and I 
do mean WE) are so fond of deludes us into thinking that we're 
responding to the previous author's message.  But we're not.  We're
acting like mud-slingers and taking small sound-bites from each others'
messages and talking around those sound-bites.

It's highly disrespectful of the previous author's content.

(Of course, being a post-modern classical liberal in anarchist
clothing, I have no problem destroying an original author's
context.... Should you destroy mine, however, I'll become petulant,
passive-aggressive, or even violent.  ;-)

Matt Alexander writes:
 > On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, Rich Shepard wrote:
 > 
 > >   Perhaps those of you who administer mixed-OS environments can answer this
 > > question: Why do winduhs users top-post their responses to messages and
 > > leave the entire message to which they are replying on the bottom?
 > 
 > Personally, I do both.  It depends on the conversation.  If there's
 > something specific in a long message that I'm responding to, then I'll
 > quote just that section and bottom post.  That way when someone reads my
 > message they have a reference to what I'm talking about.
 > 
 > However, if the body of the message is something simple that all parties
 > are well aware of then there's no reason to bottom post, and in these
 > instances it's annoying to have to scroll through all the forwarding
 > gibberish to find the next person's comment.
 > ~M
 > 
 > 
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-- 
glen e. p. ropella              =><=                           Hail Eris!
H: 503.630.4505                              http://www.ropella.net/~gepr
M: 971.219.3846                               http://www.tempusdictum.com