Subject: Re: [BOU:] Re: Home of Bourdieu
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 12:12:54 -0500 (EST)


Jukka wrote:

> Malgosia, I wasn't talking about Spoons and Virginia in early 1990's. 
> I think I can appreciate the work you have done (both Spoon 
> collective and people at Virginia). 

That wasn't my point, to solicit your appreciation.  My point was to 
illustrate, on a concrete example that I am well familiar with, what actually
goes on underneath this supposed "fulfillment of public duty" on the part
of, say, the U of Virginia.

> The point was what the situation 
> is right now, on institutional level.  The basic facilities are 
> basically at every university today. So I've understood. There are 
> Majordomos and Mailmans just about ready to go, waiting someone to 
> establish a new list.

You talk about this as if these things miraculously and sponanteously sprung 
out of the fertile soil of the institutional environment.  Listservers, like
any computer software, require money and human labor to be set up and to 
run.  They are not just "there", "waiting".  Somebody labored to set them up 
for a specific purpose on a hardware that somebody paid for, for a specific
purpose.  And these things consume resources.  Somebody has to pay for those,
and somebody has to  maintain them with their labor.

Most university listservers are set up for the purpose of serving internal
lists at the university.  Most university sysadmins are NOT paid to give
their time and labor to maintaining external discussion lists, and neither
are most university computing centers allocated resources for the purpose
of supporting such lists.  When people do give their time, labor, and resource
to it, it is usually out of their special interest and graciousness, because 
they want to.  They have no "public duty" to do so.  I don't think this is 
different now from what it was in the 1990s.

-m
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