File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1997/phillitcrit.9711, message 237


Date: Thu, 06 Nov 1997 09:54:27 -0500
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Netiquette


Paul,
	This is beautifully and appropriately said.  I agree with you %100 percent, and
though I can speak only for myself, I think what you say could be taken as the
Phillitcrit Manifesto, if we were to have such a thing.  Indeed, it would be
well posted on Phil-lit, which is the elist that has "substantialize" their
rules -- they're fervent nomothetes -- and is the list on which the expulsions,
etc., occurred.  There have been no forced or even recommended unsubscriptions
from phillitcrit, and though there has been the normal circulation of people on
and off the list, no one, as far as I know, has unsubscribed in protest (if they
did, they should have said so!).

Reg

Paul Mathias wrote:
> 
> >From what I understood, someone was politely but firmly asked and/or
> forced to leave the list, a few days ago. Views were exchanged as to
> whether this person should or should not be asked to leave or/and
> expelled. As you may know, there were so many messages about so many
> subjects that I couldn't really catch up, and honestly I didn't even
> try. To say things bluntly, I don't even know whether the discussion
> about that undesirable character was short or long, violent or peaceful,
> whether he/she was expelled or not -- and I don't really care.
> What I care about is netiquette and its status.
> It is mostly admitted that netiquette is a good thing and necessary, as
> an internal means to regulate communications over the Net. Even more, it
> may be said that if the netiquette "works" well, we don't need
> regulations of any other sort, since respecting non-written laws is by
> itself strong enough a regulatory process. This even prevents us from
> having to seek inspiration in "real world" laws, which have been written
> regardless of the peculiarities of the Net, and the very specific kind
> of interactive community it conceals and revelates at the same time.
> It remains that there is, as far as I understand, something quite
> unsatisfactory about that netiquette, and to be more precise, two
> things:
> 1/ the netiquette is not written law, even though you may find in
> various places on the Net compendia and catalogs of its rules. What then
> is in my opinion "problematic" (this doesn't mean that netiquette is
> "rubbish" and we should forget everything about it) is the way it was
> generated and the way it exists as a certain regulatory apparel.
> a) the way it was generated: as far as I know, no one ever "decided"
> that this or that should be the way we should interact on the Net, but
> habits came into being and were progressively crystallized into rules of
> various kinds. There are rules on the Net, but there is no "subject" of
> those rules, save each one of us writing to each  other and thus
> interacting in different ways. In other words, there is "nomos", but no
> "nomothetes", one who would "say" what is right or wrong. If nations
> have their "law-makers" to do the job, it is clear enough that only the
> people who created the Net, compulsively, enthusiastically, etc. were
> the authors of the netiquette. Who? No one knows or will ever know,
> unless one chooses to consider that they were (statistically speaking)
> educated people, scientists, academics, and the like. The rules on the
> Net are those of a certain elite, its habits and its "natural law" --
> unquestionable and fundamentally rooted in its real as well as virtual
> existence.
> b) the way it exists: respecting the netiquette is "being polite", and
> in fact I see that as a rule of the utmost importance. But then again,
> it is only about "being polite", and being polite between friends,
> colleagues, lovers, etc. is many various things, and cannot be strictly
> and formally defined. To say things differently, politeness may be
> expressed in terms of formal generalizations, but cannot express the way
> it is common, desirable, or meaningful to interact. As a consequence,
> the netiquette should be interpreted as an implicit set of rules
> (however public it may be found to be), and cannot clearly -- if not
> generally speaking -- define what our interactions should be. One could
> object that *all* rules and laws are "general". As a matter of fact,
> I've read my Aristotle too, and this is not the point. The point is: in
> a state of law, rules are produced publicly as a result of some sort of
> "general will"; as far as the Net is concerned, rules were produced
> chaotically through habits, customs, and could not even be said to
> signify what we call "customary law", since netiquette is not "law".
> Then where does its legitimacy lie? One can force someone else out of
> the Net, be it an individual (moderator or ISP) or a group (this list
> for instance); but this is just a fact, and has nothing to do with what
> we call legitimacy.
> 2/ The netiquette was created by an university (also military?) "elite".
> This is a fact too. Now the Net has grown to become everybody's
> cyberspace, and obviously its population is more and more common, less
> and less an "elite". There's not much to cry about. Honestly, we
> academics can be such bores sometimes... And they laymen can be so
> brilliantly funny... Now since the netiquette cannot be more than a
> users' set of rules, it seems logical that it should evolve and slowly
> be transformed. As such, if today it rules that X should be expelled
> from a list because X is making fun of Y, or because X's messages are
> longer/shorter than a given number of words, nothing prevents from
> considering this as unfair, since it is due to a set a users' rules that
> does not anymore correspond to the actual users. The problem here is to
> define the ground on which decisions can be taken when interacting is
> not any more a matter of writing and thinking together, but a matter of
> exercising power and to some extent violence towards one another.
> 
> As a conclusion, I should say that though I don't know whatever happened
> to whomever it happened to, it is of great importance that we do not
> "substantialize" the netiquette. Let me put things differently: as a
> user, I would be one Hell of a reactionary bastard and secretly (?)
> willing to have everybody expelled out from the Net, except from us very
> clever heideggero-platonists. As a thinker of my own practice, I would like to
> set _moral skepticism_ as one categorical imperative, and tolerance as its
> best form of existence.
> 
> Cheers all, and sorry for being so long.
> 
> pM
> 
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