[1507] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: What we may have missed
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ike)
Fri Oct 10 15:53:51 2003
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 15:29:50 -0400
From: Ike <ike@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <uv67k3dwy5e.fsf@tenebrae.ai.mit.edu>
Some clarification is in order (go-go gadget blanche!):
ec-discuss@mit.edu is a private list and senior-haus@mit.edu is a private
list. However, the only member of senior-haus@mit.edu is the list
senior-house@mit.edu, which is a public list. I would say that
effectively, senior-haus is a public list, in technical terms.
To summarize the rest of my points for this email: the non-technical
distinction between private and public lists in the case of ec-discuss and
senior-house is so muddy that whether the question of whether the
offending email should be ignored because it "was sent only to private
lists" is irrelevant to the discussion. The question of the community
standards of those mailing lists might be relevant, however.
Now some anti-clarification:
In terms of how the lists work technically, private simply means that a
user cannot add themselves to the list, and public means that they can.
Thus, private lists do not necessarily only consist of close gropus of
friends, but sometimes, huge groups of people with little relation to each
other aside from where they live or where their friends live.
If you're not going by the strict computer definitions of private and
public, then it would not be entirely unreasonable to consider ec-discuss
to be a public list, since there are so many people on it, and very few
people are actively excluded from list membership.
The notion of community standards is important here; whether or not
ec-discuss and senior-house are private or public lists, they both have
long traditions of being fair grounds for really mean, vicious, obnoxious,
stupid, and offensive email. Nasty flamewars full of the most profane
language are regular fare, and if there hasn't been one in a while, it
will be lamented by nostalgic alumni on the lists. Lately, there's been a
'nice', lively little discussion on the availability of condoms,
lubrication, and sexual partners within the Senior House dormitory.
I still feel that the ghetto party advertisement crossed some
hard-to-define line of stupidity, but I don't think it's grounds for
disciplinary action, and I would be sad to see ec-discuss and senior-house
turn into lists where people felt that they couldn't send whatever they
felt like.
-Ike
On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Jeremy H. Brown wrote:
> * Is it really the case that MIT students may be subject to formal
> disciplinary action on the basis of sending email that is perceived
> as offensive by some portion of the MIT community, even though that
> email was intended humorously, did not target individuals for abuse,
> and was sent only to private mailing lists?
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Documentation on the use of the mailing lists mit-talk, all-talk,
mit-news, housing-talk, and the mit-talk Zephyr class is available at:
http://web.mit.edu/institvte/talk/
