frustrated with electronic communications? (was Re: MacroOrganism)

Werner Uhrig (werner@rascal.ics.utexas.edu)
Wed, 9 Dec 92 12:24:59 CST

the problem is, basically, identical to what makes newspapers and
magazine worth subscribing to: there is an editor who makes sure
that "the worthwhile stuff" is not completely overpowered by "crud",
and there is an index (or some other mechanism) that allows the reader
to easily find the "stuff of interest" and to ignore the rest.

in the current, electronic reality, there seems to be no software
that manages to filter the data-flood for articles of interest
"just right" -- too many articles do not have a very "informative"
Subject-header, and other headers (Keywords, Summary) tend to be
not much more useful (and are rarely present anyway) -- which means
that a moderated group or a private mailing list is about the closest
we can come to "a good newspaper, journal, or magazine" and a "good
discussion or brain-storm", either 'in-house' or at a public
conference.

Of course, what's frustrating many of us here is, probably, that we
do not seem to be able to, reliably, do better than communications
"on paper" or "in person", and that frustration tends to grow, the
longer we communicate electronically (the newness wears off) and the
more suffocating the electronic data flow we have to process (sheer
volume) becomes ....
---Werner

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"Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the only one
that can be mass produced with unskilled labor." -- Wernher von Braun

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