[Air-L] Why do people apologize for cross-posting?

Matthew Allen netcrit at gmail.com
Tue Dec 11 16:55:15 PST 2012


Confirm the origins in early days.. A lot of so called netiquette was band
width related. But one possible additional explanation is that some net
users perform a kind of expert subjecthood by explicitly referencing these
norms of behaviour, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps intentionally, so as to
denote, through their knowledge of norms, that they belong to a class of
net user in the know.

Matthew allen
Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University, incoming Head of School,
Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University (feb 2013)

On Wednesday, 12 December 2012, Joe Walther wrote:

> Two responses:
>
> Deborah Finn's intuition has some precedent in the research literature. In
> Smith, McLaughlin, & Osborne's early JCMC article on "Conduct Control on
> Usenet" (back in the day when download speeds were slow, and detecting and
> deleting redundancies was quite effortful), the authors noted that to avoid
> the perception of "bandwidth piggery" individuals would apologize up front
> for cross-postings. See http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol2/issue4/smith.html
>
> More recently, Hee Sun Park et al. (2005) document that Koreans (and
> members
> of other cultures, in subsequent research) tend to apologize in the
> introductions of unsolicited (SPAM) messages. See Human Communication
> Research, 31 (3), pp. 365-398.
>
> --Joe
>
> ===
> Joe Walther
> Professor of Communication
> Professor of Telecommunication, Information Studies & Media
> Michigan State University
> https://www.msu.edu/~jwalther/
>
> Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:44:39 -0500
> From: Deborah Elizabeth Finn <deborah_elizabeth_finn at post.harvard.edu<javascript:;>
> >
> To: Barry Wellman <wellman at chass.utoronto.ca <javascript:;>>
> Cc: air-l at aoir.org <javascript:;>
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Why do people apologize for cross-posting?
> Message-ID:
>         <
> CAJwDAXq-Fj51UjZWkHASApBSXyzZPcy+KKravuNVtzaeY8Momw at mail.gmail.com<javascript:;>
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 6:25 PM, Barry Wellman
> <wellman at chass.utoronto.ca <javascript:;>>wrote:
> >>How else do you get the word out to multiple lists.
> >>Please be proud of yourself.
>
> Dear Barry,
>
> My theory is that it dates back to the day of Usenet.  If you cross-posted
> to multiple Usenet groups, the members of all those groups would see all
> responses.  This meant that folks from alt.fan.kirk-rules would have to be
> contaminated with content written by members of alt.fan.picard-rules.  Oh,
> the humanity!
>
>
>
>
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