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

Joe Walther jwalther at msu.edu
Tue Dec 11 15:21:39 PST 2012


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>
To: Barry Wellman <wellman at chass.utoronto.ca>
Cc: air-l at aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-L] Why do people apologize for cross-posting?
Message-ID:
	<CAJwDAXq-Fj51UjZWkHASApBSXyzZPcy+KKravuNVtzaeY8Momw at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 6:25 PM, Barry Wellman
<wellman at chass.utoronto.ca>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!







More information about the Air-L mailing list