In article <1993Aug3.185818.3374 at emba.uvm.edu> brianf at med.uvm.edu (Brain Foley) writes:
>> 1) Usenet news is a lot easier to deal with than a mailing list.
>Mailboxes get full and you have to wade through the list stuf to get to
>your personal mail.
>> 2) Just because it lands in your mailbox (or in your favorite
>newsgroup, doesnt mean you have to read it. Just as you can trash
>unopened junk mail at home, so can you delete unread mail if it has a
>subject line that does not appeal to you.
>> 3) Real net hackers learn to set up their newsreaders to delete
>things that they consider junk automatically. It is possible to explude
>any messages written by a particular person for example.
Brian's post...and Una's on the same...hint at what needs to be said
directly: BioNet-via-UseNet and it's subsidiary email reflectors are not
and never will be like a pet dog you can scold. They are a wide open
faucet for *global* communications...some days there is a flood and some
days you wonder it's the connection is still there.
But the notion that a stuffed email box is due to someone else misbehaving
is infantile....behave or I'll swat you with a newspaper.
Of course, there was that other poster who thought women in this group are
passively creating a *new* feminist approach to Internet and Usenet. :^)
I suspect that this is more fairy-tale type wishful thinking. At any rate,
the *very* thing that riles many on bionet.women-in-bio is the fact that
the outside world (i.e., male "disagreeable" types, comme moi) keep
intruding....alas, sigh, that is the essence of Usenet and the underlying
Internet....but of course, it might be that Usenet and Internet are male
chauvanist inventions (if something can be distinctly feminist, why there
also be things that are distinctly masculinist?). So it's possible to
begin thinking along the lines of how mal-adapted bionet.women-in-bio is as
a forum purely from the point-of-view that it was carved out of masculinist
electronic territory?! :^)
Were we to follow the thinking of yet another sexist poster to this forum,
we'd need a whole slew of new newsgroups to provide safe haven for feminist
thinkers:
bionet.announce.feminist
bionet.general.feminist
bionet.plants.feminist
bionet.software.femininst
and so on, to wean women into a unique feminist-style presence on bionet
and Usenet in general.
And let us not forget the woman, apparently concerned about being raped at
her first national meeting (if she is to believe the postings here):
bionet.women-in-bio.of-color
On the other hand, there is the option that people like Una Smith and Kay
Klier take, which is to jump in anywhere on Usenet that they are interested
in, without the usual feminist whining fanfare about how males are rude and
females are inventing a new way to do bioscience or gardening....since we
each leave our own mark on anything we contribute to.
Steve nmodena at unity.ncsu.edu
