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To: appro who wrote (1047)	4/19/1998 1:30:00 PM
From: Spots	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32873

Lot's of interesting points in your post. >>The Internet changes the rules of communication. Writers can either write to please themselves without regard for their readers or they try to write for the readers' interests. I take your point (I think), but I'd put it that the internet changes the mechanics in such a way that "rules" for various forms of communications, which existed before, tend to get mixed up. Or rather, the situations get mixed up in ways that are new, at least in degree if not entirely. So appropriate rules (or etiquette or effective communication techniques) change dynamically. On SI, various threads have entirely different characters (which you might expect), change character over time (also you might expect), change character frequently (disconcerting), have different characters in different sub-conversations (dizzying), and so on. These things happen in real life conversations too, of course, but less often and less markedly. Besides, IRL we don't write it all down and hand out meeting minutes. >>Writers can either write to please themselves without regard for their readers or they try to write for the readers' interests. Or, as I'm sure you actually mean, a thousand variations in between. The thing is (IMO) in a chat thread it's easier to impose a comment interesting only to oneself in the middle. Your audience is captive in that they have to at least read enough to know they want to skip it. This is harder to do IRL (except maybe in church or the classroom). Here it's the rule rather than the exception. I think (correct me if I'm wrong) the fact that anyone can essentially impose themselves, interesting or not, on others in a conversation without effective means of ostracism, is what leads to your comment: >>Thus, there is a need for way in which the reader can exert a higher degree of local filtering according to his needs. The need extends beyond a substitute for social ostracism or the "inappropriateness" of what a writer is saying. That is, for example, to you a post may be uninteresting (doesn't meet your needs) but to me it may be just the ticket. So it's very much a personal issue. This is probably what you meant anyhow, but the point is it's not only in the intent or thoughtfulness of the writer; it very much involves the reader(s) as well. >> Perhaps such a simple concept is beyond our grasp at present. I don't think it's simple. In fact, if by "filtering" you mean applying a priori selection criteria to characteristics of a post, I think it's hopeless. To exaggerate the case somewhat, the only filter I really trust is my mind which has to be applied to each message individually. This IS an exaggeration: Of course I use other filters--I read only certain threads, I skip posts by certain people, I read SI and not Yahoo, etc. Moreover, my mind doesn't always work so hot either<ggg>. Nevertheless, to my rapidly cooling mind, the way to approach the problem is to make it more efficient for the ol' mind-filter to work. For me, the "dialog form" (which we've been calling coffeehouse), like a play script with characters and text, seems to work better than the standard SI "email form" with senders and message headers. However, this is a guess; I don't HAVE the dialog form on any threads I actually follow. Also it doesn't work backwards very well (for me), and I can't vary the message order by thread. So I don't really know if what I've been asking for is really what I want. (Careful what you want, you might get it <ggg>.) However, I can skim books and articles pretty fast and decide if I want to read deeper, so I'm fairly confident it would help. This is, of course, my personal method and many others would want something different probably. I can think of other possibilities, of which most, perhaps all, have been posted on this thread at one time or another.