18.449 spam pushing collaboration?

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 449.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 06:38:03 +0000
         From: lachance_at_origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
         Subject: Spam pushing collaboration?

Willard,

I suspect that you are elsewise occupied with pleasanter reading than
following some recent offereing in the grey literature on spam. Which is
why I take this occasion to signal to you an interesting digression
present in a document emanating from the Second OECD Workshop on Spam held
in Busan, Korea on 8-9 September 2004. The report on the workshop is
accessible via http from the server of the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development by using the following URL
http://www.oecd.org/sti/spam

On page 12 at paragraph number 56 one can read: "To the aside complaint
that e-mail is a burden for bosses who receive hundreds or thousand [sic]
e-mails per week because employees see e-mail as face-time with the boss,
a response was that collaboration tools make a difference. [A
named-product], a Wiki knowledge management tool for example, can cut down
on corporate e-mails by hundreds per day."

I pretend to make no comment on the intracies involved in mapping a
sociology of knowledge with business culture. However, the mention of
collaborative tools in the context of email overload makes me wonder what
the prerequistes of collaborative tool set might be. Basic collaborative
work can be organized via shared access to a file server. Indeed with the
elementary ftp skills and discipline in updating read me files or logs, a
group can conduct its business entirely without email.

In fact, were not such modes of collaboration de rigeur but a short while
ago? Well, a decade or so ago. And, like email & spam is presently, ftp
was fingered with the accusation of contributing to network drag. As Jim
Carroll and Rick Broadhead wrote in Chapter 7 "Remote Access Applications
Telnet, FTP, Archie" in the revised 1995 edition of the Canadian Internet
Handbook, " Common courtesy on the Internet suggests that you should only
use FTP archives during non-working hours, in order not to cause network
congestion and to avoid causing resource problems on the FTP archives that
you are accessing. [...] You should also be aware that many archive sites
now explicitly restrict access during normal working hours." (p. 143)

Just what could that mean to all those night-hawk Humanists, "normal
working hours" on a dial-up connection?

   --
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance

A calendar is like a map. And just as maps have insets, calendars in the
21st century might have 'moments' expressed in flat local time fanning out
into "great circles" expressed in earth revolution time.
Received on Tue Dec 28 2004 - 02:00:42 EST