ADMIN: We'd Like to Pick Your Brains About TBAY

kkersey_austin kkersey at kkersey_austin.yahoo.invalid
Thu Dec 4 19:19:15 UTC 2003


There have been some really good posts on this subject already, so
I'll try not to repeat others' points ad nauseum. Eileen covered my
take on TBAY pretty well - done well, it is both entertaining and
illuminating. I think it is a particularly useful phenomenon for a
couple of reasons, one personal, and one more general.

Since OOP (and come to think of it, longer than that) I have pretty
much given up on reading, skimming, or even dipping into the main list
with any sort of regularity. I just don't have the hours a day to sort
through for the interesting tidbits. However, occasionally I do a
seach on "TBAY" and catch up as best I can on what the current
theories are. My hope is that many of the really interesting ideas
will be generate some TBAY discussion, and generally I follow all the
threads generated by, or referred to in, those posts, whether they
stay in TBAY or not. 

I agree that many TBAY posts are self-indulgent, difficult to follow,
and fail to move the discussion forward either due to repetition or
lack of new ideas. I do *not* think that the proportion of TBAY posts
like this is any greater than that of non-TBAY posts. In fact, my
perception is that quite the opposite is true. Most of the TBAY
regulars are pretty good writers, and the ones that aren't don't seem
to so any better in non-TBAY format.

There is another function of TBAY that I don't think anyone has
addressed yet (apologies if I missed it) - the "role-playing" provides
a sort of safety net for discussing potentially contentious
differences of opinion. (I'm going to refer listee writing in regular
prose style as a "poster" and to a TBAY persona as a "theorist" - I
hope that is consistent with general usage on the list.) 

In TBAY, a theorist can throw someone overboard, commit acts of piracy
or vandalism, bare their teeth and scream, threaten someone with a Big
Paddle(tm) or even get into a barroom brawl. Never mind all the
cannonades. But all the violence is done to a theorist's TBAY persona
or an allegorical representation of a theory. It's slightly removed
from a direct attack on a real life poster or his or her words. A
theorist can really *make it personal* in TBAY, and therefore *avoid*
making it personal in real life. 

It's actually kind of hard to write a kind evisceration of a
straightforward discursive post, to politely point out that a
particular theory that some person has labored over long and hard(or
not!) is *wrong*. TBAY provides a measure of freedom by allowing
*theories* to be attacked, instead of the particular words of a
particular poster. 

I've been on the list (a lurker for the most part) since right about
the time TBAY started, and I was at the time terribly confused (and
still am at times) by *some* of the references. I am heartened by
Constance Vigilance's offer to work on a TBAY encyclopaedia - a more
detailed, up-to-date history than that found in Hypothetic Ally would
be so much fun, and so useful. Meanwhile, the better TBAY posts, like
the better non-TBAY posts, provide adequate context and references to
understand the argument. And the better posts provide some *action*.
The boring TBAY post might posit an acronym and little else, expecting
others to do the work of figuring out how it fits into the current
state of theorizing; or just Mary-Sue (long non-allegorical
discriptions of what a TBAY denizen is wearing, eating, drinking, etc.
are the worst offenders). But I've seen enough boring, repititious,
drifting, ill-thought out posts that are written in straight prose
that I firmly believe that these qualities are not an artifact of the
TBAY format.

OK, I seem to be repeating myself a bit. I'll stop. :-)

For the record, let TBAY stay on the main list; let's do what we can
to encourage good posting behaviour whatever the format; and if you
don't want to read it, skip it. 


KKersey, who has been trying for nearly two years to think of a good
list name.


p.s. Eileen! I was shocked to hear you say that your Mathematics Major
brother doesn't think in symbols - Mathematics *is* symbols. It *is*
metaphor. And to do the interesting stuff, you've got to understand
that (I kind of suspect that's true of higher-level magic in the
potterverse, too). Hope he has a back-up career plan :-)  By the way,
my end-of-semester study plan was always to skip the cram sessions and
read as much 19th century Russian lit as I could. Worked pretty well
for me, anyway.






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