Link: http://www.slate.com/id/2262954

The Joy of Listservs
One of the Internet's earliest innovations is still one of its best.
By Farhad Manjoo
Posted  Thursday, Aug. 5, 2010, at 9:14 PM ET

During one frenzied weekend in 1986, Eric Thomas, 
an engineering student in Paris, invented what 
would become one of the most important things on 
the Internet: the listserv. Actually, what he 
created was LISTSERV, a network program to manage 
e-mail discussion groups. Those with access to 
the fledgling Internet had been using mailing 
lists since the 1970s, but the lists always had 
to be set up manually�only a list manager could 
keep the group's participants up-to-date, and 
that took a lot of work. With LISTSERV came 
automation: a moderator would set a few simple 
rules�who could access the list, how often mail 
would go out, etc.�and then users could manage their own subscriptions.
.

After LISTSERV, e-mail lists took off. Thomas 
says that within a few years, there were hundreds 
of discussion groups, then thousands, most of 
them hosted at universities and devoted to 
scientific research or technology. (One of the 
biggest early lists was LINKFAIL, where people 
could report Internet outages; LINKFAIL 
eventually got so big that its own traffic began 
to generate network failures.) Soon other 
list-management programs popped up to compete 
with LISTSERV, and it wasn't long before people 
began using listserv as a generic noun to denote 
an e-mail discussion group. Legally, that's a 
no-no�LISTSERV is a registered trademark of 
L-Soft International, Thomas' Swedish software 
company, which offers several examples of proper 
usage on its site. For instance, you shouldn't 
say, "Let's post a message to the listserv." 
Instead, say, "Let's post a message to the LISTSERV® e-mail list."
It's impossible, of course, for L-Soft to police 
those rules: Listservs�whether or not they're 
LISTSERV® e-mail lists�long ago became a basic 
feature of the Internet. They're so entrenched 
that you rarely notice them anymore. We all use 
e-mail lists all the time, yet in our frenzy over 
Twitter, Facebook, and other novel communication 
tools, we forget how valuable well-managed e-mail 
groups can be. I admit I only got to thinking 
about listservs after JournoList�blogger Ezra 
Klein's now-defunct, off-the-record discussion 
group of liberal reporters and academics�popped 
into the news. Klein has written that he started 
the group (using Google Groups, not LISTSERV) to 
give journalists a private space to discuss the 
news in a way they couldn't in public.

I was never on JournoList, and it has always 
sounded like an unworkable idea to me�how can you 
expect a bunch of reporters to keep all those 
discussions secret? (Blogger David Weigel, whose 
leaked JournoList e-mails led to his resignation 
at the Washington Post, was recently hired by 
Slate; I've never met Weigel or even e-mailed 
with him.) At the same time, I understood Klein's 
impulse. That impulse being: Listservs are 
wonderful! For a lot of topics, e-mail 
lists�especially off-the-record lists�are better 
than Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr at fostering a 
sense of community and generating deep, thoughtful conversations.
.

Unfortunately, e-mail groups don't have the same 
buzz as the latest wave of Webby communication 
tools. "I remember 10 years ago, you'd have 
people saying things like, 'Hey, I'm starting the 
Let's Fix the DMCA mailing list,' " says Declan 
McCullagh, a CNET reporter who started Politech, 
a pioneering mailing list covering tech and 
politics, in 1994. (It went on hiatus on 2008, 
but McCullagh plans to relaunch it later this 
year.) "You just don't hear that as much anymore. 
Today people would be more inclined to start a 
Twitter hashtag or a Facebook fan page or something like that."

That's a shame�in a world dominated by blurbs, 
tweets, and sound bites, we need more mailing 
lists, not fewer. Reader, I'm asking you to join 
me in a new mission�let's save listservs! If 
you've got a favorite mailing list, e-mail me the 
name and topic or post a comment below�I'd like 
to learn about it even if it isn't widely 
accessible or if it's on a subject that I 
probably won't care about (like sports). I don't 
want to out these lists in order to destroy them, 
a la Tucker Carlson; I'd like to promote them to 
the world, because we should all be participating in more listservs.
s.

Why am I so into mailing lists? In part, it's 
from personal experience. Over the last decade, 
I've worked at three online magazines�Wired.com, 
Salon, and now Slate. I was a big fan of all of 
these publications before I started at each, but 
what surprised me the most about each of these 
publications was how much more interesting they 
were on the inside. Many of the stories you read 
on Slate�it could even be the majority�are 
inspired or informed by e-mail discussions. I 
open my inbox every morning and find it filled 
with links to news, plus long threads of 
hilarious, profound, and sometimes completely 
infuriating discussions about those links. The 
forum is a prized source of information and a 
wonderful sounding board: When I have an idea I 
want feedback on, I post it to Slate's e-mail 
group; it's a much more reliable way of getting 
good, meaningful responses than, say, putting out a call on Twitter.
.

The quality of the discussions at my various 
workplaces stems in part from the caliber of the 
people there, but that's not the whole story. In 
the past few years Slate, like all publications, 
has tried to open its internal discussions to the 
public through Twitter and Facebook, but those 
platforms can never mimic what's going on in our 
e-mail groups. That's because the e-mail lists 
are closed: When people believe their thoughts 
are being shared only with a small group, they're 
more comfortable to express what they really feel 
and can thus say more interesting things.

There are advantages to listservs even when 
they're not private. E-mail is available 
everywhere, for starters. "In a world where 
devices proliferate, e-mail is king, equal on all 
of them," says Jim Griffin, the co-creator of 
Pho, a huge and storied e-mail list devoted to 
discussions about digital entertainment. You 
can't say the same about Twitter and Facebook, 
which might not work correctly�or as quickly, or 
at all�on all mobile devices or across other 
platforms. E-mail is also more accommodating of 
long messages. There's no character limit, as on 
Twitter, and there are many handy tools that 
allow for functions not available on Facebook 
(you can save a draft, check spelling, add inline 
links, and organize a torrent of messages using automated filters).

McCullagh points out that different social norms 
apply to e-mail, too. For example, comments on 
Facebook tend to be relentlessly positive. 
Because posts there are tied to your real-life 
identity, it's difficult to criticize someone 
sharply on his Facebook page; if you do, it's 
considered rude, like swearing at someone in his 
own house. Mailing lists, meanwhile, are very 
accepting of flame wars. As James Fallows notes, 
these can sometimes be annoying�especially if 
you're not a party to them�but the best flame 
wars can be thoroughly absorbing and informative, 
and I've even seen flame wars change people's minds.

This leads to perhaps the best thing about e-mail 
lists: They are just about the only medium online 
devoted exclusively to discussing things. You 
start a Facebook group to popularize an idea (1 
million people against hipsters!), you start a 
Tumblr to make fun of the idea (Look at This 
Fucking Hipster), and you start a Twitter account 
to get a lot of people interested in your pithy 
observations about the idea. E-mail lists, by 
contrast, are devoted to getting people to talk 
about an idea. What's more important than that?

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and 
the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a 
Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at 
farhad.manjoo@slate.com and follow him on Twitter.

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