Department Of Wishful Thinking

4 Responses to “Department Of Wishful Thinking”

1. Maarja Krusten on November 21st, 2008 6:41 am

   Hi, John, interesting piece in the NYT. I offer a strong “hear hear” to your call for expressions of politeness but in my experience, the failure to say “thank you” and “please” isn’t necessarily generational. And I would add that I would love it if more young people learned to love books. I’m one of those people who believe that reading books teaches you about people different than yourself. Reading even decrease the tendency of people to “other” those who differ from them. And reduce a little what author Bill Bishop refers to as “the big sort,” where people gravitate to the like minded.

   However, I do believe the author of the article in the NYT makes a valid point about the virtual world being a place where young people may learn “how to manage a public identity.” The comment posted by the girl on Facebook and the boy’s response are good examples. People test the waters in the virtual world and get a sense of how others respond. This involves trial and error. I’ll share a case where I tried but erred.

   I subscribed for a while to a records management Listserv but left it in the end. The subscribers mostly dealt with technology and issues of record keeping process. The Listserv had its lighter moments but they were very ritualistic. For example, certain off topic postings were reserved for Fridays. OT posts revolved around sports or hobbies (hunting, discussing vintage cars) but rarely discussed reading (my big hobby). Unlike with the archivists’ listserv to which I belong, the records management listserv included among the most prominent posters several military veterans. The group was largely made up of people in the U.S. but had some international subscribers. Anniversary well wishes tended to focus on U.S. history (e.g., the birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps).

   I initially subscribed because I am trained as an historian, a field that is dependent on decisions made by records managers about the life cycle of records. I was interested in learning more about how records managers operate as a profession (I’ve worked in a related field – as an archivist – but never as a records manager.) I also thought it might be useful to bring an end-user perspective to discussions of records retention.

   My participation in the group won me a few new virtual friends but within the group as a whole, it didn’t work out. I linked to articles such as Russell Riley’s Washington Post piece about White House records, “For History’s Sake, Nothing Like a Paper Trail.” I also posted about Air Force Eduard Mark’s observation on an historian’s listserv about his concerns aobut “the collapse of record keeping” in the electronic age. I got few publicly posted responses from the records managers. One told me off list that I raised issues on which people did not want to dwell.

   I finally dropped my subscription to the list after someone criticized me publicly for mentioning my late twin sister (a National Archives’ records declassification archivist) one time too many. At the time, she had been dead for three years and my weaving her into some of my posted messages merely was part of my mourning process.

   As I left the List, I noted in one of my final postings that: “Some see a List as a room with many corners, where different people congregate. . . . Others take a narrower view of a List’s function. There is no right way to do it, although it is considerate to take into account what the majority wants. While I look for a place where I can take off the mask I wear in the office, and let my hair down and chat freely, others look for something closer to the impersonal character of their workplace. And tolerate some ritualistic deviations (the Friday postings) but not much beyond that. Others among you seem to welcome a wide variety of styles and personality types.

   . . . . an off list discussion that I had with someone yesterday left me feeling I could follow one of three options: stop turning to the List with my postings; put on a mask and adopt an impersonal business-like style; or continue on the course I’ve followed since joining the List a little over a year ago.

   While one usually learns to conform to community standards within an office, faking it along the way in order to get along with the powers that be and to succeed, I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that some Lists, too, might require that. Of course, what is a mask for some is a natural style for others. In reading through List messages, I sometimes seem to sense who among you is putting on that mask and adopting styles or rituals and who has them inherent in their nature. Whether the style is natural or adopted, and I think for many of you it is natural, most of you seem comfortable with the List. Of course, there also is the possibility that records management as a profession calls for certain aptitudes, while history calls for others.

   . . . I had hoped those who didn’t mesh with me simply would delete my postings unopened or set up a rule to send them to a trash folder. I’ve changed my mind. Now, I tend to think that my greatest obligation is to ease the stress for those of you who prefer the impersonal, business-like approach. If adapting to that approach is too much of a reminder of the workplace for me, and I don’t want to fake it, then I should step back. I’m the intruder here.”

   So, I left the List. I still look in on it to learn about things but am unable to share my perspective. In retrospect, I should have thought about why people are drawn to records management (a profession that focuses on control, hierarchies, and process) as opposed to history (a profession that looks at underlying issues and often asks what and why). I should have monitored the List before joining and assessed the extent to which it depended on ritualistic behaviors. And I should have decided to what extent I wanted to adopt its standards and even decide to wear a mask in order to fit in or risk being myself, too much, and disrupting the existing balance of the forum.

   I think those are the types of things that people learn through trial and error. Written communications in the virtual world differ from face to face contact because it is easier for people to misunderstand each other. There is no body language to read. That may have happened with me and some of my critics on the records management listserv.

   For the younger generation, at least for the more astute among them, the lessons are learned by interacting online, through texting, IMs, Facebook, MySpace, and other forms of social networking.

2. Maarja Krusten on November 21st, 2008 7:23 am

   Sorry, left out a word, that should be Air Force Historian Eduard Mark. He was the focus of an article in Slate a while back. (See Fred Kaplan, “The End of History: How e-mail is wrecking our national archive,” Slate, June 4, 2003.)

   Also, I didn’t quote from my entire farewell post to the records list. In it, I included some observations on the different things people look for from email discussion lists. I argued that there was no single “right” approach. Some subscribers took a short and business like approach: “Has anyone used Product X for electronic records management? If so, contact me off list with assessments. Thanks.” Others were more expository. (I wasn’t the only one to use that style but I definitely tended more than other posters towards ruminating — at length — on what occurred and asking why.)

   After I posted my farewell, few readers wrote me to say they found my postings the most interesting messages on the List and wished I would stay on. A few female posters wrote me to explain why they lurked on the List but never posted they. A couple of them described some off-list exchanges that they had had with other subscribers which led them to step back from the List.

   The general reaction on the List? Unknown. The list was uncommonly quiet for several days after I posted my farewell. Nowadays, it operates much as it always has. Perhaps some readers took my post to be a passive-aggressive call for more tolerance. (I had made it clear in other messages that I was drawn more to “live and let live” types of people than to those that demanded orthodoxy.) Others may have taken it as a “how to succeed here” rumination and a cautionary note for new subscribers. Who knows.

   At any rate, thanks for letting me post my viewpoints here! I gotta run now.

3. Maarja Krusten on November 21st, 2008 7:47 am

   Aargh – posting on Smartphone leads to more errors. That should be “a few posters wrote me” rather than just few which incorrectly implies hardly anyone.

4. John H. Taylor on November 21st, 2008 9:02 am

   I was sort of being a curmudgeon on purpose. Speaking purely as a pastor, I would prefer young people have their relationships with those around them in order before worrying about their public identities. Personally I enjoy e-mails, blogs, and, recently, Facebook. And yet with all this on-line stuff going on I’m conscious of a tug on my attention span when it comes to the corporeal and incarnational. At an Episcopal schools conference I attended two weeks ago, Parker Palmer even passed out a poem about it, but I don’t have it with me. More later.

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