Internet Issues

[Martha Sherwood]

>This was written by some 15 and 16 year olds.  It's hard to resist!
>Thought I'd share with the community at large....
>
>Devin
****************
>
>I am writing as office manager and computer consultant to the Russian
>Department and the following comments should not be construed as
>representing the opinions of a professional Slavicist; however, in my
>official capacity I believe I am qualified to speak on general internet
>issues such as broadcast of personal mail and chain letters.

PERSONAL MAIL:  The parameters for determining whether one is replying to
an individual or to an entire list will differ depending on the type of
computer, the communications software installed, and possibly the manner in
which your institution accesses Internet.  If a problem arises, getting
detailed written instructions from a person in your institution
knowledgeable about electronic communication will ensure that the solution
proposed works with your system.  This issue may have been blown out of
proportion.  The only personal messages that get posted are replies to
messages that were broadcast to the list; they may not be particularly
interesting, but there don't seem to be any genuinely personal or
embarassing communications involved.

CHAIN LETTERS: Concerning chain letters and other letters sent with
requests to broadcast them widely, much of the clutter and offense would be
eliminated if the persons forwarding the communications read them
thoroughly and considered whether the particular list to which they were
forwarding the communication contained a significant number of people who
would use them (in the process, they could also do some editing which would
satisfy a university E-mail server that the communication was not a simple
chain letter, a concern for some respondents).  I think most of us are
trained to feel that something must be done with any communication; the
easiest thing to do is to forward it without giving it much attention.
However, the ease with which electronic communications are forwarded to
multiple recipients - sometimes in electronic loops which seem to go on ad
nauseum- imposes upon the communicator a responsibility which in the bad
old days of snail mail would automatically have been imposed by budgetary
constaints - namely, to determine whether the communication is worth
disseminating to a particular audience.

This last paragraph was prompted by receiving from three different
Slavic-related mail lists a request for pen-pals from a Moscow secondary
school.  There was nothing inherently wrong with the intent behind the
communication, which might have been of interest to undergraduate Russian
majors, but the communication contained no usable reply address, something
that would have been obvious to anyone who tried to make use of it.

Martha Sherwood
Office Coordinator, UO Russian Department