SEELANGS, R.I.P?

[Eliot Borenstein]

Thanks to everyone for their thoughtful responses to my original post. Let me make a few clarifications:

1) Of course SEELANGS is a valuable resource.  That's why so many people subscribe.  My point is that it could be a better resource if it were using a different vehicle. 

2) Multiple constituencies.  One poster asked why the Pussy Riot discussion was "allowed."  This is an unmoderated list--everything is allowed.  That's all to the good, but why not have a medium that makes it easier to filter out the noise from the signal? . 

3) Multimedia.  Many of our posts are hyperlinks, some of which get garbled when they're put on the list.  A different platform could change the way we deal with multimedia links.  Instead of a link to a youtube video with a Putin parody, for instance, the video itself could be embedded (Facebook has been doing this for years). 

4) Cyrillic.  Once of the refreshing things about the Pussy Riot exchange was that that this was (I think) the first extended debate on SEELANGS that took place almost entirely in Russian.  Remarkably, it worked.  But even now, I still see the occasional post that was presumably Cyrillic, but ends up as gibberish.  Shouldn't a forum for all things Slavic have a seamless way of handling the Cyrillic alphabet(s)? 

5) The digest format as an alternative.  I've been getting the digest format for years.  It's better for me than receiving individual posts, but it's still ridiculously clunky.  For example, I was reading this last set of posts in a digest on my phone.  At least one of the posts included all the previous posts, in multiple copies because of multiple embedding.   This is laborious on a small screen.  I realize that reading the digest that way is my choice, but I doubt I'm the only one opting to read on a smartphone. In 2012, why should our means of communication be optimized only for a desktop or laptop computer screen?

My proposal was to "kill" SEELANGS as it presently exists, but only by replacing it with something that could perhaps serve us all better.  When SEELANGS was established, there was no World-Wide Web, and many of its subscribers were reading the posting as ASCII text on PINE.  (If you don't know what PINE was, consider yourself lucky.)  Of course it's not a tragedy to have to scroll through multiple embeddings, and I can live with it if I have to.  But one of the main features of the evolution of digital communication in the past two decades has been increased convenience.  Why can't we take advantage of that?

Eliot Borenstein



Eliot Borenstein, Acting Chair
Collegiate Professor	
Professor, Russian & Slavic Studies
Provostial Fellow
New York University		
19 University Place, Room 210
New York, NY 10003
(212) 998-8676 (office)
212-995-4163 (fax)








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