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2004-06-02

    <kensanata> bkhl: did you read about so and so?
    <bkhl> Nope.
    <kensanata> i'm not sure how much of it remains...

Contributors: HeatherJames, BjörnLindström?, ShaeErisson and AlexSchroeder.

Does ForgiveAndForget (re)create OralHistory??

Is IRC an oral medium? Conversation analysists seem to think so. IRC conversation places much less importance on rhyme and form. Perhaps that shows that we're still in our infancy, because our stories are short. Longer stories will be written up on a web page eventually. Or perhaps this is what oral history was all about. Some of the masters got famous, but there were a gazillion other people just telling stories as they remembered them.

Features: distribution form, dialogue, rumors, turn-taking, goal-directedness. Smells like conversation, works like conversation -- but be oral in nature?

From the perspective of Homer and medieval legends, bards and minstrels reciting epics -- there's no match in IRC for that. But then again, many people do keep stories alive.

    <shapr> I dunno, do you remember the time the guy came into #emacs and
        couldn't understand why delYsid had less than 256 colors on his
        display no matter HOW MANY  TIMES we told him?
    <shapr> lots of really good stories have happened on IRC
    <shapr> I do tell them

Is ForgiveAndForget a kind of censorship that discourages telling stories? Perhaps it imposes upon us the limitations bards of old had to struggle with: No written records, and the limits of our memory, of our attachment. Everything else gets placed on a wiki page or a blog entry, and linked. Since forgive and forget asks us to not leave artefacts behind, we're falling back on what we remember. The stories are only alive while we still think about them.

Every good story has lessons to be learned from it, and open questions waiting for answers. What happened to danl on #emacs? Is rahul still a Common Lisp fan?

We could use the date pages on our wikis to note interesting things that happened on IRC. And I'm not only thinking of the on-topic stuff. Chronicles documenting the interactions, too. And based on this, we develop our CommunityLore.

Not all conflict is long-term destructive. Change is conflict too. There's also CreativeTension?. Conflict can also disrupt an existing, good community. When it splinters into sub-groups, however, each of these groups has another chance to grow.

Define external redirect: OralHistory CreativeTension BjörnLindström

EditNearLinks: MeatballWiki WikiMatrix ShaeErisson PatrickAnderson

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