A Coptic monk who lives near an archeological site in Egypt, emails students in Michigan, shedding light on the spiritual teachings that were once taught at the 4th Century monastery being excavated (Photograph by Guglielmo de'Micheli). Back in Michigan, a student, silhouetted by the glow of his computer in his own make-shift desert cave, reads email from the monk. (Photograph by J. Kyle Keener)

ONLINE DISCUSSIONS

There are many different kinds of online discussions. The most popular are listservs, newsgroups, and chats.

 

LISTSERVS

Another thing you can use email for is to join a listserv. Listservs are discussion groups of like-minded people or people joined together by their shared interest in a particular topic who use the Internet to communicate with each other.

Actually the term “listserv” is a kind of brand name become generic name (like “Kleenex”) for what are also called mailing lists.

What listservs do is managing the sharing of mail messages among created groups of people. I, for example, belong to a listserv for my department which uses it to post announcements and otherwise communicate about departmental business.

When you join a listserv discussion list, you are putting your name on a mailing list that copies and distributes electronic mail to everyone who has subscribed. When you post an email message to the list, your message is copied and mass-mailed to every other person currently on the list. The downside of listservs, then, is that your mailbox can quickly fill up with messages posted to them.

An alternative that avoids this problem is the newsgroup. (If you are reluctant to subscribe to a listserv for fear of being inundated with more daily mail messages than you can handle, you might want to see if the listserv makes an optional "digest" available. Then, instead of receiving individual messages as they are posted throughout the day, you will receive one big mail message, or "digest," of the listservs mail, bundled on a daily or weekly basis.)

In general, to subscribe to a listserv, you need to send an email message to the listserver itself:

LISTSERV@hostname

making your subject line "subscribe" and the body of your message:

SUBSCRIBE listname yourfirstname yourlastname

To remove your name from a list, send the listserver an email message with an "unsubscribe" subject and the following message:

UNSUBSCRIBE listname yourfirstname yourlastname

A good listing of listservs (as well as everything your ever wanted to know about them) can be found at www.liszt.com.

NEWSGROUPS

An alternative to listservs are newsgroups.

Like listservs, newsgroups are discussion groups of like-minded people or people joined together by their shared interest in a particular topic who use the Internet to communicate with each other.

Unlike listservs, newsgroup messages are not sent to your email address, but rather are collected in a single space on a server, avoiding the problem of your mailbox filling up. Newsgroups thus afford a measure of economy in managing discussion forums since participants link to a local server to read current messages, multiple copies aren't distributed, taking up bandwidth on the Net and disk storage in individual's mailboxes. No matter how many people actually read a given message, only one copy needs to be stored on any given computer network.

Newsgroups are also somewhat controversial, however, because the forums are public, and they aren't always sanitized for public consumption. You will find material that may offend, but freedom of speech is something newsgroup fans guard zealously.

Newsgroups run through a program called USENET. USENET was created in 1979 by two graduate students at Duke University and another at the University of North Carolina who got together and wrote conferencing software linking the two institutions. Word spread about the program and two years later, a graduate student at Berkeley, working with a local high school student, released a new version that was able to handle large volumes of postings.

Today, USENET consists of thousands of individual newsgroups, variously called conferences, forums, bboards (BBSs), or special interest groups (SIGs). There are currently more than 6,000 newsgroups operating in several different languages at roughly 190,000 sites.

No central organization or body runs USENET. It is, indeed, a living expression of freedom of the press, because you don't have to own a press to publish your own ideas on USENET.

Newsgroups are divided into broad subject categories, indicated by the three letter preface to group names. For example:

In order to read, post and respond to newsgroups, you must first have newsreader software that is installed either on your host server or on your own computer. Most browsers, such as Netscape or Internet explorer, provide a menu interface to available newsgroups, but any browser will allow you to open a specific newsgroup.

A good listing of listservs can be found at: www.liszt.com/news/. Check it out!

CHATS

Chats are discussions that take place in real time, kind of like CB radio except in text. They are the most free-wheeling of the discussion options.

Essentially, chats consists of scrolling text that is added by participants as they type and hit enter. Thus, chat messages tend to be short, and chat texts tend to be somewhat jumbled.

When you enter a chat, you create an identity for yourself. Many people take on different and/or multiple identities in chat rooms. To add a message to the chat, you type what you want to say and press enter. Your message joins the cue at that point in time.

A good listing of chats can be found at: www.liszt.com/chat/. Check it out!