A heated discussion on 'Race, Gender & the Blues'

[Steve Ahola]

On 5/30/2012 7:23 AM, chuck 249 wrote:
> Besides, before long Facebook is going to go into advertising
> overdrive in an effort
> to rescue their plummeting stock....and then possibly zellers will
> return to the listserv format, which I have always supported and
> stayed with, simply because things get archived.
>
>
You hit the nail on the head! Facebook has pretty much decimated Yahoo
Groups which were like a dumbed-down version of email lists. FB does not
handle discussions very well at all. For one thing you have no control
over how your own Wall lists posts- it is strictly by the time of the
initial post with no option to switch that to time of latest post.
Lengthy discussions (usually the interesting ones!) will get buried by
newer posts and the only people still in the discussion are those who
get email notifications of new comments on posts that they have
participated in.

Facebook reportedly archives everything that you do or say, but there is
no easy way to access it (you need to scroll down your Wall by clicking
on Older Posts at the bottom.) You can't search through posts by
keywords or names or dates.  I had gotten the impression that listserv
email lists were way over my head- like Unix. If you have an email
client that supports threads they are very easy to use. And if you move
the Blues-L posts to their own folder it is very easy to search through
them by keywords, dates or names.

One more quibble about Facebook: what we call "threads" are "posts," and
what we call "posts" are "comments." But my biggest complaint is that it
is designed for and by the post-Nintendo generations who usually prefer
to communicate with texts and Twitter-like posts rather than long
conversations, letters or emails. As though we all have the attention
span of a fly,

Steve Ahola

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