Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: It's about changes

Author:David McCusker
Posted:9/12/2000; 11:53:13 AM
Topic:Discuss by email?
Msg #:21254 (In response to 21248)
Prev/Next:21253 / 21255

Kelly Thomas: But discussion groups are RECORDINGS of thoughts at a certain TIME.

Well that's the model they present to users, barring modifications which are explicitly allowed by the medium and interface. Because this is the model, normally the convention is that changes not change the meaning of a post. Adding or removing significant content later would make any responses less comprehensible, and that's destructive.

However, I don't consider content in discussion groups as evidence. It's too mutable to represent an accurate image of the past without doubts. The only time the status of evidence would matter is when folks want to attack each other on the basis of what someone said in the past. This just isn't a productive activity anyway, so I see no reason to take any effort to support attacks with social conventions.

Kelly Thomas: They are also public forums. If you go back and try to change history, expect to get called on it.

That's interesting since folks change history all the time. The substance of what many folks say is on interpretation of what has happened and what someone else has said. Lots of people spend all their time tuning current reality by editing the memory of the past, or the meaning of the memory of the past. (You might guess I consider this mostly a waste of time, or at best questionable overhead.)

For example, lots of energy is devoted to elevating some folks to the status of heroes, and lowering the status of other folks to demons, and in the process editing nearly everyone else completely out of existence. We should talk about that too, if we bother to adjudicate the act of journalism as a process. It seems like small potatoes to focus on merely factual quanta like whether words get edited.



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