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This is ONE OF 2 responses to VC 27 John 11 ("Too much of a good thing?")...
First of all, let's review an early claim of your Voice Card, John:
"At the same time, with the improvements I've made to the voice stacks, it's even easier than before to append vast piles of this information into the record. It takes only a few seconds to copy and paste ten thousand words..."
From my experience, this is simply not true. It took hours to import the text of last issue. Still, if you have a "few seconds" recipe for getting ten thousand words from my office network into Archipelago, I'd love to see it. Really.
As for the larger issue:
I've been pondering this for upwards of a year now. If you look back to recent issues previous to volume 27, I think you'll find that my volume of imported text had gone way down relative to earlier issues. Certainly I've been much more selective in what I pass on recently, although John may find this hard to believe.
The volume of information available electronically is mind-numbing, but it's my impression that many (most?) Archipelagans don't have easy access to this. Am I wrong?
My criteria in selecting material to put in Archipelago involves relevance or humor. Let's look at my last issue's contributions:
- Electronic Performance Art - Computers as a performance medium
- Banjo Humor - humor
- More Quotes - humor
- Computer "crime" - "Big Brother" syndrome being applied in America today to computer users.
- Voting Privacy - related to last year's voting discussion
- Love Connection - Virtual reality applied to controversial subject-matter
- Male answer Syndrome - humor
- Mars - How one big corporation structures itself to avoid prospering bastards
- Fractured Shakespeare - humor
- Voice Typewriter Update - progress towards John and Roger's bet
- On Terns - Bird Humor
I count 11 imported contributions, five of which were focused on humor.
In retrospect, I suppose I should have cut back those contributions to two or three. The remaining six, I think, stand up pretty well on the relevance scale. However, I have no idea what other Archipelagans do with my imported contributions. Do you read them, or ignore them? If no one else finds them interesting, I'll stop submitting voice cards of this sort, and save us all bundles of disk space.
Underlying John's voice card, I think I see an attempt to focus Archipelago a little. On what? I'm not sure, exactly. John: could you share more of your thoughts on this?
And while the debate rages, I will attempt to restrain myself from submitting more pilfered material.
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