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Re: [lojban] Response to Robin's "Essay on the future of Lojban"
Stela Selckiku wrote:
It does not entirely matter though exactly what "skicu" means, if that
worries you, because there is no circumstance at all where you NEED to
implicitly assert that you skicu by saying "le". You can simply go
ahead and use "lo" all the time-- it's never ever wrong.
Which is completely alien to the way Nora and I have used Loglan and
later Lojban, alas. It was "le" that was always right, and lo meant
something a lot more restricted, though we argued over whether that
something could be defined consistently. But most importantly, it had
to actually BE the thing described and therefore wasn't "always right".
lo blabi zdani would never issue a political statement. le blabi zdani
might, though la'ele blabi zdani would be more clear.
But I'm not going to reargue xorlo. I will use the language the way I
know it, and if people correct me when what I say is incomprehensible,
then I may someday manage to speak the same language as them.
And that is
indeed what every Lojban teacher that I know of tells their students
to do, and that is also what I recommend to you.
The fact that every Lojban teacher does so means that I am no longer a
Lojban teacher. It is the fact that Nora and I no longer seem to know
the language that we used to be the main teachers of, that has kept me
silent for so long.
I feel safe in saying that I speak for almost everyone here when I say
that we would much rather hear Lojban with funny articles from you
than silence! We don't even pay any attention to what articles people
use anymore. :)
We didn't much back then, either. That was the whole thing about
"letting usage decide". No matter how much we prescribed, the language
was whatever people actually used.
I dunno if it exists or even is possible, but a constantly available and
updating IRC log, where one would log in and see the last couple of pages of
discussion, regardless of how-long-ago it took place, would help,
This is exactly how IRC works. It's a beautiful, harmoniously
balanced, elegant model. Unfortunately it is also deeply geeky, so
the elegance is not immediately apparent, hidden as it is behind an
entirely mysterious interface-- a geek's idea of elegance, after all,
almost never includes visible, clearly-labeled controls. :)
The real problem, as showed up yesterday, is that it is too chaotic.
Get more than a couple people there and there are suddenly 15
conversations going on at once, and you are trying to follow all of them
(or at least I do, instinctively). It feels like being at a large noisy
party, even with relatively few people actively participating, and for
me becomes rather too draining.
The culture of IRC is one that welcomes the multi-conversation, whereas
Nora and I prefer a conversation about one topic at a time (though the
conversation may wander). That is hard to do in real time with typing
(and typing in Lojban with my typo rate is even worse).
What an intermittent Lojbanist needs is closer to the ideal of Usenet
threads, in Usenet groups, so they can look at an area of the language
and see what is going on, and if something is interesting, dive in more
deeply. But it also needs to be persistent and less focused on what is
going on right now, because the things being talked about today may not
be of interest, but last week's discussion might be. I've seen some
webforums that come close to that, but I've never been comfortable with
web-based interfaces. It feels too much like filling out forms rather
than conversation.
The other problem for the intermittent Lojbanist is the level of detail,
volume, and technicalese. While a webforum, threaded email, or Usenet
thread can be easier to follow as a long-lasting conversation on more or
less one topic, if too many people are interested, or if a couple are
very intensely interested, the volume quickly gets too much to actually
read. Someone coming in now and seeing this thread will find a hundred
plus messages and considerable fragmentation of subject matter. But if
they have an hour or two for Lojban, reading through 100 messages is an
impossible chore.
So you need people willing to be digesters and editors of the activity
going on, that can turn the buzz of the multitudinous activities in the
community, into a Reader's Digest aimed at their level.
That was what I used to try to do with ju'i lobypli and with le lojbo
karni. Aimed for the serious but intermittent reader, and for the
uninvolved who still want to be informed as to what's going on. I think
I was doing pretty well, but it was quite all consuming to put out an
issue, since I also had to manage the mailing lists, do the printing,
etc. Just as Robin has just reached the point where managing the lists
was keeping him from actually doing something himself, in 1994 I was
forced to choose between being a magazine editor and helping get what
became CLL done. I made the right choice, but I think the intermittent
Lojbanist has been largely ignored since then, and that community was
and probably still is perhaps 10-20 times the size of the active community.
Unfortunately IRC is also such a geeky idea that to use it properly
requires you have a computer always running-- to some I suppose that
seems only as onerous a requirement as that you have electricity or
running water. :) Even while you're not there, your computer is
always "idling" in the IRC channel, receiving all of the messages for
you. At any time you can come to the computer and check the channel,
and the most recent messages will be ready for you, regardless of how
long ago they were. It's not expected that you'll read all of the
"backlog", as it's called,
That's the problem, I want to read it all. And for someone with limited
time, "too much information" is the worst problem.
> but it is expected that you'll skim it for
mentions of your own name,
I have never been a good skimmer. I *read*, fairly fast and
voluminously, but if there is too much for my available reading time, I
just tune out completely.
And of course with interactive media, I have to resist the temptation to
respond and get involved, or that starts chewing up my time. Some sort
of digesting service that makes the volume less, and reduces the
temptation to respond is helpful. You can write letters to your
newspaper and thus respond, but most don't - they just read. But with
online news-articles with commenting, you can find news-articles with
hundreds of responses. Who has time to read them? I've been tempted
many times to respond, but I'm glad that there is a registration
requirement, because that bit of bureaucracy is sufficient to keep me
from wasting time in the commenting, so I can read much more. (On
Usenet however, I can waste much more time, since I don't need to
register to respond to someone).
> which your IRC client will helpfully highlight for you.
That is fine if you are an active participant and your name will
therefore crop up. But for someone like me, who as president will feel
a need to keep abreast on what everyone is doing (just as Robin does),
while still choosing only a small number of things to work on himself,
we need more than to look for our name.
The "most-recently-updated" on the wiki used to tell me what people have
been talking about there, though there was still no filter short of
actually reading the full pages to get any detail, once I chose a topic.
Anyway IRC totally isn't for everything or everyone. Especially these
days, there's a lot of other options. For instance Twitter is another
chatty medium, and everything said there is immediately on the web, so
that's useful in some ways.
I don't want "chat", and one-liners are sometimes entertaining but
seldom really informative. Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging drive me
up the wall just watching my kids doing it. Perpetual interrupt mode,
never spending an hour actually following through on something because
there is too much new stuff coming in.
I want news with enough length that I can feel informed. A
well-hyperlinked blog might fill the role for intermittent Lojbanists,
but it would become a job to produce it often enough, because the person
who does it has to have a mainstream blogger's mentality and read all
the stuff others don't have time for, while getting involved in
relatively little so that they have time to produce the blog more than
once in a blue moon.
Could a shared digestive blog work? I dunno. I am as unaware of the
blogging world as of many other online things.
lojbab
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