[lit-ideas] Re: Craigslist
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 22:49:30 -0700
On May 25, 2006, at 10:13 PM, Carol Kirschenbaum wrote:
David Ritchie reflected: "I wish Craigslist were a better method of distributing unwanted stuff."
ck: Craigslist seems to work only within the Bay Area culture. It's a reflection of it, a product of it, a part of it...last I checked, that is. The idea should transfer all over, but it doesn't.
Carol,
inordinately chatty lately, eh?
I don't quite understand "inordinately chatty." There's blather and there's chat.
Chat is an informal exchange of ideas, with diversions and anything else that is needed to make the occasion humane--tea, digestive biscuits, pints of beer, nods towards the cricket score, some loosening of waistline buttons. Chat can be discursive, but words are not wasted. It's all fairly valuable.
Blather, on the other hand, fills the air with noise that sucks one, like echoes in a canyon. You see crowds running in response to blather--they become waves curling on the shore, uncertain whether they are supposed victoriously to be advancing or taking a message to wake the clams.
The measure of both is what Craigslist was first aimed at--does it help? Are humans improved, ever so slightly, by this?
We should manage Craigslist better in Portland; people care here. Somehow bozos have crowded good intentions out.
But then again, we're all bozos on this bus.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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