Newsgroups: bit.listserv.psycgrad
Date:         Thu, 28 Jan 1993 07:23:59 EST
              <PSYCGRAD@UOTTAWA.BITNET>
From:         Matthew Simpson <054340@UOTTAWA.BITNET>
Subject:      RE: CowPlop Fans
              27 Jan 1993 12:27:01 EST from <PCABE@PEMBVAX1.PEMBROKE.EDU>

On Wed, 27 Jan 1993 12:27:01 EST <PCABE@PEMBVAX1.PEMBROKE.EDU> said:
>Cowboys? Bills? 49'ers? Graduate school? Graduate students? (Is this
>network worth spending my time on?)

In general, the best way to combat this, is to mail the person directly.
However, not wanting to re-type this long letter to the many cow-ploppers,
I'm sending this one here.  If you need to request people to change the
nature of their e-mail postings, please send the person direct.  If we all
do this, the offenders will get the message (and many more).

I have to agree with the tone of this author.  Lately there has been
a plethora of one-liner type playschool chit chat on PSYCGRAD.  You
people know who you are.  The thing with one-liners is that the
writet is not exercising any consideration of others.  They just want
to talk and hear themselves talk.

Sure it's easy to hit the delete key on these items of mail, right?
However, some people have to pay money for each and every line of e-mail
they receive, especially if the reader is in Eastern European Countries
like Poland.  Censorship for the sake of saving a few dollars is not
worth it, I agree.  But when the message is nothing concretely linked
to the interests of the group as a whole, it has to be questioned, or
at least resented by the majority.

Please recognize this.  With a group as large as this (over 530) we could
find all sorts of topics that only, let's say, 5% of us could find fun
to chit chat about.  Yet these topics may not be relevant at all to being
a graduate student of psychology (eg. sports, cooking, knitting, cars,
bingo, toe-nail clipping, etc).  There would always be at least 5% of
use that would have fun chatting about these topics.  However, the
topics would not be implicitly relevant to being a graduate student in
psychology.  These topics are generally resented.

Admittedly, a topic like magnetic resonance imagery might not be relevant
to 99% of the people on The PSYCGRAD Project.  However, I believe that
because a topic like that is associated with neurpsychology, 99% of the
people from developmental to social to cognitive to sleep research to
human sexuality (etc) will not resent that topic being brought through
PSYCGRAD.  One of the biggest reason why they don't is because PSYCGRAD
is one of the only lists that people could talk about that.  But there are
other appropriate places for chit chat about sports!

Network-wide ID  Full address      List title
---------------  ------------      ----------
AUTOS-L          AUTOS-L@TRITU     The List For Classic And Sports Cars
PBP-L            PBP-L@ETSUADMN    Play-by-Play Sportscasters list
SPORTMGT         SPORTMGT@UNBVM1   Sport Management
SPORTPC          SPORTPC@UNBVM1    Use of computers in sport
SPORTPSY         SPORTPSY@TEMPLEVM Exercise and Sports Psychology
STATLG-L         STATLG-L@BROWNVM  Baseball (and Lesser Sports) Discussion List

Those of you doing the football chit chat, please respect the intention of
PSYCGRAD.  No, we can't make you do this.  But we can request that you do.

O======================================================================O
 | _  l  _  * Matthew Simpson          * BITNET:                      |
 |  \_l_/   * School of Psychology     * 054340@uottawa.bitnet        |
 |    l     * 145 Jean Jacques Lussier * INTERNET:                    |
 |    l     * Ottawa, Ontario K1N 8P5  * 054340@acadvm1.uottawa.ca    |
O======================================================================O
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