Listerine

A retirement party for a professor of ancient Greek led me to my first, and still primary, virtual community. It was 1997, I’d been working in IT for seven years, I used email every day and had employed the web to get the best deal on my new car.  After the party, my college roommate said I should try this new thing they had for alumnae of the College — the Listserv.  “You don’t have to write anything, you can just read what other people write, it’s called lurking.”  I signed up when I got home and my lurking lasted about three days, it was too passive for me.  I was soon posting with enthusiasm.  The Bryn Mawr Alumnae Listserv (hereafter referred to as The List) is a closed, unmoderated email listserv; membership is restricted to alums of the College, but once you’re in it’s a free-for-all.

One year, we pulled some basic numbers from the listserver.  There were about 350 registered for The List, mostly lurkers, with about 50 active participants.  The differences between the 4L model (Linking, Lurking, Learning & Leading) and the Wenmoth model (Consumer, Commenter, Contributor, Commentator) seem insignificant. The List definitely has all four, whatever you call them.  People move from one group to the next and back again over time.  We have sustained a vibrant virtual community for 11 years with a relatively small population to pull new members from (the College produces about 300 new graduates a year). I mostly delete these days, due to time constraints, reading a few select threads or certain people’s posts.  I surveyed my mail from the last 4 days to get a flavor of the current stats:

  • There were about 800 posts (consistent with the 100-200 a day average)
  • There were 69 different people posting
  • Topics include lots of politics, the new president of the College, various health discussions, the coup in Chad, Security issues with Facebook and IE7 , and solicitations for Wisdom of the List (WOTL) on teens travelling alone, yoga for fat chicks, New York restaurants, and how to hire a housekeeper.

Our youngest members are the new graduates that join each year; there are cyclical discussion threads on the twenty-something career-launching experience and changing social and sexual mores with representation from the last 6 decades.  Our oldest Listerine was the mother of a regular (a Leader or Commentator) who as she was also an alumnae (class of 1933!) qualified to join.  From her assisted living facility, she shared her student experiences in the 1930s, a hilarious anecdote about having the same dentist as Wallis Simpson and a recipe for chocolate pie, still referred to on the List as Eva Leah Pie.

We received near-live local coverage as Listerines adopted babies from Vietnam and Kazakhstan.  We have celebrated new jobs and promotions, marriages, babies and other big and small events.  We have mourned the deaths of several Listerines, spouses, parents, friends and sympathized when bad things happen.  There are regular live List gatherings at College events (like Reunion), when people travel, or just for the hell of it (5 people bought tickets to Paris and spent a long weekend there together once).  My friend Martha wrote a wonderful article on the List for for the Alumnae Bulletin.  It was written 5 years ago, but is still true today; I guess that is one way we can define our community as “vibrant.” We have had battles, people have unsubscribed in a huff; we had a big fracas a few years ago when a person with a serious mental illness was banned from the List for unacceptable behavior.

Is the technology of a listerv outmoded?  A lot of Listerines moved their accounts to g-mail for its thread-sorting functionality. There’s been a Yahoo group for years where people posted pictures and kept databases of addresses and birthdays.  Many members have blogs. There has been the annual Secular Secret Santa by snail mail for several years.  In 2005, the Alumnae Association purchased a social-networking web app from Affinity Circles, our closed version is called Athena’s Web. We had a big flame war last summer that resulted in a contingent decamping to form their own Google email group (known as the AlternaList); some people belong to both. But none of these flashier tools has the immediacy and participation level of The List.

I have belonged to other virtual communities:  people who are fixing up old houses like me, people who like to talk about restaurants and food, people active in politics, but the List is still first in my heart.  So je suis une Listerine, yo soy una Listerine, ich bin eine Listerine.  I’d say it in ancient Greek if I knew how.  Wait, I’ll ask for the WOTL, they know everything.