jr conlin's ink stained banana

At work, we have a random email list. It's where folks can go and talk about whatever random bit of crap they care to think about. It's a source of anger, humor, insight, annoyance, and just about every other adjective and adverb you wish to toss out. Chances are, your company has one of these too. It may not be called the same thing, and may just be a certain thread on a particular topic, but it's where folks generally have agreed to drag the discussion into the sort of topical chaos one finds if one were surrounded by folks on cellphones (e.g. the last time you went to go see a movie).

It's lasted about as long as the company has and is the target of addiction and derision. i'm fine if folks choose to or not to participate, but i did hear a rather troubling statement recently: "i'd love it if that list was closed down."

Mind you, that wasn't stated by any executive in a position to do something like that, but it did strike me as being a horrible idea. (Quick disclaimer here: Unofficially, i've somehow acquired the title "King of Random" even though i rarely post to that list or read many topics anymore.) Why is this a horrible idea? Because it's the Napster Effect.

Back when Napster ruled the roost, folks used it. A lot. Not everyone did, but a fair group did, even if it was only to sign in and see what was available. They realized just how important that service was to them. They never though about creating another Napster because that one worked so well. (That's not 100% true, as there were other Napster like services started up, but they were no where near as successful.) Virtuous or not, valuable or not, Napster had a huge draw.

So much of a draw, that when it was shut down, it didn't go away. Instead, the fragments of the now shattered audience built dozens of competing services that were harder to control or monitor. An arms race of sorts soon developed, that seemed to skip the bow and arrow stages and went straight to nuclear. One could speculate that the fallout of that ongoing war was the Creative Commons mutation, but even that often falls as a casualty of the continuing efforts of control and dispersion.

If said individual did manage to get "random" shut down, all that would happen is that there would be a dozen "mini-randoms" sparking up on the hundreds of other mail lists. Perhaps, someone would install a bulletin board system and folks would go there, outside of the mail stream. Perhaps folks might create a new AJAX based system to manage the various discussions about vegetarian parking habits. Perhaps they'll go off-site to some uncontrolled third party site where nobody can shut them down. The problem is that when legitimate issues appear (and being borne of pure chaos, that does happen even on a random list) there's no way to monitor that. Likewise, that list is a valuable barometer to the psyche of the employees since they often feel quite free to post whatever they're thinking about.

People are social. They want to talk to each other to build on that social environment. A wise general provides them a playground they can use to do that where he can keep an eye on them, regardless of how much of a distraction it may be. Because if you don't give them one, they're going to go make one, and only if you're lucky, they might let you play.