6 PEACEANDQUIET@cornell.edu

Back when college applications were our biggest problems, my generation was indoctrinated into the Cult of the Extracurricular Activity. “If you can’t play the saxophone with your mouth and the nose flute with your nose while leading a cheer and scoring record points for the sports team you captain, you’re really not worth my time. Our time.” That’s the best I can remember the speech from the Berkeley admissions officer I met. Their neighbors in Palo Alto tried to be more laid-back about the situation but, when pressed, admitted that earning an Eagle Scout badge wasn’t interesting until I had also captured, tamed, and raised a real eagle and its eaglets, learning a life lesson or three along the way.

Long story short, the eagle didn’t make it, and neither did I (hello, Ithaca), but that need to be involved in activities, activities, activities held up, leading to the point: my inbox is never empty. I get at least ten e-mails a day from the respective listservs of the different things I’m involved in here: clubs, music group, eagle care training, fraternity, etc.

E-mail strikes up a great deal of emotional interest. If you haven’t heard of e-mail addiction, it’s probably because you’re too busy hitting “send/receive” in your Outlook; if you’ve never spent a frustrating morning cleaning spam out of your inbox, you probably don’t have the necessary skills to read this blog. Everyone wants: messages that directly concern them; messages they find entertaining; nothing else. Everyone gets: messages they didn’t really need; messages that try and fail to be entertaining, and then try, try again; everyone once in a while a gem that was worth their time. The conflict between these, the E-mail Dream and the E-mail Reality, is what drives the populist Listserv Leviathan. (I use “Leviathan” in the sense Wallace uses when citing Hobbes.)

This Leviathan rears its ugly head when a particular abuser of listserv privileges sends one too many chain letters or inside jokes out to people who don’t need or want them. It can strike as a Citizen’s Arrest, when an angry listserv member lets the whole group know what is and is not appropriate for a forwarded message (“YOU ARE NOT FUNNY, [name removed at Jim’s request]”), or as a Ninja Strike, when a listserv administrator blocks the offending writer from ever e-mailing the group again. (I invented these terms; eat your heart out, Wallace.) The Citizen’s Arrest both enforces the standard (unless the convict gets sassy) and reminds everyone on the listserv what the rules are. Public shame is just as effective over e-mail as in person. The Ninja Strike is quieter, but its threat is potent. When I was younger and more foolish, I abused one of my listservs to the point that I, myself, received this threat; it worked. After that, I wrote to that listserv like my eagle ate salad (never). Wallace’s concept of the “raised eyebrow” can enter into the gray area of e-mails that disparage listserv abuse as a sidenote, but my experience has been that the annoyance usually just builds up to a breaking point before a raised eyebrow can quiet things down. Then, the conformity Wallace mentions follows immediately.

There are a couple more areas of listserv abuse and Leviathan responses I’d like to discuss, such as which Citizens are more likely to make Arrests (older, more settled-in and influential members of the group that owns the listserv address), or when the Leviathan fails (it’s the Cornell Fear-of-Confrontation Club ’serv, i.e., the members are too timid or polite to respond to the irritating authors), but I’m more interested in hearing if you guys have had similar experiences. After all, it’s possible that I’ve just gravitated toward the listservs that have loud members....