[KS] friends network and various sources of confusion

[Namhee Lee]

Hello,

I'm Michael Chwe---I'm not a member of the korean-studies @mailbase.ac.uk
mailing list, but my wife is (I'm sending this from her email account) and
thus I've been clued in on the recent thread concerning the friends
network.  As Ji-Yeon Yuh and Charles Armstrong described earlier, the
friends network is a mailing list.  I was involved with founding it about 4
years ago, and for much of this time acted as the list manager.  The list
is completely "ad hoc" and has no association with the American Friends
Service Committee, the popular television show, or any other institution,
although until recently we ran it out of a machine at the U of Chicago.  I
for one do not know whether there are other mailing lists with similar
sounding names.

One thing I can add to Ji-Yeon and Charles's clarifications is that I have
some idea about how various confusions arose.  First, a member of our list
sent Bruce Cumings's _Nation_ article to the friends listserver as well as
simultaneously (via cc:) to several other people, including Ted Barker at
tbarker at kwp.org, Dave Hughes at dave at oldcolo.com, and Matthew Benuska at
kahs at arkay-intl.com.  I think that a discussion then arose which people
continued by doing "reply-to-all", thus including the friends network along
with these several other people.  It is possible that people in this
discussion, including both friends network members and others, were not
aware whether a given person in this discussion was a member of the friends
network or not, or even what the friends network was, or who exactly was
participating in this discussion.  In any case, Ted Barker and Dave Hughes,
who made the "cold war" comments which Matthew Benuska disagreed with, are
not members of the friends network.  It is interesting to note that even
though no one (as far as I know) explicitly said that they were, the
assumption seems to have arisen and persisted.

It is also worth noting that although no one said explicitly that the
friends network has a collective or shared opinion on some subject, this
assumption has also arisen to some degree, along with the assumption that
some aspect of a collective opinion can be surmised by the opinions of a
few of its members (who in this case are not in actuality members).  Of
course, like any mailing list, its members share common interests and
perspectives, but the friends network, like many mailing lists, has no
procedure or intention of forming a collective opinion or having any kind
of "public face".

As anyone who has participated a lot in email lists well knows, these kinds
of confusions are part and parcel of the mailing list experience.  Similar
confusion-generating events have occurred on the friends network several
times in the past.  In any case, I hope that this post clarifies things!

Michael Chwe


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