Listen-up fellow baby boomer novices and wannabe-geeks, let’s
talk about listservs. Yes, that’s listserv without the “e.” No, it is not misspelled. Listservs are basically email transmissions to and from a list of subscribers who share a common interest, and there are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of them worldwide.
When you first join a listserv, you may feel like a kid going to a new school. You may be received warmly and make friends right away, or you might be completely ignored, at least until someone in the group decides to acknowledge you; that could take a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days.
When a member of the listserv sends an email to the group, every subscriber in the group can read it, anyone can respond to it, and everyone can read the response. Say that you join a neighborhood listserv, the subject of conversation could be about anything, from someone asking if anyone has seen their lost dog, Cujo, to a complaint about roaches in a restaurant on the avenue.
Unlike in a chat room where your conversation is likely to bring an immediate response, in a listserv you will probably receive the information you are seeking, but maybe not right away. If everyone in the neighborhood is discussing where they last saw Cujo, you may not learn which restaurant is infested until you happen to be dining there and actually see a creepy crawler scurrying up the wall.
Remember Lesson One – There are no private conversations on the listserv. If you want to gossip about someone else who is in the group, send your fellow gossiper a message to his or her personal email, or better yet phone that person, because just as what goes in an email stays in an email; what is communicated in a listserv goes to everyone.
Look at text messages – oh, you don’t text either? Then, that is something else we have in common. But as I was saying, just as they do in text messages, people in the listservs occasionally speak in code. Lesson Two — Brush up on the jargon before joining a listserv. There is a wonderful website that lists some of the acronyms and abbreviations used by the listserv savvy. If you are a novice, http://www.internetslang.com will introduce you to some of the lingo. If you post a question to the listserv and get this response, “SI”, the sender could either be telling you to “Stop it!” or calling you a “Stupid Idiot.” Plain English may be the standard, depending on which listserv you join, or you could be bombarded with Internet jargon. Prepare yourself, so that you will not spend time trying to determine whether the reply you received from a fellow listserver was an exclamation or an insult. Another site that you may find useful for deciphering messages is http://www.netlingo.com.
You will probably find that you are already familiar with a few of the commonly used acronyms like OMG (Oh, my God, or Oh, my gosh for the anti-Christians) and HAK (hugs and kisses). If this post has helped you to understand a wee bit about listservs, then G4U. C YA.