By Any Means Possible?
From Yesterday's Student Newspaper at Vanderbilt:
List serve mistake presents opportunity
If you had the opportunity to share anything you wanted with virtually the entire campus, what would you choose to say? That is the dilemma facing the many students on the commodore-card@list.vanderbilt.edu list serve. Some are choosing wisely, but most are not.
It began at 12:19 p.m. on Saturday. A sophomore girl, quite innocently, attempted to contact the Commodore Card office in search of a convenient time to come and have her malfunctioning card fixed. Unfortunately, instead of contacting said office via a link on their Web site, she inexplicably sent her inquiry out over a list serve of commodore card owners.
This set off an e-mail chain of responses that, by Sunday afternoon, already exceeded 40 messages and displayed no signs of letting up. From that one e-mail evolved an open forum in which people could promote or discuss any topic of their choice. Because someone else set off the email chain, the stigma of appearing pushy or random was virtually erased. People were free to express themselves and have some fun.
However, to date, only a few students have exploited this anomaly to its full potential. One student promoted a Facebook group he had created. Another took the opportunity to provide a link to www.oured.org.which promotes higher quality education for all children. Yet another student, in the longest message sent on the list serve thus far, provided a brief history of how the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles got their powers. Activism, opportunities, lessons in pop culture – this list serve has it all.
Unfortunately, messages of this sort have been in the minority. Dozens of students have foolishly sent requests out to hundreds of other students, none of whom control the list serve, asking to be removed from it. In one particularly odd case, a male student even pleaded with everyone else to have his girlfriend removed.
Actions of this sort only add to the length and redundancy of the e-mail chain, presumably the primary reason people want to be removed They also demonstrate an embarrassing ignorance of both how list serves work and the difference between the "reply" and "reply all" buttons in e-mail servers. Worst of all, these messages requesting removal are wasted opportunities.
Opportunities to entertain, educate and connect with such a large number of students are rare. Instead of bemoaning the existence of this new chain, students should, as some already have, be taking advantage of it. At the very least, they could just delete the e-mails, instead of dragging down the whole chain with repetitive complaints that have already proven futile. Conversely, if they could just sit back and enjoy the interaction with fellow students, what a wonderful world this would be.