Wiardgroup

snipped for your pretection:

>    (relax Mike, I solemnly pledge that my view is that any 
discussions 
> of panel graphics or 'form factor' are beneath contempt)

damn, i get negative points for my "there's a line missing on the 
front panel" thred...

>     Do newbies get the information they want?…….need?

as a newbie, i got so much information from sonicstate, it was unreal 
how fast i could ramp up on my gear knowledge.  the only problem was 
the gear opinions; the net makes it so everybody, regardless of their 
level of savy, can now post whatever, whenever.  i had to develop a 
built in filter pretty fast to sift the cream from the chaff.  but 
there's no arguing with hard numbers, so if you wanted to figure out 
specs on a machine, the net is a godsend.

but as someone who's been reading newsgroups since ~'93, i've seen it 
change so much.  newsgroups (or listservs for that matter) used to be 
an amazing community because people were so excited to actually have 
something to be able to use to communicate with people they shared 
interests with.  everybody seemed so nice, no matter what you were 
talking about.  no spam, no trolls, nowadays i think people take it 
for granted.

>     Does Grant (or any of the designers) get feedback that they 
> wouldn't get from plain ol' private email

i doubt it.  i've yet to give grant any feedback on my one and a half 
modules (or any soundclips; sorry grant) but i wouldn't hesitate to 
tell him how much i love the stuff over the telephone or in person.  
but i'm afraid i just don't have any feedback worth posting as i 
haven't been patchin' that long and never had any feature ideas of 
things i couldn't find someone implementing already.

plus, you know, i've been slapped down hard several times for posting 
dumb things or even not-so-dumb things.  these are things i maybe 
should have thought about more, or information that would have been 
easily found given a little effort on my part, but it's made me very 
wary about what i post.  idiocy posted to the web is eternal now, i'm 
sure as shit not going to try to negatively immortalize myself 
anymore than i already have.  95% of my posts or replys to people get 
composed and then deleted.  "oh, no one cares anyway and i'll 
probably just end up looking stupid."

>     Are WE getting any feedback here that we wouldn't get otherwise.

on this list, i don't think so.  i've kinda been wondering what i 
really have to say about modulars, wiard or any other, other than i 
think this particular module is very useful because of XXX.  so i'll 
post that on AH sometimes.  here, it's an even more limited range of 
gear to talk about, and if someone asks about my 1.5 modules, i'll 
say something, but other than that...

> For instance, my 
> perception is that close contact among users has fostered the 
growth 
> of 'tribes'; cults of personality formed around design concepts of 
the 
> gadgets  from which the nature of the designers is extrapolated 
(with 
> a predictably-high degree of  inaccuracy, I think)
>     While anthropology/sociology 101 students will give this 
> observation the big yawn (wellll… duh!) I'm nonetheless interested 
> because in the 1970's I did not experience anything approaching the 
> level of 'tribalism' in the user bases. Sure, there were Moog 
> partisans and Arp fans (and about a dozen professors who had 
actually 
> seen a Buchla) but I didn't see the level of fractiousness that you 
> can read in an afternoon of browsing the analog lists today. People 
> weren't rallying around Dr. Bob or Al Pearlman or Don Buchla and we 
> definitely didn't see them addressing one another directly.
> Mind you I'm not complaining, or  waxing nostalgic. I kinda think 
that 
> THIS is the golden age of analog but I'm theorizing (with apologies 
to 
> Dr. MacLuhan) that the media (i.e. the internet groups) ARE the 
> message .

i'd have to disagree here.  the ford-chevy rivalry is as old as the 
hills, as is the coke-pepsi rivalry, as is...etc. etc.  the thing 
about americans (and i know this is an international forum, but i can 
only speak for americans) is for some reason, they seem to equate the 
things they buy with who they are.  look at the early rap movement, 
it was all about kangols, gold chain, cars; it's the same in a lot of 
segments of our society.

i see the recent agression on these lists as inborn tribalism born 
out of this, for lack of a better term, identity crisis.  advertising 
targets a specific idividual for a specific product, and if that 
person buys that product, they likely feel that's who they are, the 
person they saw in the ad.  if you've come to believe that you're a 
moog man (or woman), and you believe a certain set of ideas about 
what a moog man (or woman) is, when an arp man (or woman) comes along 
and says, hey, arp men (or women) are better, you're going to feel 
insulted and get pissed.  and it's even a little understandable 
because it's sort of like saying "you are an unintelligent person for 
making that choice" or "who you are is less valid than who i am."  no 
one likes to feel unintelligent, especially a group of people who 
like to believe they're smarter than say, drummers.  ;)

synthesizers just escaped this for a long time because they were such 
a small segment of musicians.  i like to believe that in the 70's, 
that small segment was comprised of brainier people who were above 
this tribalism and saw the situation for what it really was, a great 
time to be making electronic music.  nowadays, the numbers are 
bigger, one person says a rash thing, another person identifies with 
it a little, it grows from there.  in reality, no one's worth has 
anything to do with what they own, but when you don't have much else 
going on in your life, arguing about your posessions isn't such a 
waste of time.

so, there's that, hope i didn't step on any toes, i wasn't meaning to 
put anyone down at all.  and i was a sociology major, so it obviously 
isn't that yawn inducing of an argument.  :)

alex