By Steve Hendrix
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 7, 2007
For increasing numbers of people and neighborhoods, I-saw-it-on-the-Listserv has become the new I-heard-it-on-the-grapevine.
The use of free group lists for mass e-mails, a mainstay of neighbor-to-neighbor communication for more than a decade, continues to climb steadily as more newcomers sign on and longtime users add additional groups to their routine.
"I think it was very unpredictable that Listservs would achieve the influence they have," said David Weinberger of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "They are providing the same sort of social circling for adults as [instant messaging] does for young people."
From "seeking vacuum repairman" to "another mugging near metro" to "your charcoal smoke is making me sick," subject lines -- and the messages they contain -- have become rich, varied, sometimes maddening veins of neighborhood gossip.
"We discuss everything," said Philip Bregstone of Takoma Park, who is on six e-mail group lists: one for his daughter's elementary school, two for members of the Washington National Cathedral choir, two for professional window cleaners and one for his North Takoma neighborhood. "Someone has a rooster in our neighborhood, and we've just had a long debate about whether it's better to keep roosters as pets or to cook them. I guess I spend about an hour a day with Listservs."
Listservs were created on an IBM mainframe in 1981. Yahoo, which provides free hosting services in exchange for implanting small ads at the bottom of each message, says it handles more than 8 million groups with more than 100 million members.
According to the Pew Center's Internet and American Life Project, 55 percent of Internet users subscribed to e-mail group lists in 2006 as a way of maintaining ties with the community or hobby groups they belonged to, up from 32 percent in 2001.
The boom, according to Pew, has come as more people wire their homes with the kind of high-speed access that can accommodate a robust flow of lost-dog notices and barbecue invites.
Not to mention some truly nasty spats. Thanks in part to the faceless nature of e-mail communication, the scalding tone of the Internet regularly erupts, even when the topic is as innocuous as, say, parking or yardwork.
An exchange last year on the Glover Park e-mail list began with this: "It's obvious that somebody in the neighborhood is calling in trash violations, and I'd love to know who."
It quickly devolved to this: "Glover Park is full of insane people who think the world revolves around them."
Then this: "You obviously don't like your neighbors . . . and don't know how to probably [sic] thank people for taking the time to answer your inane, stoned questions about the legal ramifications of discarded pet excrement. Maybe you should pack up your Pink Floyd records and just head back to Wheaton. Whaddya say?"
And, finally, this: "LISTEN and close your pie hole when you go to the ANC meetings. . . . If you have something to say to me, you seem to know where I live. I'll be waiting."
You don't often hear that over the garden fence.
At the other end of the emotional spectrum, the e-mail lists have emerged as a marketplace of the minuscule. The ease of posting allows someone cleaning out a cupboard or a garage to offer up such free-for-the-taking treasures as half a bag of rice (Takoma Park), a jar of small screws (Capitol Hill) and "a broken wooden duck toy found on the sidewalk" (Freecycle.com, for people who hate to throw anything away).
The vast majority of message traffic, though, is consumed with the kind of neighbor-to-neighbor commerce that used to take a phone call or a thumbtacked posting on a bulletin board. Babysitters, handymen, yoga gurus and those who seek their services have found the lists to be a potent clearinghouse.
Rhodessa Bender of the Del Ray neighborhood in Alexandria recently posted the name of a well-qualified nanny on her neighborhood e-mail list as a favor for a friend. Giving out her own phone number, she discovered, was a mistake.
"I was just putting out some feelers, and I was inundated," she said. "It is a very powerful tool."
Local officials and politicians have noticed that muscle. The e-mail lists have become a favorite way for police precinct officers to send out neighborhood alerts. Candidates routinely post appeals on them, and officeholders use them to burnish their constituent-service credentials. As a D.C. Council member, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty was famous for trolling Ward 4 e-mail lists for pothole complaints and other grousing about city services.
"I put out on the Listserv that half of my street didn't get the new glass recycling cans, and Fenty suddenly chimed in that he would make a call," recalled Virginia Jarrett, 63, who lives in Chevy Chase in the District. "In a couple of days, they brought the rest of the cans."
Jarrett, a retired fundraiser, is a lifelong fixture in her Chevy Chase neighborhood in the District, a block captain who frequently swaps the news of the day along sidewalks and produce aisles.
She first learned about e-mail groups about two years ago, when a dog she was taking care of escaped from her yard. A neighbor suggested skipping the usual stapling of fliers onto telephone poles in favor of posting a lost-dog alert on the Chevy Chase Listserv, which has about 2,000 participants. She has been Citizen Inbox ever since.
"It's wonderful -- it makes us a village. Sometimes I stay online all evening," Jarrett said.
In Cleveland Park, the e-mail group has swelled to more than 5,100 subscribers, making it one of the largest in the country, according to Peggy Robin and Bill Adler, its husband-and-wife founders. For years, it was a casual forum in which anyone could post just about anything. But that changed in 2000, when Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez briefly stayed at a Cleveland Park home before being returned to Havana. Suddenly, local topics were swamped by a flood of "Free Elian" postings, largely from South Florida.
"That's when we decided we needed to moderate it," Robin said. "Once you get to a certain size, you need a sheriff, or it really is anarchy."
Now, the two comb through 500 to 700 messages a month to keep the discussions from growing too heated, too off-topic or too personal. The Cleveland Park list runs on a rough parliamentary system in which writers are admonished to address the entire group, not just the loudmouth going on and on about parking in the alley.
"Our motto is 'Attack the argument, not the person,' " Adler said. "If somebody is really disruptive, we just ban them."
Mary Huber of Dale City said a debate over a proposal to change the schedule of school holidays for the Mount Vernon Community Schools grew so toxic that it drove her from her neighborhood e-mail group.
"Some of the parents had strong opinions, and it just got very, very personal," she said. "That's when I asked to be taken off."
Jarrett said her Chevy Chase e-mail village is, by and large, a friendly one. Its members even held a real-world mixer recently so members could match e-mail names to faces.
But she does recall one ugly flap, in which someone alerted others that a family was mistreating its dogs by leaving them out in freezing weather. People posted harsh attacks; some drove by the house and honked their horns. The beleaguered owners finally posted an explanation: The dogs were a cold-weather breed and the doghouse was heated.
Jarrett said she hadn't participated in the war of words but wanted to apologize to the family for their rough treatment.
And how did she do that?
"I sent them a note," she said. "A real note. In the mail."
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