the feminist librarian: once upon a listserv: thoughts on professionalism, privilege, and power [#thatdarnlist]
There’s a professional listserv. It’s a profession in which women are the majority,
yet in this online forum, an “unmoderated” email list sponsored by the
national professional organization, a single mid-career, male
contributor -- we’ll call him X -- dominates. In a recent quantitative analysis of the top fifty contributors by volume
to the listserv, over 45% of the emails are generated by X. The
majority of his contributions are what’s known colloquially as
“linkspam” -- links to online content relevant to the field, offered up
with little or no contextual explanation.