The age of the mailing list is over

The email mailing list, I mean. The social Internet mode many of us started with.

For myself, I’ve read, organized, managed and written on mailing lists for well more than a decade, but these days I can hardly be bothered. Most of the ones I read have dried up. The ones I’ve recently started hardly moved. It was easier when it was the only game in town.

But no more. The problem is that a lot of us still depend on them, including the generic us of Unitarian Universalists, who for our size have a menagerie of mailing lists. Which is OK — no technology really dies, even cassette tapes and punch cards — but there are opportunities lost by not moving to something more public, interactive, selective and robust.

Thoughts?