A note on etiquette

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

Having had to take care of my kid during his illness while my wife works 
until the early morning getting ready for the Yamagata Film Festival, I 
have not been able to keep up with goings on on KineJapan that much. But 
in light of the posts from the last couple weeks, I thought I should 
offer a few reminders about posting etiquette.

1) KineJapan is a non-moderated list. None of your mails are read or 
censored before being sent out to others.  We, the owners just don't have 
the time to do that, and we also feel that immediate posting allows for 
more spontaneous discussions.  So far, the 400 members of KineJapan have 
been great at moderating themselves, with just a few exceptions.  Please 
keep up the good work.  Just remember that it is all of you who are doing 
the moderating, keeping this list an informative and clean place of 
debate.

2) Do try to keep messages to the topic of the list: Japanese moving 
image media.  Many of you have the mistaken impression KineJapan is a 
list about Japanese cinema. IT IS NOT!  (Surprise!) It has always been 
about moving image media (including TV, video, etc.) and other artistic 
and cultural phenomena which relate to these media.  It has just been the 
case that, de facto, KineJapan has tended to focus mostly on the cinema 
(though I for one would wish for more TV discussions). The topic of 
KineJapan has thus always been meant to be broad, and therefore we owners 
tend to turn a blind eye towards occasional posts marginal to the topic 
(such as requests for places to stay in Japan, etc.), but we will get 
concerned when a series of posts turn too much away from our topic (as 
with the posts on the NY tragedy).  There are other lists to discuss 
those topics. Political debate, for instance, is very important to 
discussions of moving image media, since those images are often 
intricately tied to politics, but just try to keep the politics related 
to our topic.  There is much that is frightening about recent turns to 
the right in Japan which are worthy of discussion here, but KineJapan 
does not need, for instance, calls to sign a petition to save the 
Galapagos penguin (a facetious example, but you get my drift).  Again, 
please just try to moderate yourself.  Even if you think your topic, 
unrelated to the theme of the list, is very important, remember that not 
all of the 400 who signed up will always agree.

Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
KineJapan list owner
For list commands: send "information kinejapan" to 
listserver at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Kinema Club: http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/Welcome.html