Sandy Hobbs | Letters to AMbrose Merton # 21, 2000

(NOTE, 2011: This editorial has been reproduced because it gives a clue to the circumstances in which LTAM eventually ceased publication.)

A high proportion of contributions to Letters to Ambrose Merton now arrive by e-mail. This is itself is not a particularly striking fact. However, what is worth particular attention is that the contributors themselves frequently received the material by e-mail. In other words, our newsletter becomes the end of one particular branch of the internet communication chain.

This gives us pause for thought. What if any are the distinctive features of e-communications as opposed to material from other sources? Is e-mail significantly changing the character of communications between the people who use it? The most profound question of all may be “What is the role of a publication such as Ambrose Merton when so many of us communicate so much through the internet?”

We do not attempt to answer these questions in this issue. However, it does contain an unusually high proportion of material which has been in circulation as forwarded e-mail and thus provides us with some “raw data” which may be relevant to answering these questions.

It may be noted that many of these items are composed of lists. These are not unique to e-communications, of course. Some of the examples in this issue are in the style of “Colemanballs” a column in Private Eye magazine composed of slips by sports commentators, which subsequently became the content of a successful series of books. However, it is reasonable to ask if there is some particular aspect of the internet which encourages the deployment of lists in humour. Lists were certainly a substantial part of the jokes circulated by computer network in the early 1980s which were presented in LTAM No. 8 (1996).