Some 60+ of Mensa's editors, former editors, and their friends recently became so disaffected with the AMC-sponsored "official" Editors e-list that they created their own forum. The new M-Editing@yahoogroups.com list, launched 20 December 2002, took off immediately and piled up some 400 mostly joyous posts in the last twelve days of the year. It's calmed down some since then, but we're still a boisterous lot, and proud of it. Why'd we do it? Got tired of being officially silenced, speaking for myself.
The official Mensa Editors list was started by Marie Mayer during her term as AMC's appointed Communications Officer and was maintained by her until the spring of 2002, when its ownership and administration were assumed by her AMC successor, Tyger Gilbert. Under Tyger's direct supervision, the character of the list began to change. This timing appeared to coincide with the chorus of complaints on the Editors list in response to the fourth issue of EditorialisM, "a newsletter for Mensa editors" — Tyger's first widely visible effort — the termination of which Tyger announced on the list on 18 May 2002. Now the conduct of the list members was drawing official AMC attention in the person of the Communications Officer. And now, before our eyes, we saw unfolding a perfect example of a pattern that observers had been noting throughout American Mensa: elected and appointed officers, instead of restricting their activities to administration, were arrogating to themselves authority and powers that our social club really doesn't want or need them to have. Instead of facilitating communication among members, our national officer in charge of communications began to act as the owner and gateway of those communications, dispensing and withholding the right to speech as he saw fit.
It's worth noting that this insulting measure was being perpetrated upon those very volunteers who were entrusted with facilitating communications among the members of their own local groups.
From the time the first complaint about Tyger's official newsletter surfaced on the list, complaints or questions about the Editors list itself, the Bulletin, or any AMC position had become unwelcome there. Tyger's attitude came through clearly on 25 March 2002, when he posted: "It is my responsibility to find positive solutions to problems faced by the editors, and it is difficult enough without having to constantly cope with an undercurrent of implied doubt about the AMC." On 26 March 2002, Meredy Amyx posted a reply on the Editors list, an excerpt from which follows.
"The AMC is not the enemy. Among those who serve on the AMC, there are some good and honest people who deserve our trust. And everyone who serves the organization at any level and in any capacity merits recognition for that service, whether we agree with their interpretation of their role or not.
Nevertheless, I strongly believe that we should be questioning some things that we are seeing at the national level:
Many of the comments made on this list have been calling attention to precisely those issues. To me, asking such questions is not only the right but the responsibility of local group editors, whether they think they are interested in politics or not. Politics is about who gets to decide how the resources are used. Is that not a concern of the local group editors?"
Could such a view be posted there today? I say it could not.
For the next several months, complaints continued to appear on the "official" list about the increasingly heavy-handed moderation of its content. At the same time, some editors were becoming irritated with the rising volume of posts that contained no substance or that appeared to be private dialogues conducted in public. This situation provided the impetus to create a second list: On 9 October 2002, the e-list known as "Editors-talk" was announced by Tyger Gilbert, "for all Mensa local group editors and other interested members to socialize online and discuss subjects which are not directly related to our newsletter editing or which are otherwise considered inappropriate for the regular Editors list." Some editors, but by no means all, dutifully subscribed to this second official list.
Over the next few months, it became apparent that the "considering inappropriate" was going to be done by Tyger using some unstated personal criterion and was going to be based on his assessment of content —that is, not just how views were expressed but the views themselves. Little or no distinction was made between pure vacuous clutter and views expressed in terms that showed some personality or exhibited levity — in other words, style, which some Mensans find inseparable from thinking and self-expression. Much more seriously, attempted postings that challenged the excessive monitoring and regulation of the list began to bounce back to their authors with notes admonishing them that the subject was not appropriate to the Editors list but would be welcome on the [commonplace chatter] Editors-talk list.
I know this because I was one of them.
Late in the year, on the unofficial M-Pol (Mensa politics) list, I asked who else had been thus censored. I found that I wasn't alone. Further, I was in good company: a past Chairman of AMC and a former volunteer editor of the Bulletin and of the official Mensa Editor's handbook were among those whose posts had been rejected because the list owner disagreed with the opinions voiced in them.
Well, it's still a free country, if not a free Mensa. In December, editors who had had enough of being treated as unruly subordinates formed their own list: M-editing. Since it's member-moderated, it's fairly laissez-faire. We do tolerate what some might consider clutter, in moderation — and if it gets out of hand, we deal with it gently and discreetly, and not by public censure, snappish reprimands, or browbeating. Consequently, our list is rich in the byproducts of creativity — individualism, independence, humor, volubility, and idealism — the very qualities that used to enliven the official Mensa Editors list. That list is quiet now — in fact, both the original list and its chat-list spawn — to the evident satisfaction of those who don't see a silent e-list as a logical self-contradiction.
Prohibiting the posting of opinions because of what they were — and from people who pay dues to be able to exchange opinions with their peers — was obviously a grave error. What Tyger and Mensa lost in return for quiet was the ear and the trust of many of the members' journalists and arbiters of local group information channels. What he took away for months was the ingenious interchange among many glorious, spirited, lively Mensan voices.
That dog won't hunt with Mensans. In 17 weeks, from its creation on 9 October to 8 February, the Editors-talk list garnered just over 400 postings, and during that same period approximately 650 postings appeared on the original list, for a total under 1,100 (a rate of about 65 per week). In only 7 weeks, from 20 December to 8 February, the new M-editing list has had more than 1,300 postings (approximately 186 per week, or nearly three times as many as the two official lists combined), most of which, by Tyger's standards, ought to have been shushed. This level of activity points to a vigorous and self-renewing quality of participation — much like that which once characterized the original, "official" list, but which it will never see again.
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