John John and Di Die Live on the Internet:
Cyberbullying on Academic Mailing Lists
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Dean Kiley

Diana Spencer and John F Kennedy jnr. were posthumously splattered all over the Net - from chat and IRC to newsgroups and mailing lists - in an extension, and often intensification, of the astonishing public response to these twin media-refracted tragedies.(1) John John's demise saw AOL logging a message a second, Yahoo and other peak portal sites recorded their 2nd-highest ever posting traffic (second only to . . . Di) and even News Interactive, in good ol' sceptical hype-savvy Oz, copped 340 messages of condolence in the one weekend.(2)

I want to take a closer look at two large, long-established and well-known lists to which I've subscribed on and off since 1996, CYBERMIND [CM] and CULTSTUD-L [CS](3), the former set up to discuss "the philosophical and psychological implications of subjectivity in cyberspace", the latter to discuss Cultural Studies. Both are moderated but not filtered. I want to run through some of the cyberbullying that happens when an academic mailing list - with all the authorisation (all senses) and disciplinary (all senses) legitimation entailed - collides with an emotionally-volatile global trans-media event.