[Tango-L] Tango-L Survey Part 5 (final): General Comments

[Shahrukh Merchant]

There were a total of 74 respondents to the survey

Here are the general comments that people wrote for public consumption, 
(other than those already quoted in previous posts).

COMMENTS FOR PUBLICATION (13)

Seems like the combination of the Smartphone and Social networking 
"revolutions" has killed most peoples ability or willingness to write 
anything meaningful (let alone profound).

tango has unfortunately dis-evolved into a battle between the 
traditionalists and non traditionalists as far as music, and the close 
embrace crowd and the more open dance crowd. there is obviously a schism 
between the athletic dance crowd and the less athletic dance crowd. 
trying to convince young enthusiastic dancers into close embrace is 
futile at best, and usually a disaster. we regularly show various 
dancers examples of all versions of tango, and the generally respond 
quite negatively to the close embrace dances. interestingly, they 
respond well to mixed dancers who go between the various embraces. 
little girl dancers (for me that means usually 16 years old to late 
20's, usually who have been ballet dancing and other dancing since they 
were 4 or 5) want the big moves and dance drama that open embraces 
permit. the off center, uncomfortable dance that the close embrace 
forces are not in anyway esthetically pleasing, nor kinesthetically 
pleasant. they know how to move, on center, with the music, and the 
close embrace is not a dance they want to do. they also feel like they 
are being "forced" to do a dance they don't want to do by the "stinky 
old guys". when we take them into public forums, we have to run great 
interference to protect them. which is sad

A tango blog with an RSS feed would be interesting.

I very much prefer the old, classic, list-serv e-mail-list format. I am 
not interested in websites, web-fora, anything overloaded with features. 
The old, classic, list-serv e-mail-list just works fine. But not just: 
always!

I've been on the list since 1996. It was great in the early days. With 
social media, it is now not really relevant.

We already have plenty of groups on FB, but we have lost most of the 
email lists. As result, there is no way to directly connect to others. 
Tango-L is very valuable, but new people don't know about it.

Should Tango-L Continue? Yes. especially preserve the archives.

Prefer a mailing list to a Yahoo Groups page. Anything but Yahoo! 
Facebook is too cluttered and too commercial at this point and not good 
for extended discussions.

Tango-L was once very much alive and cutting edge discussion about the 
dance and the dance situations .... I would like to see it re visited

I do not ever intend to get a Facebook account so I consider FB the 
least desirable of options. I do read a few blogs, including 
tangovoice.wordpress.com, and often find these interesting.

There was a golden age of tango blogging but it seems to have ended five 
years or so ago. Established bloggers have little or nothing to say, and 
no new bloggers fill the gap.

The decline of tango discussion forums makes me sad. It seems to have 
occurred in parallel to the rise of Facebook, although tango discussions 
on Facebook are very light-weight and don't interest me generally. But 
maybe it's nothing to do with Facebook and instead reflects that tango 
is no longer "new" to the great majority of its community.

I used to read all of the postings when all I had to do was open one 
email and all the posts were in the one text box.

SUMMARY OF COMMENTS NOT FOR PUBLICATION

Well, of course I'm not going to publish them, but I can give a gist of 
them:

10 People identifying themselves (names or emails) and/or their location
5 Thanking me for keeping up the list [you're welcome!]
3 Positive general comments on Tango-L [thanks!]
2 Comments related to undesirable (probably former) list members
2 Suggestions or offers of help for any porting/software work needed 
[thanks--will be in touch!]

Thanks all for your participation! This is not the final word on the 
subject, just the final email summarizing the survey. (I'll post a 
separate one on the Tango-A survey on Tango-A.)

In a couple of weeks, I should decide what to do with the list, and that 
decision will largely depend on whether there indeed is any chance of 
greater meaningful participation. It would seem that, at the very least, 
Tango-A and Tango-L should be combined (if they continue)--long-time 
members will recall that they were split off for two reasons: (1) To 
reduce the volume on each individual list while (2) keeping Tango-L 
non-commercial and focussed on discussion, while providing via Tango-A a 
service for those who were teaching Tango and organizing Tango events. 
Since high list volume is hardly a problem now, a recombination would 
make sense (if there is reason to believe that the combined list would 
achieve critical mass).

Regards,

Shahrukh Merchant
Tango-L administrator