My first venture into “social networking” — not counting membership in various now-defunct early social networking sites targeting Ivy League alumni — was founding an email list through Princeton University’s TigerNet service, exclusively for Princeton graduates in the law.  Princeton has no law school, but many of its alumni are lawyers, and I thought this would be a good way for us to connect.  This was in 1995.

Nearly 14 years later, the list is still intact.  There are, I think, still fewer than 2000 members now, but it’s a pretty juicy group in many respects.  Quite a few “Tigers” (ugh) have found lateral or other employment through Princeton-Lawyers; far more have found local counsel; and quite a bit of decently learned discussion has taken place over the old-fashioned email medium.  Last year I set up a companion group on LinkedIn as well.

There’s a lot I could talk about in terms of my experiences as nominal “admin” of Princeton-Lawyers, and if I have the time I would like, at a later date, to excerpt some discussion we had last week about the concept of an “impeachment” of George W. Bush.  But that raises, for me, what is another particularly acute point, and one that was obvious within a week of the approval of this list by Princeton’s Alumni Council:  The unique impatience, bordering on arrogance, of a certain percentage of this particular breed of cat for, well, discussion groups that have discussion.

Right off the bat, shortly after we started out and were feeling our way around what we wanted the “list” to be, a number of early members loudly announced that there was entirely too much chatter, too much noise, and that they were quitting.  This happens periodically, and it did again last week when some of our more boisterous participants — including one who graduated from Old Nassau well before most of us were born — perhaps broke through the delicate membrane of professional detachment and got into some good, old-fashioned political roughhousing.

I’ve been on various Princeton lists for a long time, though because of the University’s insistence on protecting one particularly well-connected, left-wing alumnus spammer, I dropped most of them, because he generated so much noise, distraction and ill will.  (This included a phone call from a University dean to yours truly, an otherwise unremarkable and relatively penurious alumnus of no interest to Nassau Hall, telling me to lay off the mysterious “Harold Helm” or I’d be the one tossed off TigerNet.)  Now, I saw that people on all the lists would, from time to time, announce their departure from a topical group with a bit of melodrama — I’ve done it myself.  (Heh.  That includes the time I realized that an organized effort was being made on the left-wing Princeton-Writing group to shun me by ignoring all my posts or comments, because of my consistent challenges to that political orthodoxy that reigned there.  This was later confirmed to me to have been exactly what happened.) That’s one of the things you see in that online social environment.

But something is different about the lawyers’ list.  It’s the one where people quit, and usually announce the fact, solely on the basis of being offended by the volume of emails on the rare occasion when a topic actually gets some legs.  And not just, “Gee, I don’t think I have time to read or archive or filter this many emails — sorry, see you, guys.”  Rather, it’s an angry expression of offense, of outrage, as if some bounder had actually had the nerve not to powder his wig thoroughly before beginning oral argument.

What is that?  Is it “lawyers”?  Is it “Princeton”?  Is it “Princeton Lawyers”?