Alex, I share your sentiment that the blogosphere and twitterverse are unlikely to displace a good list, but I think there is something undeniable about some of the “social” features of (staying with Terry’s example) virtual community technology like Ning. On the other hand (and I am speaking anecdotally here) for every email list that has had its death knell rung by a blog, wiki, or social network site, there’s a “Web 2.0” space that comes roaring out of the gate, only to die in a hot second. I think I’m agreeing with Terry when I wonder aloud what this will look like in just three years. Some more thoughts, while I’m at the keys: I think it is patently wrongheaded to turn to some of the recent social media platforms as the logical successor of the email list, which will, I think, lose its prominence but retain some use in the coming years. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to go all Luis Suarez on my inbox; I get visibly frustrated at the fact that my parents and my academics are the only reasons I really need to check email as regularly (okay, obsessively) as I do Facebook. Twitter followers (and I’m not talking just to my tweeps here, I mean anyone following the company/phenomenon) are familiar with its limitations as well as its popularity. But to suggest this is the future of the seminar room or lecture hall seems preposterous. It is most certainly becoming the conference lobby, though, and we all know how important the lobby is for the vibrancy of a community. Email is not dying as long as it remains the one de facto mode of electronic communication, so lists based on email might survive on that fact alone. Academic communities that depend on email *exclusively* may be heading that way, though, so yeah maybe a “change or die” attitude is healthy at this point for lists like this one. The way I see it, any evolution in communication and collaboration that tweets and blogs are progenitor to still has a ways to go, but it’s fun to watch it happen. ~Warren P.s. Case in point? While I composed this email, Eszter Hargattai (@eszter) tweets the following: “Wondering if speakers at #pdf09 are reflecting on including short catchy phrases in their talks to make them more easily tweetable...” Touche. -- Warren Allen Drexel iSchool Research Assistant warren.allen@ischool.drexel.edu AIM/Twitter/G: iSchoolWarren On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Alex Halavais<alex@halavais.net> wrote:
Chronicle has an article suggesting that the e-mail list is dead as a form of scholarly communication. It quotes (twoutes?) an ex-AIR-Ler, David Silver, :
http://beta.chronicle.com/article/Change-or-Die-Scholarly/46962/
I find the discussion a bit surprising. I'm a great promoter of the scholarly potential for new forms of social media--blogs, microblogs, awareness applications, etc. I think some of that potential has been realized, but that there are significant ways in which these venues and tools can be further leveraged. That said, I don't see them as substantially displacing a good list.
Am I wrong on this? The question isn't just about AIR-L. It's true, the number of lists I've been a subscriber to peaked in the late 1990s. It's also true that time I might have spent reading a list may now be channeled to reading other kinds of accumulations. But I think lists still have a lot of life in them. That is true of large lists like this one, but also much smaller efforts. Collaborations among distributed scholars still occur *mainly* over email and small email lists, no?
Alex
PS Please excuse my 1140 character post.
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