Charles Ess wrote:
(a) the ease of forwarding e-mail to large numbers of people, including friends of one's friends who likely hold to a large range of views and beliefs, perhaps as coupled with (b) the relative ease of saying something rhetorically powerful (perhaps too powerful, all things considered) in response to such e-mails as they offend or contradict - in contrast with the ways in which we may (perhaps because of greater experience, prudence, familiarity with "the other," etc.) exercise greater rhetorical / social restraint in other contexts (including embodied contexts, as these include a range of both verbal and non-verbal modes of communication),
I think all of this nicely ties into: 1. Alstyne, M. V. and Brynjolfsson, Erik. "Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyber-Balkanization?" Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems, Cleveland, OH. (1996). 2. My research on online groups and information overload. See the paper coming out in ECSCW2003! The logic is that the internet lets us interact with more social information, so much so that we have to become more and more selective about what we read and who we interact with. Your physical neighbors and physical colleagues with which you often have face-to-face interactions with you often do not have that choice. The result is that email list differences I would argue are more likely to led to a parting of the ways. Although email groups are more stable than usenet newsgroups. Hence off topic discussions about Iraq or other political issues being a problem for many online groups, where as physical groups may have more stability. Quentin