Disclaimer: This email is *not* a criticism of the list, or of individuals on the list, please don't take it as such. I gotta say, I was very surprised by the length and intensity of the flame war on a list devoted to people who study such things. (Frankly, I ignored most of it, so I'm not in a position to take sides.) But I'm quite fascinated by the aftermath. I mean, I've seen messages of all different types, and some really interesting patterns are emerging: * paranoia - people (on both sides) seeing attacks where there weren't any (as far as I could tell); * reactive behavior - classification of human beings into clear categories (e.g., troll, academic, etc.), usually negative, and the consequential seeming inability to interpret text composed by the categorized person as being anything besides the stereotyped behavior of the category; * gang mentality vs. it's-me-against-the-world mentality, and how they seem to feed and nourish themselves on the other; * concilliatory behavior by people who want to see the dispute end ** and the outright rejection of the concilliatory behavior; * expressions of disgust and threats to leave as a different strategy for trying to end the disputes. ** and the disregard for (ignoring of) the negative attempts at trying to end the dispute; * and all kinds of attention-getting behavior in order to keep promoting the person's particular side of the argument--an inability to let go. More importantly, I see this as a wonderful opportunity. We have a list full of people who study this kind of online behavior, and we have both observers/outsiders who had no part in the flame war, and we had participants from both sides, who can provide their insider perspective, and all of it will be informed by academic (in the non-pejorative sense) knowledge. How much better of a research opportunity is this? And we have the venue for collaboration already here: the AoIR list itself. We don't seem to have lost any of the main participants (I could be wrong here), and we could go off-list to contact those people who did leave (we have their email addresses in the archives, no?). I mean, we talk about collaboration a lot, well, here's a chance to explore a new type of academic publishing model (hey, at least anybody with tenure can afford to try it out), loosely based on the wikipedia model of massive participation and many eyes to capture all perspectives, except all the participants are academics. What do you think? People always criticize academics for being behind the trends, struggling to catch up. By developing a truly community-wide/community-inclusive research methodology we'd be ahead of the trend. And, who knows, the community-wide participation in such a positively oriented/constructive activity might just be the type of behavior we need to start the healing process ;) Ingbert Ingbert Floyd PhD Student Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign -- ========================================== Check out the unofficial GSLIS Wiki: http://www.gslis.org/ Tell me what you think, if you find it useful, or if you have any ideas for how to organize it better. And if you feel comfortable doing so, I heartily encourage you to contribute content! This GSLIS is the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.