Well, I do not have up-to-date evidence, but what I have is data telling us a bit what researchers liked or disliked about the communication in emailing lists in the year 2000. See the pre-print on my old-fashioned website: Matzat, U. (in press). "Quality of Information in Academic Emailing Lists." in: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Best wishes, Uwe
Message: 1 Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:07:46 -0400 From: Barry Wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca> Subject: [Air-L] in dis-praise of the Chronicle To: aoir list <air-l@aoir.org>, "Denise N. Rall" <denrall@yahoo.com>, Catherine Middleton <cmiddlet@ryerson.ca>, Peter Timusk <ptimusk@sympatico.ca> Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.4.40.0906301901280.17230812-100000@origin.chass.utoronto.ca> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
I was appalled by the Chronicle's article -- especially the headline -- on the putative death of e-lists such as this one.
First, they gave no systematic evidence, just some anecdotes. Although the article was more nuanced than the headline: "on the one hand, on the other hand." Yet, still anecdotes.
Second, they ignored the organizational ecology research that has shown that some organizations die and some get born all the time.
Third, the posts by my fellow Canucks Catherine Middleton and Peter Timusk clearly showed the difference between 140 character Tweets (which I do a fair amount) and posts to this list (ibid). Both of their posts were too nuanced to be short tweets.
Fourth, as Marc Smith can show you, even the older Bulletin Boards are still thriving.
Indeed, my hunch is that each communication form adds on to the other, rather than displacing it, which is why I never get much writing done (today's excusive, anyway).
Happy Canada Day to All (except Janet Napolitano),
Barry Wellman _______________________________________________________________________
S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC NetLab Director Department of Sociology 725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388 University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 2J4 twitter:barrywellman http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman fax:+1-416-978-3963 Updating history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _______________________________________________________________________
======================================= Uwe Matzat Sociology School of Innovation Science Eindhoven University of Technology P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven The Netherlands --------------- phone: + 31 40 247-8392 email: u.matzat /"at"/ tm.tue.nl http://www.tue-tm-soc.nl/~matzat/ =======================================