I agree, Ingbert, this is an amazingly rich resource for study. fyi, I did make an attempt to study a segment of discourse that occurred on this list last year after the bombings in London. I contacted each of the participants for permission (informed consent). Half responded, half did not. Of those who did, I received permission only from a couple. The others wanted to attach conditions. I was discouraged. :-( I would hesitate to state so unequivocally the labels you used to acts of discourse without a collective analysis, but the problem is that no one wants to be 'singled out' (as it were) as enacting an instantiation of most things, let alone most of the behaviors on your list. Even to offer a specific example (which you did not) would potentially target someone and lead to who knows what unintended consequences. Kevin proposed an alternative:
I am not interested in (publicly) discussing this listserv and its recent and ongoing events. What I am interesting in is expanding my own knowledge of relevant research which may inform the discussion and aid me in placing this into context.
I appreciate this impulse. It may be an example of the kind of orientation that leads to the academic life: the consideration of theory and its application in other people's lives - in other words, in contexts other than our own. :-/ BUT, here we are, "in" this context. For myself, I want to work in both environments. I want to use the skills of real-life intervention in academia, and bring the insights of academic theory and constructions of knowledge to everyday life. Perhaps there is a way to tack between the two proposals (yours and Kevin's) in a way that produces a framework for self-study that enough AoIR's would accept? steph http://www.reflexivity.us On Sep 14, 2006, at 2:03 PM, air-l-request@listserv.aoir.org wrote:
Message: 11 Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 11:39:12 -0500 From: "Ingbert Floyd" <ifloyd2@gmail.com> Subject: [Air-l] Aftermath of flame war To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Message-ID: <58b9f8580609140939p56f69a64p1c483e9ef2493ead@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
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
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Message: 12 Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 11:42:48 -0500 From: "Kevin Guidry" <krguidry@gmail.com> Subject: [Air-l] Listserv Research To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Message-ID: <3d273fe80609140942ta95fbffw22a36a1ad6692d5e@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
I'm fairly new to the list and I'm trying to place the recent metadiscussion about the listserv itself and participation in context with what I know about typical and historical behavior on and characteristics of listservs and listserv participants. I am not interested in (publicly) discussing this listserv and its recent and ongoing events. What I am interesting in is expanding my own knowledge of relevant research which may inform the discussion and aid me in placing this into context. I am aware of some resources specifically related to this topic, particularly Brian Butler's 1999 dissertation "The Dynamics of Cyberspace: Examining and Modelling Online Social Structure" and the works referenced therein. However, I am having some difficulty locating additional and more recent relevant research as much of what I am finding is research performed *using* listservs but not *about* listservs. I suspect that I may not be using the correct terminology or jargon to perform a sufficiently narrow search. I also suspect that my topic may simply be too broad or undefined. Can some kind soul please point me in the right direction or towards specific resources that may be useful? I also have to wonder if my difficulty in finding more recent resources may be attributed to a dying off of listservs as they are replaced by wikis, blogs, bulletin boards, and other resources. But that does not match my experience at all. It may indeed happen over time but it seems that although younger persons are often dismissive of e-mail it many older persons, particularly in the professional worlds in which I have worked, still hold onto e-mail and thus perpetuate listservs as a viable, useful medium.
Kevin Guidry Information Technology Fellow Sewanee: The University of the South
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