[Air-L] some data on: in dis-praise of the Chronicle

[Matzat, U.]

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 at chass.utoronto.ca>
> Subject: [Air-L] in dis-praise of the Chronicle
> To: aoir list <air-l at aoir.org>, "Denise N. Rall" <denrall at yahoo.com>,
>         Catherine Middleton <cmiddlet at ryerson.ca>,      Peter Timusk
>         <ptimusk at sympatico.ca>
> Message-ID:
>         <Pine.SGI.4.40.0906301901280.17230812-100000 at 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/
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