[Air-l] Of Burnished Gold

[Nancy Baym]

Steve Jones wrote:

>At 4:38 PM -0500 2/8/02, Lachlan Brown wrote:
>[...stuff deleted, redundancy possibly avoided, important things 
>potentially left out...]
>>Please provide the information I requested.
>
>For information about subscribers to air-l, you can send a "who" 
>command - e-mail to air-l-request at aoir.org with the word who in the 
>subject or body of the message.

If anyone bothers to calculate anything based on who command results, 
please share what you come up with. I've played with it and it's 
tedious (and with only domain names to go on, a huge chunk of which 
are .com and .edu, it's dubiously informative). I think we can safely 
say there are more Americans than residents of any other nation, but 
there are a large number of nations represented by at least one 
subscriber. There are at least 35-40 geographic domain names on the 
subscriber list (including some African domains, Lachlan).

Remember also that there is a distinction between aoir members, of 
whom there are approximately 450, and air-l subscribers, of whom 
there are nearly 1,000. [plug for joining goes here, there are some 
benefits that go with membership beyond the sheer glory of non-profit 
giving].

To those of you who believe we should have members or air-l 
participants from places we don't, or more from places that we have 
only a few, or more of any kind of internet researcher for that 
matter, I urge you to let such researchers know about us and invite 
them to participate and/or join. We all have to share in the 
responsibility of making aoir as inclusive as it can be. Broad 
diversity can't be created by the executive committee no matter how 
much the 11 of us wish it could, but it might be created by 1,000 
list subscribers reaching out to those who aren't here. Toward that 
end, the exec committee will soon be posting a few e-materials at 
aoir.org that you can download and use to inform others about our 
existence. I'll have more about that for you in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, believe me, there have been over 200 messages 
exchanged on the executive committee mailing list so far in February. 
I think it's a safe bet that the general readership of air-l does not 
want to be burdened with all of our thought progresses at each moment 
of their evolution.

Nancy
_________________________________________________________
Nancy Baym
nbaym at ku.edu
http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
102 Bailey, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org