[Air-l] peace

[Danny Butt]

What's interesting is the diversity of groups that I'm subscribed to, which
ones are talking about the war, and how. This conversational diversity is,
as many on this list have written about eloquently and studied extensively,
an Internet phenomenon.

But underlying David's question seemed to be a recognition of the slippage
from interest group or occupational resource to "community". Perhaps the
air-l community turned out to not behave quite the way we expect communities
to behave. I sensed a question coming out to the list about what kind of
community air-l is - "is it the community that is worth the emotional energy
I'm investing here"?

In my experience, this happens whenever one invests a lot of time in a
project, as I know air-l exec do with the list. It's natural consequence of
spending a lot of time and energy interacting with people and trying to make
our projects successful. Our increasing work-life integration (driven by
ICTs) makes us demand more of our professional relationships.

But to me, the silence, and David's question, just reinforced the things I
already feel about air-l:

* It's highly professionalised
* It's very North American

Into this picture of the air-l community feeds the other information... the
preponderance of methodological research questions, requests for stats (the
overall displacement of politics in the u.s. empirical social science
tradition), off-list complaints about the careerism of AOIR conference
delegates from people who always complain about that sort of thing, etc.

None of this is really a problem to me, because, as Steve and others have
noted, there are plenty of other places to be talking. But it does form my
framework for not expecting air-l to talk about the war, nor expecting to
find it a very useful place to talk about it. My picture of the list
hopefully indicates that air-l is not a "haven of on-topicness" in any
serendipitous way, but rather constructs its topics and community to
facilitate certain kinds of conversations at the expense of others. Again,
I'm not complaining about this, it certainly serves its purpose extremely
well and I gain a relatively large amount of useful information from it. But
I don't ever feel like I might (or would want to) engage air-l in the
dialogues on the political implications of ICTs that I seek on other lists.

The larger question that follows from this is whether this is the sort of
list AOIR people want. No right answers in this conundrum: the "benefits" we
gain from our environment of highly specific, sophisticated discussion
groups is not free, it comes at the expense of other kinds of conversations
with other kinds of people and other kinds of action.

So, does air-l want to make a difference to the invasion (I can't bring
myself to call it a war), and if so, what could that difference be? Would
trying to make that difference damage the other functions of the list? Would
it be worth it?

peace,

Danny




Steve Jones wrote on 20/3/03 3:06 PM:

> I would not be at all surprised if many, maybe most, subscribers to
> air-l are on other lists in which the conversation is non-stop about
> the war (regardless of whether that is "on topic" for those lists).
> Perhaps air-l is a haven of on-topic-ness. Maybe very few people are
> paying attention to air-l right now. Maybe, as I have seen with some
> of my students, some people are "warred out" and don't wish to talk
> about it. I also expect that people are otherwise engaged about this
> war in ways _not_ involving the internet, whether they are seeking
> peace or not when it comes to this war. And there are likely many
> people right now seeking news, being with family and friends, etc.,
> and not being very attentive to email lists (or the internet
> generally).
> 
> I would also not be surprised if there were those concerned about
> publicly posting a comment about the war, and I would want to be
> respectful of that. It does not matter that I believe or would like
> to believe and convince them, and everyone, that there is nothing to
> be concerned about raising one's voice, for even if there is nothing
> to be concerned about there are those who wish not to speak and to
> coerce speech is not necessarily better than to silence it.
> 
> I have found myself flooded with email about the war, but I do
> wonder, as Nils asks, whether the internet will matter in the case of
> this war. 

-- 
http://www.dannybutt.net