[Air-l] network of networks and email/e-mail

Barry Wellman wellman at chass.utoronto.ca
Sat Mar 31 18:16:01 PDT 2007


While we're discussing origins:

I invented the term "network of networks" in "The Network City" article
with Paul Craven in Sociological Inquiry. As Casey said, "You could look
it up." The term lay dormant for years even though I was proud of it and
reused it in places such as our _Social Structures_ book (1988). It
probably got reinvented independently when the internet came along.

While we're discussing usages:

I prefer "internet" to "Internet" both for scholarly reasons and because
it is one less keystroke. However, I find in practice that my fingers want
to write Internet, and I have too many fights to start another one with my
fingers.

I've just lost another one. I invariably write "email" and "e-mail". Also
one less keystroke, and the way of the world is to compress away
hyphenation over time. However, Sage's copyeditors insisted we go back to
"e-mail" on the Bernie Hogan, Juan-Antonio Carrasco and BW article on
Visualizing Social Networks that will come out sometime this year in
_Social Networks_.

And so it goes.
 Barry Wellman
 _____________________________________________________________________

  Barry Wellman   S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology   NetLab Director
  Centre for Urban & Community Studies          University of Toronto
  455 Spadina Avenue    Toronto Canada M5S 2G8    fax:+1-416-978-7162
  wellman at chass.utoronto.ca  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
        for fun: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php
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