[Air-L] Death to lists?

[Denise N. Rall]

Alex -

I couldn't agree more. Most hard scientists engaged in cutting edge research are not blogging or using social networks. First they don't have time, second they are not engaged in seeking opinions from non-specialists, and third, this is not a venue for collaboration on research projects that are under development and therefore, cannot be casually disclosed before publication. Lastly, as has been mentioned here before, blogging is not going to count (except possibly in new media??) for promotion and tenure.

It is well known that mathematicians and physicists use their own networks, mostly managed by email. As I'm married to a scientist, I know that all of his collaboration happens over email, not Facebook. All of my collaboration from colleagues for AoIR conferences happens via email.

I am an iconoclast in that I read this list, before this list I read Phil Agre, then I read some online Africa list, an online publishing list, and before that, I read news. I am definitely looking for content and colleagues' thoughts rather than 'friends' or images. But I can see that for some the aspect of friends is more important than facts (roughly speaking). I would be quite depressed to lose this list but I would hope to find another text-based interchange and not have to enter SL to talk to others.

P.S. Alex how do I get rid of the 1140 character post and return to 80 column. I tried ASCII encoding which I thought would work but no luck so far.  

Cheers, Denise

Denise N. Rall, PhD. Special Projects, Faculty of Arts & Science,  Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA 
Mobile +(61) (0)438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/ 
Join the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
Internet Research 10.0, October 7-11, Milwaukee, WI, USA


--- On Mon, 29/6/09, Alex Halavais <alex at halavais.net> wrote:

> From: Alex Halavais <alex at halavais.net>
> Subject: [Air-L] Death to lists?



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