Coincident to the recent thread on this list, Swine Before
Pearls, I was reading an assignment for my Information
Environment in Contemporary Society course that touches upon
some of the factors germane to list usage. I toss them out
for our collective consideration/edification:
1) New technologies, especially technologies of communications
- can and do radically effect social practice...but these
impacts occur within a system of entrenched beliefs and social
practices cemented in place by potent forces that may
ultimately act as barriers to adoption.
2) the typical unmoderated network discussion list often
produces a short run of relatively high quality on-topic
dialogue but then drops into silence broken occasionally by
brief exchanges that are as often simply misdirected postings
as they are related to the purpose of the list...What factors
inhibit the development of patterns of sustained high-quality
participation?
3) Zuboff (1988) describes the tension that can be created
when a computer-based electronic communication system was
installed at a corporation...the openness, inclusiveness, and
anonymity of computer-mediated communication was antithetical
to the organization's hierarchical structure; it facilitated
the rise of democratic dialogue among workers, thereby placing
stress upon traditional hierarchical roles.
I was struck by how this article seems to describe recent
discussion on WATPA-L. We have created/adopted this computer-
mediated communications technology to facilitate
communications among our group. Our group, generally defined
by its affiliation and advocacy of telecommunications and
access, now ponders the appropriateness of having its
discourse "world readable" on the web. I would hope that
discussions occurring on this list would generally interest
someone tripping over them when searching telecommunications,
public access or other related topics. As several other posts
have pointed out, if visitors to our archived material are not
interested, they'll move along...but at least they've had the
opportunity to access (and weigh) the information residing
here (there).
Bill Langham
(The article, Comserve: Moving the communication discipline
online, by Timothy Stephen and Teresa M Harrison, appears in
Journal of American Society for Information Science, V45, No
10, December 1994, p765.)