Facebook and other social media also have their own email capabilities as well as collaboration applications.
I think that listservs/email lists can also have similar characteristics you describe to social media. This will vary according to the person reading it and the experience they have.
new professionals or graduate students with fresh eyes can read any listserv and see it one way "wow!" Most graduate courses today usually assign some listservs to read or other online forums to students to see what's "out there". Sometimes, this can be good or bad,
and our future professionals do not always get the best perspective of their future colleagues.
mid career professionals and senior/director career professionals will also read them another way based on their knowledge and expertise. Ten years ago I remember reading AUTOCAT a certain way , these days I see more people asking others how to do basic work and less posts from those who are experienced. I see groups of people posting and leading threads a certain way and nothing else. I also know many colleagues who never have the time nor the interest to even read what comes into their inboxes. What role do the lurkers play in email lists/listservs ?
That is also an interesting element.
People also like to receive their information all in one place today too. How we read online has changed. In the mid 1990s, the listserv or email lists were the in thing because it was all new territory back then. I was working at Columbia University when listservs really became popular, how exciting was that to ask a couple hundred catalogers how they did something.
Over recent years however, newer tools and technologies have also developed, which new professionals need to stay on top of also, especially if they are going on the job market soon.
Librarians can never be just good enough, because their work changes every day.
Last year, I did a presentation using Google Docs and a librarian asked me why I didn't use Powerpoint. several months later, that same librarian gave a presentation on Google Docs.
Cheers,
Karen W.
Karen Weaver, MLS, Adjunct Faculty, Cataloging & Classification, The iSchool at Drexel University, Philadelphia PA email:
[log in to unmask] / Electronic Resources Statistician, Duquesne University, Gumberg Library, Pittsburgh PA email:
[log in to unmask]
On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 9:01 PM, Gretchen Whitney
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Greetings,
I've not changed the subject line for this discussion, to enable readers of the archive to follow the discussion via the thread.
Overall the discussion queried how information about how information practitioners and others through their education were being encouraged to find communities of interest.
The discussion veered into whether e-mail discussion lists were archaic and outmoded, and should be replaced with "social networking" sites such as Twitter and MySpace and the like.
I would like to draw a careful distinction between e-mail lists and "social networking" sites. (Bernie is exactly right, in that the e-mail lists (and, for that matter, the origins of e-mail itself in the appending of a personal, social comment to an FTP'd file across the network) are all social networking techniques and sites.
The distinction is this: e-mail lists ask you to "follow the group." A group of folks with a common interest gather together electronically and talk. jESSE is an example.
So-called "social networking" sites ask you to "follow the individual." Look at ME!! See what I have to say!! I can't fault Mary Minow's libraries and the law blog - it's great, but she's established herself in this area through other media. And Lorcan Dempsey's (from OCLC Research) might be interesting.
This is a fundamental distinction. And both directions have their place in a complex information environment. The first is based on the group, the second is based on an individual. It is patently unrealistic and uninformed to say that one is better, or should replace the other.
--gw
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Gretchen Whitney, PhD, retired School of Information Sciences University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37996 USA [log in to unmask]
http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/
jESSE:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/jesse.html
SIGMETRICS:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
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