harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) (07/20/87)
I agree with Dr. Ernulf's thoughtful comment (posted on psychnet). It's a foregone conclusion that it's only a matter of time before the vast scholarly potential of global electronic networks will be discovered, demonstrated and taken advantage of by all the disciplines. The only question is: How soon? Initial conditions happen to have placed the Net in the hands of computer-related disciplines and students. I would not want anyone removed from or denied access to the Net (except individuals who incorrigibly abuse it). My suggestion was that more disciplines should be ADDED to dilute the current predominance of these starting populations and its effects on form and content. (My read-only or sponsored-only suggestion about students is a tentative one; it would pertain only to the serious scholarly e-groups, and seems to be a reasonable constraint on participation. The virtue of e-nets [for the special case of scholarly communication] is NOT that anything goes and anyone can say anything about anything; it is that a global community of scholars can communicate with a speed and breadth that is incommensurable with prior media. I predict that some sort of constraint will have to be found for the unmoderated groups [which, in my view, have the greatest potential of all] to prevent their signal/noise ratios from being overwhelmed by sophomoric pranks and pronouncements, abusiveness and other forms of acting out that the Net irresistibly draws out of the tail end of the gaussian distribution. I'm certainly not blaming all of this on students, or even on unaffiliated amateurs. The problem is larger, and will require some rational constraints unless we take the backward step of bottle-necking everything through moderators. -- And this is without even mentioning the most menacing factor of all: The "authentication" problem for networks is currently unsolved. Nothing prevents me from altering headers so as to post a libelous or defamatory message about X in the name of Y! No wonder the legal status of electronic messages [copyright, plagiarism, libel, defamation, etc.] is still moot.) But as to "user-friendliness," I simply cannot agree. The truth is that ANYONE is 20 minutes away from being able to use the Net at least as efficiently as I do. The friendliness is there already. What's needed is (1) much more evangelistic effort to get people through that 20 minutes and (2) compelling demonstrations of the Net's astounding potential for scholarly communication and the evolution of ideas (such as the demonstrations I was attempting) so that people become irreversibly addicted to it (as they are to speech, writing and print). Once we reach a critical mass, the rest will be autocatalytic, as with the other three revolutions in communication. -- Stevan Harnad harnad@mind.princeton.edu (609)-921-7771
rjf@eagle.ukc.ac.uk (R.J.Faichney) (07/21/87)
Summary: Expires: Sender: Followup-To: In article <1024@mind.UUCP> harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) writes: > >[..some amazing stuff..] Alright, Diane, nice try - but do you really have to resort to such nomenclative subterfuge? What would the rest of the gang at Cheers think if they knew you were using another person's name? Robin