srh@wind.bellcore.com (stevan r harnad) (09/25/89)
As Editor of an interdisciplinary journal of open peer commentary
called Behavioral & Brain Sciences I recently received the following
response to a posting to the journal's email list in which I extolled
the revolutionary potential of global electronic networks in scholarly
and scientific communication:
"I think that e-mail is great for research collaboration, for
interdepartmental discussion in lieu of meetings, for sending
in journal reviews, for general discussions within small groups
of people, for local news, and even for sending out abstracts
requesting reviewers, as you do, but I'm skeptical about other
uses that involve, for example, free-for-all discussions of some
It gets to be too much to read. As I think you've learned over
the years, editors have a valuable function, sifting the wheat
from the chaff and improving the quality of the former."
[My reply follows. I'm posting it in comp.society.futures to ask for
information about ongoing or planned projects along the lines
envisioned here.]
Thanks for sharing your reflections on limits of email discussion. I
have a vision, however, of what email net discussion COULD be -- if
conducted at a sufficiently sophisticated level, with certain
constraints, by the best minds in the fields in question -- and I hope
to be able to implement the vision eventually. In my opinion (and
experience), the speed, flexibility and scale of multiple email network
communication (a medium I've dubbed "Skywriting") is potentially so
powerful and congenial to a creative thinker's scale and tempo of
communication and interaction that it may represent just as
revolutionary a leap in human communicative (and creative) potential as
its three momentous predecessors (the advent of language, writing and
printing).
Don't form too firm a pessimistic conclusion from what you see on the Net
now: For mere historical and technological reasons it's currently
dominated by computer scientists and students (rather as if not just
the form but the contents of the printed page had been dominated for a
century by Guttenberg and a legion of linotype operators) and shunned
by a more mature generation in all other disciplines, whose majorities
are still computer-phobic. Try instead to imagine what it would be like
if the strongest thinkers in all the disciplines were on the Net now,
and used it concertedly.
There's no great problem with sifting the wheat from the chaff:
Wherever necessary a discussion group could restrict access to
read-only for all but the qualified; and one can always protect oneself
from unwanted discussion by one keystroke -- or even pre-filters in
mail one's software. Wasted forests of paper and junk mail choking your
mail-box are not at issue. The facilities for scanning, filtering and
discarding unwanted Skywriting are even more powerful than the
facilities of Skywriting itself!
But what you have to sample for yourself are the remarkable rewards of
Skywriting on topics that are currently of pressing scientific interest
to you. I can't say I've done this with the best minds in the field yet
(not enough of them are on the Net, to date). But then it's perhaps all
the more remarkable that even with the Net's current demography I can
report that lately my own interactions via Skywriting have advanced my
ideas more than conventional reading/writing, speaking/listening
combined. Imagine getting a provocative idea or experimental finding,
posting it at 9 am, and already receiving feedback from the relevant
parts of the world scholarly community within minutes: "Here's a
logical problem; here's some contrary evidence; here's some supporting
data; here are some surprising ramifications; so-and-so has already
reported this... etc." Sure, there's a lot of potential information from
such a source, but what earnest thinker would rather turn AWAY from
it?
"Editing" is really a software matter at this "pilot" stage of inquiry,
conducted in the Skywriting medium. Selecting and archiving what turns
out to be lapidary in this evolution of ideas is another matter, but
we're talking about improving the flow right now. Are you really so
satisfied with the current scale, scope and rate of communication of
ideas in the conventional media of scholarly communication? Might one
not have hesitated at the advent of printing too ("There's already too
much to read...")!
The possibilities of Skywriting are an empirical matter, but I'm going
to do my level best to make sure they are properly tested, rather than
pre-emptively discarded or passed over because of the skewed initial
conditions.
Stevan Harnad INTERNET: harnad@confidence.princeton.edu harnad@princeton.edu
srh@flash.bellcore.com harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu harnad@princeton.uucp
CSNET: harnad%confidence.princeton.edu@relay.cs.net
BITNET: harnad1@umass.bitnet harnad@pucc.bitnet (609)-921-7771