Thoughts about “Your Online Life”
"We spend more and more time online, but feel less and less connected." via 10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life - Alexandra Samuel - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review.
Elsewhere Communities
Thanks to @ethan (Ethan Zuckerman) for link to this editorial in the Stabroek News, a paper in Guyana (a nation on the northern coast of South America): "Elsewhere Communities." An impressively literary editorial, but I'm not sure there's an argument that holds - or even an argument being made. Kenner was talking about imagination, and transformational creativity, not just about talking to people who are different from us. That's important, too, and Global Voices is trying to do something worthwhile, but it isn't about the Elsewhere Community, but about bringing [...]
Online decline of citation communities
Survey Finds Citations Growing Narrower as Journals Move Online, Jennifer Couzin, 08/07/18, Science : 329. A sociologist argues on page 395 of this week’s issue of Science that making scholarly articles available online has narrowed citations to more recent and less diverse articles than before–the opposite of what most people expected. (…) Oddly, “our studies show the opposite,” says Carol Tenopir,(…). She (…), have surveyed thousands of scientists over the years for their scholarly reading habits. They found that scientists are reading older articles and reading more broadly–at least one [...]
Debunking the “long tail”
It's not an attractive thing, I-told-you-so-ism. And the joy of being proved right by an academic study ("and it took $100,000 to prove X Y or Z, when anyone with an ounce of common sense could have told you!") is usually dimmed by thinking about the good things one could have done with a similar amount of money. But I am relishing the reports about how the "long tail" idea so eloquently promoted by Chris Anderson of Wired magazine is being shown up for the fantasy it is. It never [...]
I want community, not another “connection”
I started this post in the autumn of 2008 and it's wrong. I thought that online social networking would level out because people would be too busy trying to keep their jobs or find new ones to fool around at Facebook. With the cash squeeze, I thought that free social networking sites would have their venture money restricted.
Paying to participate–does that create a different community?
From LinkedIn, 14 June 2008, an exchange that includes a statement that is worth looking at, as we think about what creates viable, vibrant communities: "anything that reduces participation in the network (such as... see more charging a subscription fee) is unlikely to add value." I realize that that's a common position in the online world: the more, the merrier. The wisdom of crowds and all that. But think of human history. Haven't we been forming guilds and clubs that are exclusive, and isn't there something special about small groups [...]