On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 01:14:24PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > I don't think I ever said, "why cant we just...". Did I? > > I had forgotten about "noodles". I can't even remember how it worked. Or > where it is. > > N
In some ways, the new social media are attempts at moving email conversations into a hypertext format. However, the big, big problem with all of this, (for me at any rate) is that essentially unless it is in email, it is invisible to me. I don't have enough time to read and digest all my emails as it is. If an email is just a digest of something taking place on a website, I'm very unlikely to follow a link to a web-based discussion unless there is a sufficient asbtract of the discussion embedded in the email to pique my interest. The likely pay off for firing up a web browser, copying& pasting the URL is too low to do it for every URL that passes my eyeballs. As an example, I'm a member of many LinkedIn groups, for instance, but one by one, LinkedIn has been gradually removing my email subscriptions, rendering them effectively invisible to me. On another note, for one of my projects (Theory of Nothing) I essentially summarised (somewhat selectively, it should be admitted), email conversations spanning nearly a decade. All that I needed was an efficient archive (which most email lists have), with a search function that can be limited by date. Yes, it is hard work, but that is what scholarship is all about. It is probably still easier than trying to sift through mountains of hand written letters that pre-internet scholars have to do. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
