Interesting to hear all your perspectives on this. I’ve now had multiple debates with my PhD students, who keep trying to convince me to set up a twitter account for our lab. And I continue to resist because I find it very distracting, and counter to the idea of developing scholarship (which to me requires time, solitude, and space, all of which seem very limited in the fora in vogue). My students are happy to have long and deep verbal discussions, but when I solicit opinions or perspectives by starting an email thread for the lab, there is almost no response.
So I too am converging on the idea that the current crop of kids just don’t write long-form. Perhaps I am paranoid, but I worry that a lot of interesting views will be lost over time because nobody is bothering to expound on them. A century from now, can historians piece together our narratives from the shards of twitter? > On 04-Jan-2019, at 15:13, Nishant Shah <itsnish...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Because a lot of my work is with young kids, it is actually surprising to > see how much email is actually used, but not for conversations. For a lot > of the 16-22 year olds that we we work with, email is home base. it serves > different purposes of notification, sign-ups, verifications, cloud storage, > and archiving, but not direct communication. So a lot of emailing is a > trigger action rather than information transfer. One of my PhDs calls this > an extended cybernetic loop without a closure, because emails are used to > direct attention and click on things. This does beggar the question of > where to people do long-form writing. And the only thing I can sense is > that they don't. If it is not going on a blog or on social media posts, it > is not going anywhere. Instead, different ideas seem to go on multiple > platforms, and surprisingly, emails sometimes become the consolidating > drivers that stitch them all together. > > I, personally, just queer the thing by writing whatsapp messages that > scroll to an infinity and facebook posts which defy good advice of brevity > and ramble at will. > > On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 1:21 AM Charles Haynes <charles.hay...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> On Thu, 3 Jan 2019 at 19:08, Thaths <tha...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 9:47 AM Dave Long <dave.l...@bluewin.ch> wrote: >>> >>>>> These days I think [email] is mostly used by us old fogies. >>>> Fair enough, but what, pray tell, do all those non-old-fogies use to >>>> convey thoughts that are too long for social media comments and too >> short >>>> for blog posts? >>>> >>> >>> Not being on most popular social media (Twitter, FB, etc.) I am not >>> qualified to answer this. But when have I let such trivialities get in >> the >>> way of offering my opinions? :-) >>> >>> I posit that one way the youth of today are conveying their thoughts in >>> through non-textual means: Through Snapchat (i.e., marked up >>> photos/images), and through the sharing of meme images/animations. One >>> mixed (textual and non-textual) medium popular in many parts of the world >>> (and with many parallels to emails/mailing lists) seems to be WhatsApp >> and >>> similar messaging apps. >>> >> >> It seems to me that none of those media support the kind of thing Dave was >> asking about: "too long for social media comments and too short for blog >> posts" does that mean they just don't do that sort of communicating? >> >> -- Charles >> > > > -- > Dr. Nishant Shah (Ph.D.) > Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India ( > www.cis-india.org ) > International Tandem Partner, Inkubator - Leuphana University, Lueneburg, > Germany > # +49-0176-841-660-87 > http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shah > http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah
