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Electronic communications and communities

David L. Carlson

The barriers to communication between scholars and between scholars and the public have been falling as the Internet has grown. Although most of the publicity goes to the web, surveys show that the email is used by more people. Since it is based on characters rather than graphics, bandwidth and modem speed are less problematic than they are for web pages. In addition, while the web is the best way to disseminate information on the internet, electronic conferences and newsgroups are still the best way to interact on the internet. Electronic conferences for archaeologists began in 1986 when Sebastian Rahtz and Kris Lockyear created the 'Archaeological Information Exchange.' Four years later AIE begat ARCH-L and the number of archaeologists participating has grown steadily. Today ARCH-L has about 1800 subscribers in 44 different countries; most subscribers are in the US and the UK. ARCH-L now averages about 16 messages a day; just under 3000 messages were posted in the first 6 months of 1997. In addition to ARCH-L, there now are at least 40 other electronic conferences and newsgroups covering different aspects of archaeology.

The advantages to electronic discussion are significant, but the disadvantages are often irritating enough to discourage beginners from getting started. The primary advantage is the opportunity to discuss a topic with people all over the world. A question regarding an obscure subject has an amazingly good chance of getting an informative response on an active discussion group. Topics of passionate interest to you, that cause your local colleagues to roll their eyes, will often find others who are equally passionate on electronic conferences. Electronic conferences are good places to ask for assistance, to notify your colleagues of upcoming events and to try out new ideas (assuming you are prepared for devastating responses). They allow information to be disseminated rapidly around the world. They allow more people to participate in a discussion than would be possible at a professional meeting or conference.

The disadvantages flow from two major problems: too much information and too little common courtesy. The volume of messages on a busy discussion group can be very high, more than anyone would probably want to read in a single day. Furthermore, certain topics tend to come up repeatedly on a discussion group. People subscribe and unsubscribe so there is always someone who does not realize that the topic was discussed to death six months ago. We are all accustomed to filtering out extraneous information about us: ignoring notices on bulletin boards, advertisements on television or radio, discarding junk mail and scanning over newspapers and journals for items of interest. Most of us have not fully adapted our filters to electronic media yet. Increasingly the software programs provide a range of filtering and filing capabilities that make it easier to deal with the volume of information. The problem with common courtesy also relates to the novelty of electronic communication. It is very easy to reply and it is very easy to forget that the cues that we use to modify the exact meaning of our words in spoken communication do not transmit over the internet. Sarcasm usually fails in electronic communication since it depends not on what is said, but how it is said. Because you do not see the person to whom you are sending a message, it is easier to be rude and harder to avoid being misunderstood. In addition to inadvertent insults, there are also some who thrive on conflict and deliberate harassment or humiliation.

Internet discussion groups fall into two broad categories: newsgroups and electronic conferences. Each of these groups can be further subdivided into moderated and unmoderated groups. Moderated newsgroups and electronic conferences have editors ('moderators') who review each message before it is distributed. In 'the good old days' (before most people knew about the Internet) newsgroups were unmoderated and there continues to be controversy regarding moderated lists. This controversy would be of greater concern if it involved changing all lists and newsgroups from unmoderated ones to moderated ones. In fact, they readily coexist and each meets different communication needs.

Newsgroups are bulletin boards for various topics. Each message is posted to the bulletin board where it stays for a limited amount of time. The messages are stored on computers with large storage capacities and are retrieved with news client software. There are over 20,000 newsgroups and no newsgroup server stores all of them. Posting a message to the bulletin board involves sending an email message to the newsgroup. Because of their organization newsgroups have a number of advantages. You do not actually subscribe to a newsgroup. Your news reader software keeps track of the groups you are most interested in and retrieves message headers from those groups. You retrieve only the messages that you are interested in. You can readily add or remove a group at any time without having to contact anyone else. The messages are stored at a single location for you to retrieve as you need them. They are not automatically sent to your email account so you do not pay for messages you do not want. For this reason, they will not fill your email account storage space if you leave town for an extended period of time. News reader software makes it is easy to follow a particular thread on a newsgroup (a linked series of messages on a particular subject and the various responses).

The principal disadvantages to newsgroups are that you must retrieve the messages regularly or they will drop off the bulletin board before you have seen them. There are archives for newsgroups that are accessible from web browsers that allow you to retrieve old messages so you can generally track down something you've missed - if you know that you missed it. The second disadvantage of newsgroups is that they can be bombarded by commercial messages that have little or nothing to do with the topic of the group ('spam'). You may have to sift through a large number of message headers to find those you are interested in. Anyone with an Internet connection can post messages to any unmoderated newsgroup.

Electronic conferences are managed by software that keeps track of the conference subscribers and distributes any message sent to the conference email address to all subscribers. You subscribe to an electronic conference by sending a message to the program that manages the list (or sometimes to the person who manages the list). Once subscribed, you receive copies of every message sent to the list. Since you receive the messages in your email inbox, you do not miss any messages if you are unable to check your mail for a few days. On the other hand, if the disk space that has been allocated to your email account fills, additional messages are returned to the sender. Since the messages come directly to your email account, extraneous and nuisance messages can be very irritating.

Unmoderated lists (and newsgroups) can have a relatively high percentage of postings that do not seem to be on the subject. These include jokes, personal messages to one or two other subscribers, personal attacks and other generally irrelevant information. It often seems that if the list subscribers could just control themselves (or someone else would control them) that more of the list messages would be closely related to the topic the list was created to discuss. Discussion of certain topics may seem to continue indefinitely and may be generated by a few people who seem to be endlessly repeating themselves. Tolerance for off-topic messages is also affected by the type of email account that one has. In the US Internet access is now readily available and moderately priced at flat rates so that the number of messages a person receives does not affect the cost of the service. Elsewhere in the world this is not the case, and paying for a message that contains a joke or personal attack can be galling.

Unmoderated lists also have difficulty wrapping up a topic. People join the list in the middle of a discussion and repeat points made earlier or they ignore a discussion for a while and then jump in. Most lists now have archives that subscribers should check before raising an issue, but list archives are still not regularly accessed in my experience. Since unmoderated lists often have automated means of subscribing and unsubscribing, people often participate for a while, then leave, and then come back. In the last six months, 34 people left ARCH-L each week and 40 joined. The turnover is not as great as the numbers suggest since people unsubscribe and subscribe when they change email accounts, leave town for an extended period of time or get too busy to participate.

Electronic conferences provide a greater variety of ways to control the flow of messages than newsgroups allow. A list can be closed, requiring approval from the list-owner before someone can subscribe to the list. A professional society can limit participation in a list to those who are members of the society. Closed lists are also an effective way for a group of scholars who are working on a particular project to communicate if they are scattered around the world. For large lists that are not tightly focused, closing the list just creates problems for the list-owner who has to decide who gets in and who does not. For open lists, some list-management software (e.g. listserv) provides other tools to control the list. These include filtering (removing a subscriber and preventing him or her from subscribing again); limiting the number of messages per subscriber per day; or limiting the length of an individual message.

A conference or newsgroup can be further controlled by moderating it. In a moderated newsgroup or conference one or more moderators review a message before it can be distributed. Moderated lists can keep the discussion tightly focused and prevent topics that are off the subject or have been previously discussed from appearing. To operate effectively, the moderators must make the commitment to process messages promptly. How well a moderated list works depends entirely on the quality of the moderators. Moderated lists are censored only in the same way that newspapers, magazines, and electronic broadcasts are censored; someone decides what gets included and what does not.

Given the advantages of a moderated list - greater focus, fewer messages, less repetition - why would anyone subscribe to an unmoderated list? Both exist and are likely to continue to exist as long as the Internet is around. There is no need for every electronic conference to be the same (either moderated or unmoderated). Archaeologists, and people interested in archaeology, will participate in a variety of forums organized in different ways. That diversity should be encouraged.

There are several reasons to participate in an unmoderated discussion list. One is that the speed and spontaneity of an unmoderated list can make up for its sometimes chaotic content. Especially for obscure questions, a larger list provides a better chance of getting a useful answer. Although the turnover in subscribers can be substantial, electronic conferences help people to discover new colleagues. They lead to the creation of simple communities that are connected by a common interest. Secondly, we widely recognize the important of academic freedom as the only way to ensure vigorous, creative approaches to understanding the world around us. I think that the right to academic freedom carries with it a professional responsibility to expose ourselves to competing viewpoints, even if they are antagonistic. Every archaeologist works for the public in one respect or another. You will get a better sense of what the public thinks about archaeology (including your students and prospective students) from an unmoderated group. You may also get useful ideas that are relevant to your own research from messages that seem to be on completely different topics. Permitting the free expression of controversial ideas does not mean that anything is permitted. Unmoderated lists have every right to establish rules against expression that is obscene and threatening. They also have the right to establish guidelines for participation so that the discussions are not dominated by a few individuals. With these rules in place, the potential for collaborative interaction and opportunity to learn more about one's field is enormous.

David L. Carlson, Texas

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