" 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?" >From what I am learning from them, it seems that it is more that they write a long-form that is distributed over time, sites, and platforms. So their indexing is different. The young people I work with in the research do a huge amount of content production but this content is distributed and modular, and they keep on finding ways of stitching it together - through things like twitter streams for instance. And surprisingly, email.
On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 11:01 AM Deepa Agashe <daga...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > > > -- 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
