[-empyre-] ISEA Panel

"Axel Bruns" <snurb@snurb.info> · Sat, 7 Aug 2004 10:23:30 +1000

G'day !

Here's my contribution to the ISEA panel on list culture - looking forward
to any comments or criticisms...

Speaking for fibreculture, Axel Bruns will talk about crossovers
between mailing-lists and other discussion/publishing fora. Fibreculture
itself is now involved in a number of other projects (including the fc
journal, various resources on the Website, a possible art gallery, and
outside publishing projects online and in print). Axel is also general
editor of M/C - Media and Culture (http://www.media-culture.org.au/) with
which fc has also collaborated, and will outline the developments occurring
on this end, too.

Fibreculture defines itself as a space for critical and speculative
interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information
technology, the policy that concerns it, the new media for(u)ms it supports
and its sustainable deployment towards a more equitable Australasia. It is a
forum for the exchange of articles, ideas and arguments on Australasian IT
policy in a broad, cultural context. It was founded by Geert Lovink
and David Teh in 2001 and initially developed mainly around its
mailing-list, but has developed well beyond that forum in recent times,
especially also by organising annual conferences and publishing edited
collections of articles in a print book and newspaper, and an online
journal.

This should give us reason to shift the theme of this panel slightly. It is
no longer appropriate - and most likely it never was - simply to look at
mailing-lists in isolation. While they may have played a special role some
years ago, when access to list culture was significantly easier than access
to the means of building (collaborative) Website spaces, this is no longer
the case: especially blogs, but also other collaborative publishing spaces
(Slashdot- and Indymedia-style sites, Wikis) are increasingly infiltrating
the 'market' for mailing-lists, and sometimes are able to better deliver on
the promise of collaborative communities than mailing-lists themselves. 

Of course these other forms do have some significantly different features
(more permanence of publication, a mix of temporal and spatial structures of
organisation as opposed to the purely temporal structure of mailing-lists)
which makes one or the other form more appropriate for different uses - so
perhaps there is a need to ask 'whither mailing-lists' here. (And then there
is also a certain amount of blending between all of them: postings being
forwarded and syndicated from one form to the other.) Another way to pose
this question is to ask what a specific community is in fact aiming to
achieve, and then to select the appropriate mix of communication forms
(mailing-lists, blogs, Wikis, content management systems, streaming media,
etc.) to suit those aims. Purists might be horrified, but in essence what is
necessary here is market research into the needs and wants of prospective
users in the community.

Thus, in this environment, operators of online publishing fora of whatever
form - from free-form discussion through to refereed academic publications -
need to be able to make choices of publishing technologies and philosophies
which are appropriate to their own aims and intentions. To do so, they need
to be aware of the full range of publishing models available to them, and
choose not only one but a combination of technologies which is most
effective for their publication. They need to be able to incorporate new
models as they emerge (e.g. syndicating new articles using RSS feeds, or
delivering mailing-list content via mobile devices), and most fundamentally
should not hesitate to network with other publishers in the field.

Indeed, this is where online community culture and marketing approaches
still diverge to some extent: even though time is scarce in the 'attention
economy', and different discussion and publishing fora are competing for
users, nonetheless at least in the community field they still continue to
network and cooperate without a fear to lose users to their collaborators.
While commercial sites continue to uphold a policy of 'no outside links',
major community publishers like Slashdot and Indymedia as well as most
mailing-lists provide links to external resources extensively; as Slashdot
editor Jeff Bates puts it, for him "driving readers away [through linking]
is a myth - if your content is good, they will always come back" (email
interview, 2001).

But what becomes difficult amongst this flexibility and interconnection,
then (and especially so for mailing-lists without the visual recognisability
of Websites), is to maintain a strong individual identity for any one
publication. Where content is increasingly being shared between various
Websites and discussion fora, where users move promiscuously between
individual sites, and where contributors are active in any number of lists
and Websites, what makes one forum distinct from the other? Answers vary,
from the technological (the publishing systems used) to the organisational
(the extent of moderation and other interventions) to the social (the sense
of community which exists around a particular group).

Prospective site or list operators would do well to assess the market in
their field, then - there is no need to replicate what is already out there
unless significant shortcomings exist, while at the same time in the mix of
media forms for an one topic of interest, geographic or other community,
gaps may still wait to be filled.

The fibreculture-M/C Journal collaboration makes for a useful case study
here: M/C Journal has been a well-known refereed academic publication (with
the aim of providing material of interest to a wider, more general audience)
in the field of media and cultural studies since 1998, and M/C also runs M/C
Reviews, an ongoing series of reviews of events in culture and the media.
Its own mailing-list efforts were never significant, however, and except for
guest editors its administration remains centred around Brisbane.
Fibreculture, on the other hand, spans Australia and New Zealand, and also
includes some overseas contributors, but (at the time of the collaboration
between both entities) remained mainly focussed on its mailing-list and
face-to-face conferences. 

Collaboration between the two (by publishing a 'fibre' issue in M/C Journal
which was edited by fc members) enabled M/C Journal to tap into
fibreculture's pool of subscribers as content contributors and editors,
while allowing fibreculture to develop some of the thoughts expressed on the
list into fully formed, reviewed and published articles. In a break from
M/C's traditional modus operandi, submissions for the 'fibre' issue were
reviewed openly by having referee reports and follow-up comments posted to
the fibreculture list itself. Both sides profitted without losing their own
identity or subscribers. Subsequently, either forum has also continued to
expand its own range of offerings - fibreculture has published the first two
issues of its own fibreculture journal, while M/C will launch its
M/Cyclopedia of New Media in a Wiki format at the end of the year.

Finally, then, it should be noted that of course there is nothing wrong with
running only a Website or only a mailing-list. However, as operators of such
fora we should be aware that our users are now highly unlikely to spend
their time exclusively in our forum, however valuable our information or
engaging our discussion. Users and information move quickly now -
interesting postings are forwarded from one list to the other (and to
Websites), links to articles on one site are featured on another and in
postings in mailing-lists. The emergence of RSS syndication,
GoogleNews-style news aggregators, and mobile access to email and Websites
only speeds up this content exchange further. No one site can capture and
hold its audience any more - it is only through maintaining good quality at
home and collaborating effectively with the sites next door that we can
manage to remain relevant.

-- 
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http://snurb.info/                                      \ \ / /~|_)
snurb@snurb.info - Axel Bruns Ph.D., Brisbane, Australia \ X /  |_)