For someone who uses Facebook perhaps a bit too much, I seem to be having a hard time getting my thoughts in order this week to talk about using social network sites as a method of building academic communities– perhaps because, so far, I have not found the same sort of interaction and vibrancy in any of the academic or interest-based communities with which I am familiar with.
The only H-Net list I have much experience with is H-Announce, which I signed up for through the GHA last year, and which regularly fills up the GHA email inbox with lists of academic positions, calls for papers, lists of book reviews, and other info. There doesn’t seem to be much activity over on H-Public at first glance, though that may have something to do with the way that the list itself is moderated–most posts on the log pages originate with the “H-Public Editors”, (aka Cathy Stanton, from what I can tell), and it’s only by digging down into the messages that you can find the original posters (most of the activity this past month has been announcements and calls for papers in any case, which I already recieve). It is different over on H-German, which I decided to look at in comparison– there, the logs give the appearance of a very active community, messages coming from a number of people, and topics ranging over much more than upcoming conferences or open positions.
As Kate wrote in her post for this week, perhaps adding a more open format to H-Net might give other boards a leg up in developing the same sort of activity that H-German shares– or perhaps not. The Massachusetts Studies Network, which went live early this past July, is shooting for just such a mix of professional networking and personal network that Kate (and boyd and Ellison, for that matter) might have in mind– but the network is off to a fairly slow and rocky start. Early adopters found that there was not much more to do than log in and find your colleagues, and though I, for one, added it to the “list of things to look at while I drink my morning coffee”, after a few weeks I stopped checking in, since there didn’t seem to be a lot of activity. It wasn’t until about a week or so that I actually posted something on the site.
Last year, I had the same sort of experience moderating the Connections2007 website and messageboards: we never seemed to build up to the “tipping point” where activity on the network would be self-sustaining (and unfortunately, never shall– the boards were closed by the powers-that-be soon after the conference and semester’s classes were over). So I suppose my question concerning SNSs for academia ends up being how to promote the “network” over the “networking”, as boyd and Ellison make the distinction…
Anyhow, that’s just some of my thoughts– sorry it’s taken a while to get to it. On a related note, did we ever set a tiem for tomorrow’s meeting?