Date: 19 Oct 1993 18:50:25 -0400
From: Fritz Schwartz - X334 <SCHWARTZ@FAXON.COM>
Subject: Excellent long piece on use of e-mail and the Net
**Due to the length of the article referred in the following message,
(Phil Agre's 'Networking on the Network'), the article itself has not
been included. Note, however, that the message below includes
instructions for retrieving the text of the article--ed.
___________________________________________________________________
With all due respect to all of us on SERIALST, PACS-L, and other
library-related list servers "RISKS" is probably my favorite list server
for its high "signal to noise" ratio. I read the attached LONG message
there today and concluded that the author, Phil Agre of the University
of CA at San Diego, has many really good points that are worthy
of reflection. I am also of the opinion that far too few of us think
carefully about how we use this facility called the Internet. Although I
realize that some of us are much more dependent than others upon external
e-mail and although I realize that this article is not strictly on serials,
it seems to me that Agre's points are relevant to all of us as we rush full-
tilt into the electronic age. I also liked what he had to say about using
librarians. I hope you find it as thought-provoking as I did. Please pass
it along appropriately after noting his caveat.
Fritz Schwartz
Manager, EDI & Standards
The Faxon Co.,
15 Southwest Park,
Westwood, MA 02090
617-329-3350
schwartz@faxon.com
======================================================
RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest Thursday 14 October 1993 Volume 15 : Issue 12
FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS
ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator
Contents:
Networking on the Network (Phil Agre) [long]
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1993 17:57:14 -0700
From: pagre@weber.ucsd.edu (Phil Agre)
Subject: Networking on the Network
The following article (about 6300 words and 40kB) is a how-to for research
people who are learning to use the Internet as part of their professional
networking. It has two goals, practical and philosophical:
Its practical goal is to give new users a structured way of thinking about
e-mail as part of everyday life. It warns against some of the more common
risks of indiscriminate e-mail use, and it offers some specific formulas for
approaching common situations.
Its philosophical goal is to cast doubt on the idea of "virtual communities"
and "cyberspaces" that are supposed to exist in a different dimension from
the rest of our lives. To the contrary, I think we should learn to view
electronic communications as part of a larger ecology of communication media
and community-building processes. That's not to say that e-mail has no
revolutionary potentials; quite the contrary, it is to emphasize that real
revolutions can be made, and can *only* be made, as the article says, "down
here on earth, amidst your actual relationships with actual people, and not
in an abstract technological head-space."
"Networking on the network" is also an experiment in Internet publishing.
I don't get any credit for it at tenure time, but I do get to keep revising
it forever, based on the comments I receive from people all over the net.
At any given time the current version can be fetched by sending an e-mail
message like so:
To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: archive send network
So please do send me any comments you might have. I'm especially hoping to
get comments from students in classes (of which there are several already) in
which "Networking on the network" is assigned as a reading. Phil Agre, UCSD
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