Well, the time has come for me to shut down the old CivPro and FedCourts email lists. It's been grand. These were among the first -- maybe even the first -- lawprof email lists. But for me -- and maybe for you -- blogging has overtaken writing email. I think blogging is a much better medium of expression. Though email lists retain utility for passing around announcements and getting answers to research questions, I think they are obsolescent as a mode of conversation, which is what interested me in them over a decade ago. After years of dealing with an overflowing mailbox full of bounced messages and address changes, I'm going to go out of the business of list administration.
I'll keep the lists going until fall semester begins. I encourage you to use the lists to make announcements about email lists you have started. Give information about how to subscribe, and the CivPro and FedCourts members can migrate to you. Feel free to talk here about what new lists should exist and who most wants to run them. For example, it might be nice to have a jurisdiction list and a complex litigation list, or some other such division of topics. For me, as soon as I start talking about it in those terms, I think, no, there should be a jurisdiction blog and a complex litigation blog, and these can be group blogs written by the people who have written great messages to these lists over the years. So, please, use the last few weeks of these lists to propose new group blogs and find people who want to work together on them. And promote blogs you already have, as I'm doing here.
Ann Althouse
University of Wisconsin Law School
althouse.blogspot.com
Aren't you tired of email lists?
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3 comments:
Well, no, I'm not. But most of the lists I am on have mostly dried up over the last couple of years.
Just like news groups, one of the strengths of email lists (presumably listserve groups) is that they are fairly democratic. Any one on them can start a thread. Contrast this with blogging, where you have one, or a small number, of people starting conversations. You have to depend on them to say something relevant or interesting. And, sometimes, stuff that is important to me gets skipped.
Also, blogging doesn't do a good job of threading. With News groups it is easy to keep track of who said what, and respond to that. At least some email software can do this with email lists.
I obviously like blogging, but I don't think that it is the ultimate solution when you are talking a community, versus, the professor/student paradigm that you seem to have with blogging.
In some contexts email lists still work better than blogs. I'm on a couple of lists for homeschoolers doing particular types of homeschooling. The lists allow us to ask questions and send out ideas and information. Anyone on the list can initiate a question or topic, as opposed to a few authors. Also, some of these homeschooling moms have very limited time to spend actually online, so they need to download their email, read it offline, and then queue up their response to be sent out the next time they're online. For those people, email lists are still better.
We use Yahoo's email list tools extensively to store links and files that members have shared that will be of use to other members. We could do that on a website, but I'd have to find another tool or set it up manually.
I am on a book discussion list, and I think that one could go either way. It *could* work as a blog, but for many people who are not totally up on the way blogs work yet, email lists are still easier.
Another advantage with the email is, if a lot of topics get addressed in a small span of time, working through the individual emails ensures that none are missed. With a blog it's easier to miss some.
I'm not in the least tired of lists. Perhaps because my lists, on the whole, are in different fields than my blogging. Literature and humanities related, rather than political. And it also happens that most of the people on those lists are on the other side of the political divide, so I wouldn't have the chance to interact with most of them otherwise.
The one political list I'm on has bloggers and non-bloggers and we occasionally have get togethers at interesting or provocative political events in our area. Which would be hard to organize from a blog.
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