He used the chance to declare “cultural war” for the “soul of America,” against an enemy of radicals “cross-dressing” as moderate Democrats, who were preaching “abortion on demand” and “radical feminism” while working-class Americans watched their jobs disappear and a “mob”—the Rodney King riots—looted and burned Los Angeles. The liberal columnist Molly Ivins memorably wrote that the speech “probably sounded better in the original German,” but its themes would form the founding document of today’s Republican Party. Indeed, when I mentioned the speech to a former Trump Administration official, he immediately recited several lines by heart.

the cosmos and Islanders’ cultural identity is the reason a star is featured at the centre ofthe Torres Strait Islander flag, designed by Bernard Namok in 1992.

rers. The inter- dependence of form and content in other areas of study teaches us that tools are not neutral. Although tools may begin as external objects, in learning to master their use we internalize them (Ong, 1982, p. 81). Thus they become perceptual agents - "new technologies for thinking," as Alan Kay calls them (1991, p. 140) - whose charac- teristics affect how and what we know and do through them. According to the Torontonian scholars Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and others, and more recently Walter Ong, "writing restructures consciousness."9 Dis- covering how this happens (e.g. with e-mail) is a formidable task, however, since the new per- ceptual agent is itself a product of the mind it affects, and that altered mind is what attempts to understand the agent that has chan

we consider the future of CMC as a medium for scholarly commu- nication by discussing factors that threaten to impede its development as well as its potential to create a new and more highly interactive form of scholarship. Although CMC offers great promise, its development cannot be taken for granted. Systematic and organized efforts are required to integrate the use of CMC into the communication practices of an academic community. We recom- mend that professional academic organizations begin to undertake such efforts now. We also argue that CMC can have a more substantial impact on scholarship than that achieved simply in facilitating interaction. This new medium offers the opportunity to realize the advantages of oral and written discourse simultaneously, producing a text with "dialogic" qualities. Generated in on- going computer-mediated exchange between scho- lars, a dialogic text allows us to re-appropriate and preserve some of the interactive, conversational qualities of knowledge production lost since the development of printed text.

makes possible the production of an altogether new form of discourse that could be of consider- able scholarly value.

Given the dramatic rate of diffusion and the intense levels of interest in these capabilities that we have witnessed in connection with our six years of experience with COMSERVE, it is our opinion that if established professional organizations do not move to incorporate computer-mediated com- munication, new CMC-based professional organ- izations may soon emerge•

Many systems have been implemented that provide resource sharing capabilities by establish- ing "robot users" O.e., computer programs that operate continuously, without human monitoring). These programs are capable of responding to commands sent to them in electronic mail mes- sages. Users send mail to the service's network address. When the message is received and inter- preted, the program will attempt to respond to the embedded commands. In this way users can control programs operating on computers located thousands of miles away that manage access to large repositories of resource materials. Such programs can be instructed to send particular files or programs or to perform other operations, such as searching a database of information (e.g., an index for a scholarly journal). Results are returned to the user in the form of electronic mail or files sent back over the network

conference members

We also argue that CMC can have a more substantial impact on scholarship than that achieved simply in facilitating interaction. This new medium offers the opportunity to realize the advantages of oral and written discourse simultaneously, producing a text with "dialogic" qualities. Generated in on- going computer-mediated exchange between scho- lars, a dialogic text allows us to re-appropriate and preserve some of the interactive, conversational qualities of knowledge production lost since the development of printed text.

Although CMC offers great promise, its development cannot be taken for granted. Systematic and organized efforts are required to integrate the use of CMC into the communication practices of an academic community.

Empirical research has sought to determine whether CMC as a tool for scholarly communica- tion achieves its expected advantages. The earliest studies reported that participants were enthusias- tic about the medium, finding that the computer facifitated information exchange within larger groups, enhanced creative thinking and idea gen- eration, fostered more complete examination of ideas, and generated new interaction and friend- ship patterns among participants (Ferguson, 1977; Freeman, 1980; Spelt, 1971; Zinn, 1977). In one of the most extensive evaluations of interaction in "on-line communities" (Hiltz, 1984), participants reported that their scholarly contacts were broad- ened, that they better understood the research of others and how their research related to that of others, and that the conferences had clarified theoretical controversies

not a student of science fiction, I placed a query on the CompuServe science fiction forum -- I suppose that such a query might in some modest way resemble the brother Grimm's interrogation of bearers of folktale.

PACS-L @UHUPVM 1

Discussions contained in the Bitnet list PACS-L @UHUPVM 1 suggest that there is some interest in recognizing the Internet as a publica- tion, albeit an amorphous one, that might never- theless be subject to cataloging.

Ultimately, we may discover that an Internet- based system for distribution, together with the donated, institutionally subsidized, labors of au- thors and editors can result in less cost to aca- demic consumers and a greater variety of mate- rials becoming available

With the dissemination of large textual data- bases via media such as disks, authors and editors lose control over their work: users can generate subsets, modify them according to their own sense of what constitutes improvements, and even change them so as to avoid charges of plagiarism and copyright infringement.

In effect, their exchange of corre- spondence (e-mail) publicly on lists over global networks constitutes participation in a new form of publication. This dimension is central; such network communications systems as Bitnet and the Internet offer new modes of publication, often but not always with counterparts in print media.

e. Editors and system operators must contend with the fact that electronic transmissions, lacking even the friendly cues that attractive letterhead and a signature can provide, often seem unnecessarily harsh (Turner, 1988, p. A

he has read. The purpose of a humanistic list is not to encourage fan mail; it is to transmit ideas cleanly and clearly with as little interference from social conventions designed for face-to-face meet- ing as possible. That, of course, means that we have to d

The primary consideration in creating any efficient electronic discussion group is not technical, but social. It is not enough to amass the names of a group of individuals who may or may not be interested in the focus of the list and to tell them how to contact one another; what is needed is a core of participants who will have reasons to correspond with one another, who will introduce more people to the list, and who can be counted upon to become dependent on the discussion group they themselves create. In other words, we must first begin with a group of people who already form a social network. Then that has to be transferred to a system such as Bitnet or Internet. Finally, the whole endeavour must be supported until, through computerization, it transcends the limitations of time and space imposed on earlier forms of communicatio

can figure out how to contact anyone else on the system, or even who is available for contact, so I have undertaken to provide telecommunications resources

My own experience with the system suggests that it is better than the telephone because communications can be captured to disk and kept for reference; because the receiver of a question has time to check his/her responses; because once a message or file is sent, it is delivered immediately to the recipient's account; and because the system is funded on a subscription basis by the institu- tions, and users are not normally charged for the distance a message travels. I have used Bitnet and Internet to put together conference programs; to help write a major grant application with three other people spread over two continents; to locate and receive software one-half hour after I realized I needed it; to trade ideas and information with others working on similar projects and to learn of publication opportunities for projects on which I was currently workin

The ability to assemble ourselves quickly into groups capable of concentrating everyone's focus on a problem without the difficulties and consequences of bringing the participants together physically would seem to be the genuine successor to flight in anyone's register of the most important technological developme

y. Writing and talking are not merely tools of our trade; they are our product and our raw material and the subjects of our investiga- Patrick W. Conner is Professor of English at West Virginia University where he teaches and researches Anglo-Saxon language and literature. He is the author of Anglo-Saxon Exeter (Boydell and Brewer, 1992) and the editor of The Abingdon Chronicle, volume 12 in the Collaborative Edi- tion of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (forthcoming). He is also creator of The Beowulf Workstation, a HyperCard application to aid students in studying Beowulf. tion

"' First, humanists must be aware that they are engaging primarily in social, not technical, end

The ideal seminar, whether traditional or electronic, is a kind of long conversation, con- vened by a single person but conducted by everyone for mutual enlightenment. Its purpose is not so much to convey facts as to further under- standing of its subject, to train the minds of its participants, and so to help create a community of scholars. It is a pedagogical structure in which every member is both teacher and student

ListServ lists are sometimes called "discussion groups," and McLuhan has made the term "global village" almost unavoidable. As I have indicated, I prefer to call HUMANIST an "electronic semi- nar" (henceforth "e-seminar") and so invoke the academic metaphor of a large table around which everyone sits for the purpose of argumentation, in

Because e-mail is restricted to verbal expression, it tends to favor those with highly developed rhetorical skills (Spitzer, 1986; Adrianson and Hjelmquist, 1988, pp. 91, 96), and because it is particularly good for lively argument, it serves well the need of scholars to reach consensus

On the practical level, HUMANIST and similar groups have demonstrated that we can certainly take advantage of the new medium for traditional scholarly and academic purposes. Experience with HUMANIST suggests that the new medium, care- fully managed, may be just what is needed to foster widespread humanistic discussion and collabora- tion in a world largely indifferent to its goal

ote, we have used speech and gestures for some 50,000 years, writing for 5,000, printing for 500, the telephone for 100, but e-mail for less than two decades (1985, p. 11; Rice, 1987, p. 69). Thus it is not surprizing that although the sociology and social-psychology of groups constituted by it have been repeatedly studied during this period,4 our knowledge is s

d to our immature understanding of the new me

One of the earliest nonscience scholarly uses of this technology was the listHumanist,

McCarty saw a kind of electronic seminar, whosepurpose was ‘‘not so much to convey facts as to further understanding of its subject, to trainthe minds of its participants, and so to help create a community of scholars.’’

In some ways, the exchange of correspondence publicly over these networksconstitutes a new form of publication. The posting on a list frequently resembles a letter to theeditor where someone conveys their opinions on a subjec

However, a diverse body of work on thesocially situated nature of scientific communication alreadyexists which points the way. This ranges from Crane’s(1969) pioneering analyses of invisible colleges throughLatour and Woolgar’s (1979) classic study of laboratory lifeat the Salk Institute to Traweek’s (1992) richly texturedethnography of the HEP community. In addition, the workof Schatz and colleagues on the Worm Community Systemproject, which was designed to capture the full range ofknowledge, formal and informal, of the community of mo-lecular biologists who study the nematode worm C. elegans(see: http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/projects/wcs/index.html)can provide useful insights; so, too, research into the mate-rial practices and social interactions of scientists working incollaboratories, such as the Upper Atmospheric ResearchCollaboratory (see: http://intel.si.umich.edu/crew/Research/resrch08.htm) or the Space, Physics & Aeronomy ResearchCollaboratory (see: http://intel.si.umich.edu/sparc/) at theUniversity of Michigan

The answer probably has to do with the relative intensityof socialization and oral communication (Traweek, 1992,pp. 120 –123), along with the character of the organizationalstructures and value systems, which define collaborations inlarge-scale, high-energy physics and biomedical research.