History and the New Media

Rob Townsend's Clio Wired Home Page

Journal Entry 3

Messages in a Bottle: H-Net and
the Online Scholarly “Community”

A hundred billion bottles
Washed up on the shore
Seems I'm not alone in being alone
A hundred billion castaways
Looking for a home
The Police, “Message in a Bottle”

The framework for analysis of online communities provided by Barry Wellman, Milena Gulia, and the staff at the Pew Internet and American Life Project offers a useful starting point for assessing scholarly listservs like H-Net.[1] However, their description seems too focused on the binding aspects of community, instead of assessing the needs and absences that these communities are intended to address. They seem to spend too much time comparing these communities to an idealized gemeinschaft standard (even while rejecting that ideal as ahistorical and not applicable).  In the process, they miss a far stronger line of critique, which would analyze how these collections of individuals are often more marked by their silences (the vast majority of readers who are described as "lurkers"), their unidirectional style of communication, and the prevalance of messages from those who are marginalized in other aspects of life. My sense, after eight years on a number of lists, is that these lists bear far less resemblance to a community, and have far more in common with the image of the lonely castaway, tossing messages into the sea.

Wellman and Gulia offer a number of useful measures of a "community"—common interests (or “specialization”), and reciprocal support or companionship. After reading a number of the H-Net lists over the past few years and then doing a closer analysis of the past month’s postings, it seems fair to suggest that H-Net lists do not meet either of these standards. Consider just two lists—H-Teach and H-Ideas. Certainly the lists are based on a broad common interest—a general interest in history teaching or intellectual history. But beneath these broad umbrellas the actual postings to the list highlight a wide number of particular divergences, which end up excluding or marginalizing most of the people on the list. On the H-Ideas list for instance, under the broad heading of intellectual history one could find calls for conferences on the social history of technology (focused on this as a 20th-century phenomenon) and 18th-century notions of "the self." Similarly, H-Teach offers messages asking about textbooks on England and textbooks on China, as well as general readings about the meaning of September 11. Reading the messages, one is struck by how little the authors of these messages have in common—sure they all teach history in a general sense, but would an English history teacher have much interest in spending a few hours in the Chinese history class? In practical terms, it is at least notable that none of the authors of these divergent postings offered advice or comment on the other's questions. From message to message, one is struck by how little the postings have to do with each other.

Both lists share a very similar pattern of one-way pronouncements and dangling threads of conversation.[2] In the past month on H-Ideas, readers posted five questions, which generated fourteen responses. Half of those responses were to a single line of inquiry—a query about Asian influences on Western thought. The rest of the questions received two responses or less. On H-Teach eight queries elicited a total of fourteen responses—two received no response and only one received more than two responses. On both lists, the pattern of query and response never took the form of dialogue. Each question addressed a very particular need (a book recommendation or syllabus suggestion) and the responses tended to be specific, and direct, with only a rare patina of the letter form of salutation and acknowledgement. The narrowness and abbreviated nature of these “conversations” provide little evidence of community.

This may just be an indicator of male forms of communication. Men dominate the lists even more heavily than Wellman and Gulia’s data suggests.[3] But the voices also tend to represent those who are at the margins of the profession in terms of institutional affiliation or seniority.[4] The PEW study offers one reasonable interpretation of this tendency, that participants in these groups tend to be technologically oriented and hence younger. While this may seem intuitively correct within the terms of their more optimistic notions of community, it fails to consider an alternative possibility—that those who enjoy enough status and affirmation in the "real world" do not need to journey into cyberspace to seek community. If we read the lists as a measure of the writers' (and lurkers') alienation from others in the larger historical community, we see patterns that point toward a very different line of inquiry than the "glocalized" community posited by Wellman. While vibrancy and interpersonal communication might be the order of the day in other online communities, on the H-Net lists the silences seem more striking than the noise. The lists seem comprised of those generally excluded from the core of the profession. And the conversation, such as it is, tends to be comprised either of one-way communications or specific responses to very particular questions.

This is not to say that H-Net fails to serve an essential function for the profession, as it serves a valuable function as a channel of communication. Over the past eight years I have used the H-Net lists to distribute information on jobs, prizes, and events as well as requests for articles and a survey on part-time employment.  In almost every instance, I received a wider and better response from the H-Net lists than I did through print publication of the same information. In that respect, H-Net represents a valuable tool in the exchange of information about scholarship and history.

However, it seems neither valid nor useful to describe the lists as "communities." Indeed, for analytical purposes the community model might well conceal more than it shows. In the end, it seems more appropriate to view the lists as series of messages tossed forth from those who lack a solid footing in the profession.