Facebook is also not as useful a space for actual engagement with the text of a post. A common practice on the list is to clip from an earlier post and respond to it directly. It just feels weird to do this on FB, where you can't quote things as easily in the comment section. It is also not nearly as easy to figure out who's watching a conversation ... Sean Andrews
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Yes. Some additional points. The email list started out as a high end exchange between various federal labs about on-going projects. In one section of the 2011 Nobel lectures, Adam Riess put up a sample example exchange about whether or not to publish a key finding, i.e. the universe was accelerating its expansion. This was back in 1997-8. From the quoted text, it as obvious they were using various unix email systems. The presentation was interesting from a sociological, historical POV. Then there were the old usenet groups where you could follow system administration developments and how-to documentation among programmers and administration issues.
Point. Email developed in a hybrid space for fast and speculative exchanges on research results, something between a phone call and a short publication. That morphed into news, politics, economics, social issues. Archives became a useful tool to back track.
I find something like FB and Twitter toy communication. What seems to be happening is a similar track to the techie past. If you want to just comment on news, then FB. If you want to write something, then an e-zine. So Baskar's Jacobin got top honors for the e-zine route last year for a lot of the East Coast lefties who often use to post on LBO and get into extended discussions. Most of the essays in Jacobin and Counterpunch are about as long as a long email piece of yore. A couple of hundred words, about three pages which is the usual limit here.
CG